Your music is definitely not to be considered as avant-garde, a genre that some believe is the only contemporary music. How do you see the current contemporary music scene?
This is a big question, actually, so I’m going to take some time to answer it as best I can.
It’s funny—you know, the term avant-garde, as well as a lot of the music, actually strikes me as remarkably dated. I’m not alone in this. It’s a product of a very specific moment in history, and couldn’t have existed as it did without a lot of post-war trauma and a pervading sense of political guilt. I’m not knocking the music—the music of Boulez and Ligeti, especially, I care about greatly, and what they did was fascinating and often very, very beautiful. But this is already quite old music, now. Ironically enough, it’s a term of war – the advance guard(!) – coined by a group that really saw themselves as righteous aesthetic fighters. Ligeti himself distanced himself from this thinking pretty early, starting in the 80s already. It’s thinking that has very little to do with why I’m involved with music.
However a lot of animating spirit behind the avant-garde goes much farther back – at least to the excitement of the early 20th century and works like Erwartung and the Rite – pieces so explosively packed with new ideas and new methods that composers still (in 2024!) haven’t fully digested all they have to offer. I’m referring to belief, initially quiet and then gradually overpowering, that something had to be done differently. It was a period of such explosive growth, change, discovery – let’s say, from the 1910s through the 1960s – that there was no time to digest all the new possibilities they arose. You have these works of genius popping up every few years, but very few “retrospective” composers—composers who assimilate all the new possibilities, composers who don’t forge new paths as much as they tread old ones with the most exacting degree of craftsmanship. Bach was one of these composers, for example. Brahms is another. Ligeti, too, in his later years (as well as his earliest years). Of course, in the process, the old tools are freshened and the paths rendered completely, totally new.
To answer your other question: the current new music scene is a vast, vast web, with a countless strands, many of them non-classical in origin. It’s a really, really exciting time to make music, because pretty much anything is permissible, and there’s a whole century’s worth of brilliant moves that haven’t been attempted since, say, 1940, because by 1950 that move, say, was already regarded as incredibly passé (or even politically suspect). It’s a good time for building grammars and exploring sound and building architecture from it. There are many composers working today who I admire who see this as their job.

Where does your music come from. Where are your roots?
I dunno, really, where music comes from, it’s a nice mystery. I come from America. My grandparents were European refugees and displaced persons who emigrated in the late 40s. I grew up in New Hampshire – small, rural town. The longer I live abroad, the more I recognize how American I feel, and am. I think you can hear this in the new Fantasy, which Bertrand Chamayou is premiering this week in Venice… I didn’t notice it so much while writing it (thankfully!), but now I’m quite aware of it. Maybe I find it easier to be American abroad, somehow.

What is your primary message? What do you want to express with your music?
Alas, if I thought I could come even close to answering this in words, I don’t think I’d be writing music. I’d probably be a novelist. But even if I were a novelist, I think I’d probably say the same: if a paragraph could possibly do the job, I wouldn’t dare to write a novel.

What would you say is your personality as a composer?
Curious!

What does initiate your music? Could society problems like climate change or even wars influence you?
As a human living on the earth in 2024, of course I’m deeply concerned. I don’t know anybody my age who’s not.
As a musician, I’m aware of how minimal or rather, how oblique music’s impact is. Just the other day I was talking with one of my old teachers, David Lang, who’s brilliant and writes a lot of thoughtful music involving text, issues, ideas, and we were commiserating about what a terrible medium music is for persuasion. It’s non-linguistic. Everybody can walk out of the concert hall thinking they’ve interpreted it correctly, and you have two-thousand different viewpoints (and most of these are the same viewpoints which entered the concert hall two hours before).
Music’s power lies elsewhere. To me, music has power, despite all the horrible things we do – as you say,  climate change, wars… But as a composer you have to make peace with some facts. A great tune is not going make us stop fighting. And it’s certainly not going to make us stop destroying our planet. It might make someone’s life worth living, however.
There are other ways of engaging as a citizen which have much more ability to build communities, form relationships, change societal behavior. Some of these even involve music: playing music for others, with others. The desire to connect, of course, that’s hugely involved in my impetus to write. And music has huge power to connect us. But specific political statements, no, that’s not what’s going on in a piece. I tried, back in school (like many). Those pieces are going to stay buried, because (like almost all political art) they’re bad. Art in good faith wanders away from its original mission and opens onto something wider, it can’t not.

When do you compose? Are there moments of inspiration or do you just take the time to do it?
Oh, gosh, yeah. It’s time, time, time. The more I do it, the more comfortable I get with that: to start a piece, one has to start by just showing up to it day after day. Get to work as soon as possible.
Of course there are bolts of inspiration! And these are wonderful, like rain in a drought. But you can’t wait for them to come to you—you have to go seek them out, every day, till the piece is done.
I should clarify the problem. It’s not like the norm in my head is silence… in fact the opposite, there’s always music swirling around. But mostly it’s fairly mundane music, music where I already know how it works. That’s the drought. That’s not interesting. It might support an interesting improvisation, for me, or even for an audience, but it won’t support a whole piece, which is architecture you’ll work on for months and months. The trick is latching on to some tiny kernel that seems promising enough that it will lead to a whole set of new concerns, something worth building a piece out of. That is: a kernel that will lead to bolts of inspiration at increasing rather than decreasing intervals. That’s the initial inspiration. And it’s a gamble. Sometimes you realize halfway through that you need to rethink or restart, and you have to throw away a lot of music.

