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My career as a composer has come in two waves: one spanning the years 1980-1990 when several of my orchestral pieces were performed along with vocal and chamber works, and another starting in 2006 after a decade and a half of intensive work as a musicologist (the majority of my sixteen books, including Expression and Truth, Interpreting Music, and Why Classical Music Still Matters, are published by the University of California Press). My return to composition was prompted by the unexpected opportunity to compose a song cycle based on prose extracts from Henry James’s novel *The Wings of the Dove*. Since then I have divided my time between scholarship and composition, with numerous performances of vocal and chamber music in the United States and Europe. My quartet movement "Clouds, Wind, Stars" won the Composers Concordance 2013 "Generations" prize. My compositions cover a broad spectrum: song cycles, piano music, six string quartets, chamber music, and orchestral music. I favor traditional acoustic instruments and try (like so many others these days) to compose without reference to exhausted debates about tonal and post-tonal idioms. I just compose each piece the way it tells me it wants to be written.
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