I was born in New York City and grew up in Westchester County where I went to Sunday School at the White Plains Community Unitarian Church. I studied philosophy and music at Beloit College in Wisconsin and began writing songs there.

At 25, I decided to enter the UU ministry and I enrolled at Meadville/Lombard Theological School and the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. I was the summer assistant to the ministers at the Community Church of New York in 1982 and 1984 and I worked at the World Conference on Religion and Peace at UN Headquarters in the summer of 1982. I did a chaplaincy at the Texas Medical Center and an internship at May Memorial Unitarian Society (where I wrote my first hymn) and the University of Syracuse, NY. I graduated from the U of C in 1983 with a Masters in Religious Studies and M/L in 1985 with a Doctorate of Ministry. I also won both the John Haynes Holmes and the John Wolf preaching scholarships.

I was raised in the Carolinas and Appalachian Ohio by a piano teacher mother who taught me to love music, and a minister father who taught me to love language. Webelieved in a tolerant God, social justice, hard work, speaking our minds, harmonizing loudly, and eating waffles on Sunday nights. I wrote many songs when I was a teenager, some of which were not too bad. All in all, it was a pretty good way to grow up.

In college I learned that the canon of music was bigger and more amazing than I’d ever dreamed, and that music theory held more expressive possibilities than I could ever fully explore. After nine years in the academic world, with a fresh doctoral degree in hand, I set out to become a “freelance composer.” The only problem was that I had absolutely no idea what that meant.

In our recent survey, seventy UUMN members described themselves as composers. They were invited to submit a composer profile as part of a new series, "The YOU in UUMN." Today we begin sharing those profiles:

I like to tell people that I direct the Children's Choir at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Urbana-Champaign, and in my spare time, I teach electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois. I have composed and arranged music for piano since I was in high school. Except for one course in music theory in high school and one in college, I have had no formal training in music, and none at all in choral conducting. When I became director of the Children's Choir in 2002, I found that some of the music that I wanted to program was in the wrong key for the children's vocal range. So I had to transpose the music. At that point, I decided to change the harmony, and then I added an instrumental part.