When I was a very young child I didn’t differentiate between “music” and “noise;” it was all just “sound.” Traffic jams were as fascinating as bird-song; a recording of wolves howling as enthralling as an orchestra’s pre-concert warm-up. I thought every situation or ensemble had its own version of tuning. The church choir my parents sang in, the Big Band music my grandmère listened to on Saturday evenings, the decommissioned player piano in her living room, the seagulls at the beach, street musicians, Mardi Gras parade bands, my father or my grandmère singing to us, - no situation matched any other exactly so I inferred that each situation was unique and developed my own system of tuning when I sang. Depending on your perspective, it was either more (or less) fortunate that I was more concerned with the spaces between and within the sounds than the actual sounds themselves. Sometimes I find my way in and sometimes I don’t. Some children have imaginary friends; mine was named Music.

Occasionally I’m asked which composers are my favorites, which composers have influenced me, or something along those lines. I never feel as if I answer those types of questions adequately. Probably because I don’t have a favorite composer. I’m in awe of J.S. Bach’s œuvre, especially the mathematics and geometry of it, of Mozart, Debussy, or Ravel’s effortless grace and elegance, Beethoven’s Geist; and Mahler,… sometimes I can’t speak after listening to one of his compositions. But those are only some of the obvious choices, and none alive within my lifetime or from anywhere other than western Europe. I don’t think of myself as influenced by another composer’s harmonic language or æsthetic, so much as by their life. I’m inspired by the color, shape, and texture in visual art; by landscape paintings, by nature, by the emotional circumstances that generate a need to compose, by what I know of the person for whom I’m writing at the time.

I enjoy reading poetry; I’m a trained classical singer; I write a lot of songs. I also write instrumental chamber music, and not as often, orchestral pieces. Sometimes I create arrangements of compositions already in the public domain; but only if I feel I have something positive to bring to that work. My undergraduate education was something of a lab experiment in creating a composer: my training was in everything that led to the mid-20th century, and then I was turned loose to “find my voice.” Graduate school was craft, craft, craft. And even though I’ve tried on every 20th Century compositional style from post-romanticism through serialism and minimalism, and although aspects of each appealed to me, none quite fit. Once I stopped trying on other composers’ glass slippers what evolved was the blend of tonal and freely atonal, sometimes elegant, often intense, occasionally rhythmically challenging, melodic, color-oriented language that is me.