[1] His principal teachers included Samuel Adler, Joseph Schwantner, Leon Kirchner, Earl Kim and Gunther Schuller.
[3] His 70-minute chamber opera, Romulus, a setting of the Alexandre Dumas, père play, was premiered at the Peter B. Lewis Theatre of the Guggenheim Museum in May, 2007"[4] and subsequently issued on a Naxos CD.
Other major works include American Visions, a vocal-instrumental song-cycle on poems of Yevgeny Yevtushenko (New World Records), and a masque, Orpheus, based on a poem by Stanley Kunitz (Albany Records).
Of the latter, critic Jules Langert wrote of its San Francisco premiere that "[t]he music seemed in constant flux, creating strong, richly textured sonorities… and brilliant splashes of color; this Orpheus floated on an incandescent fabric of sound.
[3] With these groups, he conducted New York or world premieres of works by Elliott Carter, Charles Wuorinen, Joan Tower, Julia Wolfe, Milton Babbitt, Bernard Rands, David Rakowski, Arthur Kreiger, and Jason Treuting, among others.