I often spend hours at night staring at the curtains blocking the yellow lamp outside my window wondering what I might've been. This is a ridiculous exercise... Thinking about it isn't going to change anything except to hijack my emotional security... Secondly, I like to think that a sliver of my experience is influenced by the stream of realities that pours forth at each moment of possibility. If that's the case, then I'm experiencing all those realities regardless. It's like a trout jumping out of the stream and getting a broader view of the spiraling river water but falling back in and continuing it's course. Or, more accurately, a fish that's caught and thrown back in, robbed of an otherwise transformative experience. Like being eaten.

Tying this back into my musical life, I find myself doing this sort of headwork around styles and influences. I've spent much of my life with open ears, and a listener today cannot avoid a global polystylism. How in earth could you avoid it? You can hardly spend a day in the world without witnessing centuries of music across all the continents. I wonder what it was like for anyone before recording.

All of this serves me wondefully/terribly. When I sit down to write music, half the ideas that come are earworms noodling amongst my synapses. And once I work through that, I often question whether the ideas are perfect for that project or if it's just whatever comes up at that time. I just hope whatever project I'm working on is served appropriately by my daily diet of randomized musical influences.

I know there are stories of Bernstein locking himself in his apartment and avoiding all recorded music and concerts when embarking on a project. I dream of that. Just like I dream of coffeeshops without music piped throughout.

One way or another, I'm compelled to compose, and whatever doubts arise around the material I've no choice but to continue, or fail. And who is to say whether the cheesy electronica car commercial from last night's TV watching, or the Beck album that's on in my present caffeinated whereabouts, or the elevator spewed Muzak version of Barber's Adagio is influencing the scalar rise in my mind, or the particular phrasing that currently has me locked?

So how useful is it to ask of someone's influences? Just another way to conceptualize music into a box that couldn't hope to hold the abstraction that is music. And with the Internet, you might as well just go listen, instead of trying to pinpoint which Radiohead record that person listened to a year ago and how that could inform their character somehow.

This begs the following questions: What if Thelonious Monk was listening to Webern the day he wrote 'Round Midnight? Would it be the standard we know it to be today? What if Chopin had heard "Poor Johnny One Note" the day he began writing the Db prelude (raindrop)? Or if Messiaen heard a crow on the day he originally wrote his first birdsong into a piece? Was Beethoven secretly listening to Gesualdo?

- thumbwritten, somewhere that isn't my home.

It is a new decade. Which is really just a point on a circle – more accurately – a tightly wound spiral. One that we attribute significance solely for the purpose of historical analysis. Not to mention the idea of the New Year. It's just a procession of energies and time. It seems we like to think we can stop it for a moment and take stock; and that the stopping has significance. Of course, if we could truly stop time...well, that would be interesting (ever let go of a spinning merry-go-round?).

10 years ago I was in my fourth year at Ithaca College. When I think back, it's sort of a black hole. In January of '99 I was in London for the semester; in January of '01 I was finishing my final year at IC. So that middle ground seems rather uninteresting, or unmarked in my memory. It was the first time I had a lead role in an opera; the Vicar in Britten's Albert Herring. The story here is that I spent the entire rehearsal process as the Vicar's cover/understudy. And then a week before the show opened, I found out I would do the entire run, due to the original singer's required vocal rest. Had that not occurred, I probably wouldn't have been bit by the opera bug and my current dreams and desires would be rather different.

That was a time when the music that I thought was most effective required some sort of theatrical bent, or some other performing art in its rendering. From an audience perspective, I've always found chamber music concerts and orchestra concerts somewhat boring, even though I absolutely love the music. Whenever I "check in" with the other audience members, it seems their focus is lacking and when there's some story or images or dance the focus seems much deeper. I often wonder if audiences are more penetrated by multimedia than simple singular focus events. As a sometime meditator and lover of simple things, I'm clearly torn on this subject. I think of fewer powerful images than a pianist and grand piano occupying a stage and performing. Or similarly, a string quartet or smaller ensemble. But as soon as the number reaches 10 or so, I'm distracted by the rather un-unified front. Especially with orchestral music: I arrive, find my seat, and close my eyes...then I'm in heaven. But the problem with this way of experiencing music is that it denies half the elements of performance. So, what to do...?

The following year, while in London, I became obsessed with music-theater. This could be anything from simple blocking (a la theatre), or dramatic lighting, or some form of language taking place in music... and the continuum extends all the way to opera. My memory of the concerts during that time are plastered with strong imagery, and the music seems to envelop the imagery as I recall them. It seems, due to the theatrical presentation, my mind is hooked in from more than one angle. It's not just music, it's also a relationship to space, and costumes, or blocking and I actually recall the music itself with more depth and clarity than other concerts that lacked this sort of presentation. Again, what to do...?

I continued to pursue this bent as a composer, and tried to hang on as long as possible upon pursuing my Masters degree at the University of Michigan. Due to my newness in Ann Arbor, I had little time to make the connections with actors and directors and other schools to pursue this sort of musical experimentation. And I had also fallen in love and completed my degree in 1 year so that I could join with my beloved at the time. I just couldn't hack school anymore. UM was incredible, and in retrospect, I wish I had stayed longer, but my life's energy wouldn't allow me much more time with the intellectual pursuit of music within an institution. There was one piece, from Basho, which I composed for a a harpist friend at UM. She had a keen kinesthetic sense and I composed the work around her quality of movement with the instrument. Her recoil after striking a chord and other such things. The piece was successful at UM and that summer I composed Michiyuki for Naoko Takada using her quality of movement as a continual focus of the piece. (I desperately need videos of these pieces).

