I've been into music since I was very little; My favorite group when I was 7 was Motley Crue (I had no idea what anything meant, I just liked how it sounded). Once I got to high school I started playing drums and some guitar and bass in a garage band. We made some strange music, but it was.
When I started college I decided that I should study music, since I had all of these sounds in my head and I wanted to gain more control over the guitar so I could let them out. Little did I know that the guitar wouldn't let them out...
I studied Classical Guitar all through college and enjoyed performing thoroughly, but I found that I wanted to be more creative than making somebody else's music sound good.
In the Winter of 1998 I took a composition class with David Cope. This was probably the most fun I had during my undergraduate career because half of the time we sight read each others' music. There were some amazing musicians in my class, which made it less of a problem when I wrote really difficult music for them. For my final project I decided to write a piece that I thought would be impossible to play. I called it Ceramic Phases with two movements, Moon and Sun, named after a set of Ceramic plates my mom had given me. My hope was that the Sun movement would be somewhat chaotic with the Moon being much more orderly. Unfortunately I repeated some structures during the composition which the musicians figured out. The first performance was exactly as I hoped, the subsequent performances were too clean; they cheated by playing the figures without trying to count out the rests.
Later Paul Nauert had arranged for the Peabody trio to do sight-readings of student compositions and I got them to play Ceramic Phases. After a brief bit of confusion, they realized the parts for the first movement weren't synced (feldman-esque); they played it near perfect.
I continued to write music and play guitar. In the Spring of 1999 I had my senior recital in classical guitar. During that concert I performed two of my own compositions.
I took a year off from school to travel around europe and bake bagels in Olympia, WA. Then I came back to UCSC and started work on my MA.
In the Spring of 2001 I took a computer assisted composition class with David Cope. I started to realize the potential of using computers to write music and immersed myself in trying to make something interesting. I realized that I had already been using algorithmic techniques on most of my compositions at that time, such as my piece Pulse, even though they were written by hand. Moving to the computer was an obvious next step. My final project became the start of the Textures Algorithmic Music Toolbox, which I have used for just about every composition project since including my Master's Thesis.
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