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For the last six years, I have been trying to create a kind of personal style or language. I have been mostly obsessed with harmony/sound color, music that morphs gradually OR abruptly changes and injecting preexisting music (kulintang melodies mostly) or systematic processes to get musical results which are not intuitive. I mostly write music for small ensembles with piano and big ensembles like orchestra. I began in piano, so I prefer music which is rich and expressive and try to write music which achieves that, whether it is frenetic or suave it doesn't matter. I don't subscribe to any schools or genres within classical music, although I pick an choose from various musics. For instance, I like really hyper, rhythmic music, but that can be anything from Bach to Kulintang music to underground hip-hop or Coltrane and Charlie Parker etc. I also like really sonorous music, like minimalist stuff from early Glass, Reich and La Monte Young (who influenced my sound installation "Buzz"), to spectral composers like Claude Vivier, Gerard Grisey and Rameau (who I think of as the first spectral composer). Dramatic catharses in Romantic music always been a pleasure for me , so I have always liked Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky et al and I tend to write music with big climaxes. I also like real individualist composers like Ives, Stravinsky, Debussy, Messaien, Ligeti and Lutoslawski because they created very special types of ways to write music. These last composers are my biggest inspiration because their music sounds so original and personal--which is my goal; the reason I write "contemporary music" is because it is the only genre which allows for such an extreme amount of idiosyncrasy.
I have studied music at San Jose State University (California is my home state), Eastman and the University of Michigan (where I am doing my dissertation, even though I moved to NYC). At SJSU, I played Gamelan, Kulintang Music, Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian percussion, West-African (Ghana) percussion, and had a thorough exposure to electro-acoustic music. My pieces for Disklavier came out of this experience (see my website for some clips and files). At Eastman and Michigan, I was able to hone my craft for orchestration and ensemble writing. All of the places that I studied encouraged private composition lessons with multiple faculty, so as a result I've studied formally with ten composers: Brian Belet, Allen Strange, Daniel Wyman, David Liptak, Daniel Godfrey, Martin Bresnick, Bright Sheng, William Bolcom, Betsy Jolas, and Michael Daugherty. I've had so many differing opinions about my music of course, but I think that's a good thing, I don't like dogmas.
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