About this site

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.—David Hume, 1739

I started this website in 2005 when I decided to retire early from the School of Music at Arizona State University. After hearing performances of some of my recent works, several people urged me to retire from teaching and compose full time, and I decided to take their advice.

This site provides information about my compositions, especially those I composed after I turned 35 in 1979. Before then I experimented with a variety of 20th-century styles, gaining valuable experience. But over time my youthful wide-ranging exploration of stylistic possibilities settled down to an enduring fascination with a few deep-rooted aesthetic preferences.

Exploring these intuitive preferences has been the focus of my work ever since. My writings on this site discuss some of the stylistic preferences and approaches to composition that characterize my later works.

As I discovered and began to serve my intuitive preferences, I soon felt strangely disconnected from a number of my early works, and I’ve withdrawn several of them. I realized that the stylistic pathways that these works explored no longer interested me once I found myself on an aesthetic course that intrigued me far more deeply.

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