Overview
I am a composer of instrumental and vocal music. My most recent works are T120, a piano trio composed for the Horszowski Trio (2021) and a Quintet for Soprano Saxophone and String Quartet (2019). My current project is a quartet for flute and three strings, commissioned by the Electric Earth Concert Series.
My teaching centers on technical aspects of music, including classes on music theory, composition, and transcription. I also co-teach a course called "Music and the Brain" with Tobias Overath, a colleague in Psychology and Neuroscience. This class explores the physiology and psychology of hearing and music cognition, a study that has enabled me to reconsider ideas I know well from an entirely different perspective, with the result that "old" ideas have become "new" again. More marginal interests include some aspects of music technology: live sampling and signal processing, sonification, and computer-assisted composition.
Aside from these professional interests, I enjoy working with machine tools as well as motorcycling on back roads in North Carolina.
Current Appointments & Affiliations
Recent Publications
Teaching Composition: Artistic Growth Through Confrontation, Tact, Sympathy, and Honest
Journal Article Contemporary Music Review · 2012 Teaching composition requires different strategies depending on each student's interests and experience. Reflecting on my own experiences as a composition student, I have found two teaching approaches to be especially helpful. Undergraduates frequently req ... Link to item CiteDynamic nonparametric bayesian models for analysis of music
Journal Article Journal of the American Statistical Association · June 1, 2010 The dynamic hierarchical Dirichlet process (dHDP) is developed to model complex sequential data, with a focus on audio signals from music. The music is represented in terms of a sequence of discrete observations, and the sequence is modeled using a hidden ... Full text Open Access CiteRecent Grants
MDBF Arts Incubator
Institutional SupportPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by Mary Duke Biddle Foundation · 2018 - 2023Visiting Artist Residency
Institutional SupportPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by Winifred Johnson Clive Foundation · 2016 - 2017Visting Artists
Institutional SupportPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by Winifred Johnson Clive Foundation · 2014 - 2015View All Grants
Recent Artistic Works
T120
Musical Composition May 1, 2021Quintet for Soprano Saxophone and String Quartet
Musical Composition January 1, 2019Piano Roll Prosody
Musical Composition January 1, 2017View All Artistic Works