The story goes on... Upon leaving Michigan, I moved to Massachusetts, lived on a haunted horse farm; moved to Taos, NM, waited tables, began playing jazz piano for a living, wrote my first orchestra piece; moved back to MA, worked as a stone mason/gardener; returned to Taos, gigged all over NM; and for several years I took a spotty hiatus from composing. A few projects came along, but it wasn't until about 3 years ago that a bit of momentum struck and I began writing a tad more. Now, finally, I am in a position to truly delve into my compositional language again. I've composed mostly vocal music in the past few years, and it's as though I'm starting again at 15, back when my interface with music was as a singer. And instead of going to college, I'm teaching college; and instead of composing instrumental works with a theatrical bent, I'm writing vocal music which is theatrical by its nature; and most significantly, I'm hungry for an opera.

I'm not sure if any of this makes sense, but there's a certain timely architecture that I'm seeing in my mind. And as I said at the beginning, it's really not that significant, but in stopping the spiral for just a moment, I feel like I'm at a new jumping point. The aughts were pretty much the antithesis of the nineties for me. The nineties were about school, rigidity, focus, incredible amounts of learning, trying anything anyone suggested, etc. The aughts were about freedom, lack of focus, slowing down, understanding life without the structure of school, aloneness, and seeking a true sense of direction and desire. And now that we're in the tens, it's about integrating those 2 decades as a composer/performer, and moving into life with a balance between structure and space.

Last night was the first performance of "The Love of Three Kings", performed by the Bleecker Street Opera Company at 45 Bleecker Street. My friend and frequent collaborator, Paul Haas, is music director for the group and asked me to re-arrange/reduce/re-orchestrate (whatever you'd like to call it) the score to accommodate a 1-on-a-part sort of orchestra. 4 winds, 4 brass, percussion, keyboard, 5 strings. This was an incredibly daunting task for me as I've never dealt with so much music in one project – so many black dots and lines. But now I understand why younger composers often worked as copyists. I learned a great deal about Montemezzi's orchestration and his language, and his particular use of the late-Romantic opera orchestra. The original forces are huge – it's an incredibly difficult work for the players – and there's a kind of weight going on all of the time. The work is often compared to Pelléas, and without a doubt there are several Debussian things in the score, but I'd have to say that it felt more like Wagner. Of course, with such a small orchestra, I bet it leans back to Debussy in the audience's ear. How ironic that two of the most diametrically opposed composers (at least in our historians' judgement) emerge as the most obvious influences. Read the NYT review.

I'm thrilled to be involved with this company as they do great work in apprenticeship and outreach and are family relations with their famed predecessor, Amato Opera. Check them out here. I wish them the greatest of luck, and I'm looking forward to attending the performance soon.

On another note: "Oh, the timing." (I say this often.) It's my firm belief that timing is everything. I mean this in broad strokes, and more aligned with personal development... but if God is in the details, it seems that karma is in the timing. I was sort of raised in an opera house. Both my parents sing opera in Milwaukee, and I spent a good deal of my youth in dressing rooms with my mother at the Florentine Opera and elsewhere. After studying voice for a long long time, I stopped singing Classical music right around the time of my Master's degree and just started up again – it's been almost 8 years. I've been hungry to write an opera for the last 2 years or so, and have been taking up old ideas and searching for new ones, and the floodgates just sort of opened. Within a month of taking up the voice again, I was hired by Naropa University to conduct the Chorus, I was commissioned by Donald Nally (Chorusmaster at the Lyric Opera), I've met numerous collaborators, 2 librettists, and several opera singers with similar desires as my own, and then I get this job re-orchestrating an opera. Timing, timing, timing. I suppose I'm supposed to do this. And in typical fashion, it's unlikely that I'll ever sing in an opera in New York City, but I've already gotten involved somehow.

Had a concert in Taos last weekend. Robert Mirabal performed "On Taos" with the folks at Music from Angel Fire. Best collection of players I've ever had performing my music and it was incredibly satisfying. To accommodate Mirabal's flutes the piece is almost entirely modal, and I often feel guilty for this, like I'm cheating or something.... but whatever, music is music, regardless of the math behind it. What was most interesting though, was the quality of the audience. Having this piece played in Taos – a piece about Taos – makes for a really intense, intimate experience. Most the audience shares the same imagery and emotional memories of the landscape and quality of life in Taos... and so the piece seemed so much more resonant with the audience than anything else I've written... except for Shanti (which was written for a close friend and performed for her close friends). I love this quality and hope to find more ways to incorporate it into my music. I was reading the other day about Mozart's premiere of Don Giovanni in Prague, and it's just wild that at the time Prague was no bigger than Boulder... that closeness, and social tightness must have been incredible. Could you imagine someone on par with Mozart premiering an opera in Boulder? What a different world we live in today. How might we bring art music back to the community? Artists writing for their most relevant communities... I often think that as we broaden our scope in search of larger audiences, we lose the intimacy that's valuable at the fore, and all we're left with is a generalized version of ourselves as artists. But to make art-things that are tied to our direct social and environmental experiences and then perform those for our peers and community – that's magic.

Just did an interview and live performance with Sara Dee at KGNU during her set on Jazz and Beyond. My close friend and bassist, Robin Abeles, was here visiting from NM and it was prosperous timing for the interview. I've not done much live work on the radio. I played at KTAO on a few occasions with Robin, and I've done short interviews before but never something like this. It was a great pleasure. KGNU occupies a really nice space and Sara Dee has this incredible smoky wonderfulness about her and she's such a warm spirit. Robin and I performed 2 of my tunes and 2 standards. We had a renewed joy about us, we haven't played together in a few years and coming back to performing jazz again was very satisfying.