When you receive a commission, does the client describe what he expects of you?
No, I’d be pretty wary of that commission. Of course, in a great collaboration you take the input of your collaborator seriously, and it feeds you – I love working in the theatre, and I’ve had good experiences working with filmmakers and would happily do that again (especially with films on the stranger side). But if you’re not collaborating you just agree on an instrumentation and a length, and then you get to work.Bertrand, who I think is a really great artist, asked no particulars of me, with this big new piano piece. Of course I would have listened, if he had, because he’s a marvelous musician. But he knew some of my older piano music, and trusted me to do my job—which is to go away and discover something new for him, something I’d never done before. I’m really grateful to him for that—and I’m very glad that this Fantasy now exists. It’s music I didn’t quite know about four months ago.

How do you compose? At the computer? At the piano?
Often (but not always) at the piano. Never at the computer. I write on paper, big landscape pads that let you think in long horizontal lines – longer swathes of time. At the very end, when it’s done, I engrave it on a computer. It’s not the most efficient but it’s the only way I know of keeping my imagination open. As soon as I’m typing it into the computer, the imagination is closing, the piece is cooling into final form, it’s dead, it’s over.

You are the Winner of an Open Application in the Classeek Ambassador Program. What does this mean to you?
It’s been an unexpected and lovely surprise. Of course I’ve just started but the team at Classeek has been wonderfully supportive so far. At the end of the year there will be a portrait concert at their hall in Aubonne, Switzerland. I’ll play some piano music (including the Swiss premiere of the Fantasy), and I’ll be writing some new chamber music for the occasion, which I’ll premiere with colleagues. It’s the first time I have the chance to program a concert entirely of my own music (or centered around my own music), so really that’s very exciting—and I’m real grateful for the opportunity. Beyond that there’s the chance to meet and get to know others in our extended musical community, which is something I’m always grateful for. And it’s always nice to have some people advocating for you.

How did you get started playing the piano and composing?
We had a piano in the home. My mother plays (though not professionally). Apparently I begged for piano lessons, I don’t really remember. I was five. I started writing down music immediately, as soon as I started learning to read it. I learned to read English around the same time, and people both read and write that, and it just seemed sort of obvious to write music too. Obviously the music was terrible. There’s a piece called ‘Choo-Choo Chug’ which is like three lines long and shows the train starting, accelerating, going through a crossing (with a bell) and then stopping at the next station. I grew up in a tiny town, though, and I never had a composition teacher or anyone who really knew what to do with me in that regard. I stopped writing for a long while, from age twelve really through age twenty-one. That’s when I first had a composition teacher, in college. So being a composer and pianist was my earliest dream but it took a very long, circuitous route to get back here—I was actually a math/theatre double major when I started college. I’m delighted to find myself now composing again instead.

You were born in the United States and you are currently studying in Europe. Is Europe still the cradle of classical music?
I couldn’t comment. I suppose, yes, by definition, given that the art form was born and survived its infancy here. That would make the US the cradle of jazz, rock, and hip-hop, yeah? But all these are global forms. Which is one of my favorite things about being a musician. Wherever in the world you go, you can find your people, and a little corner that’s home.

Today, artists pay a lot of attention to social media and Internet presence. Your presence is rather modest. Why?
Well, it’s a bit exhausting, isn’t it? I mean, it’s a whole ’nother job… there are people whose entire job is to run social media presence for other people! Look – I went to Waldorf school, I handwrite music on paper. I do what I can. I’m on Instagram, I’ve got some music posted on the net, some more coming soon. But I’m interested in those tools only in as much as they help me connect with other humans, and give me more chances to make music with them. These days, I’m very blessed – I have many wonderful humans and lots of music in my life, really enough to fill the days for now. There are some cool projects on the horizon, and it’s likely those’ll have more internet presence. But in general my attitude is, the attention will come if and when it comes—maybe even when it’s merited, or when I’m ready for it. I focus on the music. It’s plenty to keep me busy.

What do you see as your next steps in music?
Well first off I’m very excited about this Friday’s premiere, Fantasy for piano solo (2024), which the marvelous Bertrand Chamayou is playing at the Venice Biennale Musica. Later this year I have premieres of a marimba/vibraphone duo for a consortium of about two-dozen percussionists, then a piano quartet for Classeek, and then an orchestra work for the Orpheus Sinfonia in London. This year also features piano engagements (solo and chamber music) in the US, UK, and Switzerland. There are a number of projects already in the works for the following years. So I’m happily at work on all that for now. Plan is to just keep playing and writing.