About Me

I am an English composer in my sixties.  I was born into a musical family, started piano lessons at the age of 6 and composed my first piece at 10. I have pursued composition as a hobby since then. Having retired from a career as a management consultant, I decided to prepare my 56 completed works for publication and build a website to showcase them and future compositions. The need to find something productive to do during the second Covid-19 pandemic lockdown at the start of 2021 was the spur to make this decision a reality. 

 

My musical influences are wide and varied. I have held a lifelong interest in classical music in all its various forms, but have particularly strong interests in the Romantic period, impressionism, twentieth century music, opera, choral and piano music. These have strongly influenced my style.  My father was a jazz lover and so I heard much of that style growing up and, within the world of popular music, I have a strong preference for guitar-driven music.  My music is also influenced by musical theatre, most of whose composers came, like myself, from Russian Jewish roots, by the music I heard in the synagogue under Chazzan Freilich and Rabbi Chaitowitz and by the sounds and modes of Klezmer music. 

 

I would describe my music as strongly rooted in tonality, but often with a modern twist. That twist might be to introduce some significant dissonance into an otherwise tonal framework, introduce modes outside the major/minor system such as the Ahava Raba (Freygish) and Mishaberach modes from Jewish music or to explore unusual or idiomatic time signatures – for example, I have a particular facility to write music with five beats to a bar. In this way, my music has more in common with the music written in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries for film, television and musicals, which displays similar characteristics, rather than that written for the concert hall.

 

As well as composing, I still play the piano to a proficient standard, having achieved the ATCL diploma in 2013 and sing as a bass in the Lichfield Cathedral Chorus and in the Singer’s Hill Synagogue choir in Birmingham.  I live in Lichfield with my wife, Sally.