I’ve settled now into composing, after a musical life that started in my New York City childhood, when from the age of 10 I sang opera and wrote my first compositions. I studied voice in high school, during my college days at Harvard, and after college, when I got a diploma in voice from the Longy School of Music. During those years, I wished I were a Verdi baritone, but settled for bass-baritone roles,

Deciding to compose again, I somehow got into the Yale School of Music, having written just a couple of pieces, and in 1974 got a master’s degree in composition, studying with Yehudi Wyner, Mario Davidovsky, and Robert Morris. I didn’t write much of the atonal music favored then at Yale, and throughout the American composing establishment. Instead I wrote theater music, and — influenced by the downtown music scene in New York that produced Steve Reich and Philip Glass — wrote what back then were called experimental pieces, in one work using a large ensemble of speaking voices.

And I kept on singing, appearing at Yale in the leading roles of Captain Balstrode in Peter Grimes and Alberich in a concert performance of Das Rheingold. But the handwriting, was on the wall about my future as a singer: a review said my strength was my acting.

Moving back to New York, I worked in the music program of the New York State Council on the Arts, while conducting and sometimes producing opera performances, working with the late theater critic Michael Feingold on productions of delightful small Offenbach works.

All through that I composed, writing four operas, all of them successful, especially my setting of A Christmas Carol, which was widely performed. One of my operas still awaits its professional premiere, though it was triumphant twice in workshop performances, one of them at the New York City Opera. This was my treatment of Frankenstein, with a libretto by the science fiction writer and poet Thomas M. Disch, in which I imagined the work as Bellini or the early Verdi might have written it.

In 1980, I began writing as a music critic for the Village Voice, then an important weekly newspaper in New York. I covered the downtown music scene that had earlier inspired me, and wrote also about mainstream classical music, for the Voice, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications, including Vanity Fair, for which in its early days I was classical music critic.

I began, though, getting frustrated with the mainstream classical scene, finding it rigid in its orthodoxies, and sadly out of touch both with the world around me, and with the power the masterworks had, both when they were written and when they were performed in past generations.

And so I defected to pop music, becoming chief pop music critic of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner (which then coexisted with the Los Angeles Times), and later becoming music critic and senior music editor of Entertainment Weekly. I started well there, but found myself not well suited to mass-market journalism (which isn’t a criticism of the magazine; it was really good back then). Having personal difficulties as well, I failed at EW, and in the 1990s returned to classical music writing, finding that the field had changed, and now was open to my thinking.

The change, put simply, was that the classical music world now feared for its survival. Ticket sales were down, classical record sales were down, and over and above all that, classical music was growing less relevant, in a culture now focused on other things.

This led mr in two new directions. One of them was teaching. I gave a talk at Juilliard on classical music’s problems, and was invited to teach there, in 1997 launching a graduate course called Breaking Barriers: Classical Music in an Age of Pop. I then was asked to teach an existing graduate course on music criticism, and when after some years students seemed less interested in it, gave it a new name, Speaking of Music, and new content. Now it covered many ways in which students might talk and write about music, including things useful for their careers, like writing bios and program notes.

This tied into my other new direction, which was to work on many things involved with classical music’s future. I did research, among other things finding forgotten studies from past generations, which prove that the classical music audience truly has aged. In the years when the studies were published (1940, 1955, and 1966), the audience was much younger than it is now.

I wrote on classical music issues, made suggestions for change in the field, and did expensive public speaking, giving keynote talks at conferences in the U.S. and abroad, and speaking at conservatories, among other things giving commencement talks at Eastman and at the Longy School of Music.

Throughout all this, my teaching continued. I was at Juilliard for 26 years, and taught also at the Eastman School of Music. In 2023 I moved my courses to the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, which was closer to my home in Washington, D.C.

And then in 2025 came a great change. Throughout my writing, teaching, and future of classical music work, I’d had sometimes composed, always with success. Among other things, I produced a concert of my music at the Strathmore performing arts center, and was part of pianist Min Kwon’s America/Beautiful project, in which many composers wrote variations on “America the Beautiful.” You can find these performances online at URL TK.

So in 2025 — 82 years old, but unafraid to launch a new direction in my life — I decided composing should be my focus. I resigned from teaching, and now spend my time immersed in my music, unconcerned with classical music’s future. While I’ll still write about it — I’ll be putting my current thoughts on this site — I don’t think about it while I’m composing. I write classical music with a kind of nostalgic love, and feel happy when I work with musicians to have it performed.

And so I launched a project with the Terra String Quartet, to perform and record three string quartets I’ve written, with the recording coming out on the Acis Productions record label. I’ve written a playful and intricate string trio, called Cooperation, for the Cret Trio. My new idea, as I’m writing this, is to compose an entire recital program for soprano and piano, in which I’ll imitate all the music traditionally sung — old Italian songs and arias, German lieder, and, among much more, a dramatic imitation verismo opera aria.

What fun! I’ll be posting the music here.

My home, as I’ve said, is Washington, D.C., having moved there with my wife, Anne Midgette, when, after years as a freelance critic for the New York Times, she became chief classical music critic for the Washington Post. We have a son, about to turn 14 as I write this, a smart and funny kid who has no interest in classical music. Which is his inalienable right.

🦋

Coming — links to things I mention here.