I was born in 1947 in New Haven, Connecticut, and grew up in west Los Angeles, California. I always loved music and studied piano while playing several different instruments in school bands and orchestras. After an extremely happy Freshman year as an Applied Organ Performance major at BYU, I became a Latter-day Saint missionary in Northern Ireland and then in London, England, where, in 1968 I was asked to give daily noon recitals, through Spring and Summer, on the church's Hyde Park Chapel organ. For me that was heaven. Back home, which now was in Salt Lake City, Utah, aged 22 and married, with my wife and her two little sons whom I adopted, and having graduated from the University of Utah in Music Theory, I studied further with my original organ teacher Parley Belnap and with Salt Lake Tabernacle Organists Alexander Schreiner and Robert Cundick. In 1972, we moved to Belfast, Northern Ireland, to help care for my wife's father who was terminally ill. While there, I taught at the Ulster College of Music and at the Hopewell Middle School. I was also accepted for post-graduate work at Queen's University, but finding ourselves in the middle of the raging sectarian violence, we moved back to Salt Lake City in 1973, and started our lives over again, virtually from scratch. My work toward a Master's Degree at the University of Utah was interrupted in 1974 by the beginning of a 34-year career with Ballet West, where I played piano for company classes and rehearsals, and I performed as a soloist on stage and in the pit. After nine years, I became their Associate Conductor, and served, for extended periods, as their acting music director, for 25 more years. Over those years, I performed on the piano at major venues in Salt Lake City, Honolulu, Los Angeles, Tempe, Albuquerque, Aspen, Denver, Detroit, Chicago, Nashville, West Palm Beach, Raleigh, the City Center theater in New York City, and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. I also conducted ballets with the Utah Symphony, the Utah Chamber Orchestra, the Anchorage Philharmonic, the Spokane Symphony, the Portland Symphony, the Billings Philharmonic, the Boise Philharmonic, the San Jose Symphony, the Phoenix Symphony, the San Antonio Symphony and the National Symphony Orchestra at Wolf Trap, near Washington, D.C. I have two sons, David and Alexander, one beautiful and intelligent granddaughter, Laylah, and I live in Redondo Beach, California, with my wife, Annie. |