Since the age of two, I have wanted to play the drums. A big part of my music career has been as a per­cus­sion­ist, and it was through per­cus­sion that I started with con­tem­po­rary clas­si­cal music. It was also the cat­a­lyst for my explo­ration of many other kinds of music, and I was quite active as a per­former until recently.

As a child, I moved between clas­si­cal per­cus­sion and jazz drum­ming, thanks to the influ­ence of my teacher, Trevor Bran­den­burg. Because the clas­si­cal per­cus­sion reper­toire is largely modern, I had an early expo­sure to twentieth-​century music, and I always liked it. I had had rel­a­tively little expe­ri­ence with the clas­si­cal West­ern canon, so I never learned the mis­con­cep­tion that modern clas­si­cal music is dif­fer­ent, weird, or “difficult”. Also being a per­cus­sion­ist, I didn’t focus very much on pitch aspects of music until my later teens.

After high school, I decided I would study jazz drum­ming, so I enrolled in the jazz pro­gram at Grant MacE­wan Col­lege (GMC) in Edmon­ton. Brian Thur­good, my teacher at GMC, encour­aged me to polish my tech­nique and work towards a pro­fes­sional level of per­for­mance. I enjoyed this chal­lenge, and my play­ing improved tremen­dously. How­ever, the more I refined the skills I had in jazz and pop, the more I was curi­ous to learn about other kinds of music. I was espe­cially inter­ested in Cuban music, and stud­ied pri­vately with Cuban per­cus­sion­ist Mario Allende for sev­eral years. I also took some courses at the Uni­ver­sity of Alberta on Ghana­ian Ewe music.

The Cuban stud­ies in par­tic­u­lar had an influ­ence on me, and I even­tu­ally ended up study­ing in Havana (see Cur­ricu­lum Vitæ). My curios­ity for explor­ing new kinds of music also led me to start com­pos­ing. I started out doing arrange­ments for bands I played with, then even­tu­ally began com­pos­ing my own songs. Grad­u­ally I became more inter­ested in learn­ing how to write for instru­ments I didn’t play and that weren’t nor­mally part of the jazz/pop ensemble.

After moving to Toronto in 2002, the demands of my com­po­si­tional career pre­vented me from doing much per­form­ing. Since that time, most of my performance projects have been based around free improvisation.

I play the following categories of percussion. I also own most of these instruments:

• Drumset, including rock, jazz, pop, and Cuban styles
• Mallet percussion, especially the marimba
• Orchestral percussion of all kinds
• Cuban percussion, including congas, bongos, timbales, batá, güiro, etc.

Over time, my music has grad­u­ally taken on more and more aspects of my par­tic­u­lar musi­cal back­ground. I grew up play­ing jazz and rock drums in addi­tion to clas­si­cal per­cus­sion, and this influ­ence has become increas­ingly clear in my pieces, although not always in terms of direct appro­pri­a­tion. What is more common is an inter­est in the cul­tural ele­ments of hear­ing: why we hear things in cer­tain ways, what it is we listen for in par­tic­u­lar genres, and so forth.

In addi­tion, my recent pieces have taken a par­tic­u­larly crit­i­cal slant on these ques­tions. I tend not to trust state­ments or ideas that people take as axiomatic, so I have focused on writng music that decon­structs these “givens” in order to find out exactly how axiomatic they really are—chal­lenge for the sake of chal­lenge, in other words. Almost always I do find some grain of truth in the axioms, though this process of intense scrutiny serves as a sort of inspira­tion to explore some­thing new, to push my music in dif­fer­ent direc­tions, and also to better inter­nal­ize the musi­cal or per­cep­tual or cul­tural truths that I do happen to stum­ble across. And what’s more, I often find myself saying, “Well, I was right, there really is a lot about that idea that is totally superfluous.”

So there are these two facets: one the one hand, my inter­est in cul­tural ele­ments of music, stem­ming from my back­ground in jazz, rock, clas­si­cal music, Cuban pop­u­lar and folk­loric musics, et cetera; and on the other, a kind of rebel­lious side that likes to ques­tion musi­cal author­i­ties for the fun of it.

On top of that, I also have some other more tran­sient inter­ests—flavours of the week that keep things fresh. For exam­ple, over the past few pieces, I have been inter­ested in writ­ing music that is fast-paced, rhyth­mic, and light in tex­ture. I’ve def­i­nitely writ­ten a lot of slow dark music, but it seems to me that there is a pre­pon­der­ance of that kind of thing in the new music com­mu­nity and I want to see how far I can push the other direc­tion. Com­posers like Jacob ter Veld­huis and Richard Ayres have been par­tic­u­lar inspi­ra­tions in that regard, though I am just as likely if not more to look at pop­u­lar music for this. I don’t think my music resembles those two com­posers very much, but they are people whose music I have thought about a lot as I write my own. And again, I also often sit and think about the Beastie Boys or the Black Eyed Peas; Aphex Twin, Björk, Stere­o­lab, or Metric; or what­ever. There’s some­thing to learn from any kind of music; the impor­tant thing is to actu­ally sit down with it and do the thinking.

Another thing that’s come up a lot lately is a rever­sal of formal pri­or­i­ties. Actu­ally, this might be start­ing to fall under the cat­e­gory of axioms I’ve chal­lenged repeat­edly instead of just a flavour of the week, but still… Many pieces by com­posers in the new music tra­di­tion have long, flow­ing forms with strong hier­ar­chi­cal inter­re­la­tions between sec­tions and seam­less tran­si­tions, often built upon a single motive or series of terse musi­cal ideas. That comes from the Beethoven tra­di­tion I sup­pose, which is as good a model as any to emu­late. But I wanted to know if there was another way to do it. So a lot of my recent music deals with very simple long-term formal struc­tures, based on a series of unre­lated musi­cal motives that change from sec­tion to sec­tion with very little tran­si­tional mate­r­ial. Coher­ence is cre­ated through the larger simple formal pat­terns instead of the long-term devel­op­ment of motives.

For exam­ple, Cul­ture no.1 is in four dis­creet sec­tions plus a coda. Each sec­tion is started by an audio sample that the musi­cians then imi­tate, and that’s all there is to the form. No interre­la­tion between the sec­tions, no mate­r­ial that comes back later to be devel­oped. But on the local level, I have very tight inter­ac­tions between mate­r­ial, clear devel­op­ment of motives, and this helps to carry the music through from one sec­tion to the next. The global char­ac­ter of the sec­tions, how­ever, and not the local devel­op­ment, is what strings together the piece as a whole.

As the saying goes, talk­ing about music is like danc­ing about archi­tec­ture, and prob­a­bly this little blurb will seem com­pletely inad­e­quate tomor­row. But that’s always the way it is and I hope at least this serves as a snap­shot of what’s going on in my music right now, which is always useful. Actu­ally, I don’t like that quo­ta­tion; talk­ing about music is noth­ing like dancing about archi­tec­ture. Metaphors like that over-simplify the issue and lead to the kinds of musi­cal axioms I don’t like. Maybe it’s better not to say any­thing. So I’ll just leave it here and you can decide for your­self what my motives are, if you’re so inclined.