Descriptions of Places

The Catskill Escarpment rises behind the historic stone buildings and hotels of the Hudson Valley. Looking west from the Howard Johnson outside of Saugerties Many of the places I hiked during my youth have come to seem small to me. The Catskill Escarpment on the other hand still provides a challenge, and a thrill, in its slightly depressing Upstate New York way. I first glimpsed it from across the Hudson as a child, riding along the Taconic Parkway, at dusk. A fading glow in the western sky behind it accented the ridge line, a massive landform that dwarfed the scattered human-made lights in the valley in front of it.  The sense of unqualified awe that I felt has diminished some since I've had the privilege of comparing the Catskills with the Rocky Mountains and the Andes, but the escarpment still has the capacity for adult-sized adventure. Running down its edge on a steep trail, the Hudson Valley directly below you, and watching the low horizon across the river rise rapidly in your

Composing music has given me one of the greatest pleasures I’ve known. Not the writing itself, but the listening to people playing it, or more specifically knowing that something I wrote has affected the listeners, I’ve found to be an intense and almost unseemly feeling of aggrandizement. Many people have had the fun moment of telling a joke to a room full of people and having them laugh heartily. Hearing one’s own music performed is like this but moreso. A composer can really put a lot of themselves into a piece of music, and ideally can tap into some realm of abstract beauty, and to have those depths dredged up from one’s own self to be recognized by others is a more serious thrill than any joke or funny story I can think of. There are many different ways musicians like myself enjoy making music, and the the joy that I find in all of them seems related, but only distantly so. To play live, improvisational or quasi-improvizational music and watch people dance to it is great, but in so