An account of my musical journey: the music and instruments I play and have played, the music and players that have influenced me, and other random ranting. Read at yer own risk.

I grew up in a home where neither parent played music, but appreciated music deeply. I started playing piano on a Winter upright at age 7, learning classical music. I was brought up listening to opera, my father's favorite genre, as well as Tango, my family being Argentine. In Elementary school, I briefly played French Horn before switching to violin. Although my violin lessons ended when I left my violin at the bus stop a few years later (oops), my piano studies continued. My parents exposed me to a great deal of classical music. Living in Irvington, NY (45 minutes from New York City) allowed me to go to hundreds of concerts and operas at Lincoln Center throughout my upbringing. Usually for five bucks I would go to the score desk and follow the music.

During Middle School and High School I studied piano under New York pianist David Bradshaw, of the duo piano team Bradshaw and Buono. My interests were in music of the Baroque and Romantic periods: Bach, Liszt, Chopin, late Beethoven. I tended away from the classical period and highly atonal modern works. I attended the music festival and competition Giornate Musicali in Italy for two years, sharing first place the second year. My repertoire included Chopin's Prelude Opus 45 and Etude Opus 25 No. 10, Liszt's Invocation and St. Francis of Paola Walking on the Waters.

During the last two years of High School, I acquired a Korg 01/W FD keyboard and got interested in sequencing and scoring. Fairly soon afterwards, I joined the Irvington High School Jazz Band, a seven piece group that actually didn't do much jazz, mostly rock covers. I think it was named such for legitimacy. Eventually we splintered off to form a smaller rock band that played at parties and such. We played fairly standard covers of the Doors, Led Zeppelin, Alice in Chains, Jane's Addiction, David Bowie, etc. During this period I began to explore more non-classical music: Industrial bands like Pigface and HAL; progressive rock bands like The Soft Machine and Jethro Tull; and more esoteric groups like Black Tape for a Blue Girl (and everything on the Projekt label), Portishead, and Aphex Twin. I also spent much time playing drums at our drummer's house.

Soon it was time to go to college. Although I thought about pursuing study in science, my sequencing work led me to an interest in recording, and I went to the Cleveland Institute of Music (CIM) to get a Bachelors of Music in Audio Recording. (The first day of orientation I met Jenny, a harpist, and we married five years later.)

During my time there, I was able to record over 350 concerts from solo instruments to full orchestra to operas. One highlight was helping on the recording of Wagner's Das Rheingold for the Cleveland Orchestra. My knowledge of the music (essentially knowing it by memory) was helpful in cueing up microphones. The amount of recording work exposed me to a number of great musicians and a lot of different types of music.

At CIM, I added a major in music theory after finding it fascinating. My theory major was an intense workout in musical training: writing down melodies and chords as they were played, sight reading orchestral scores, and sight singing melodies with each note in a different clef were some of the tortures we were subjected to. We also analyzed pieces for form, harmony, and melody, as well as surveyed the history of music. It was here that I developed an appreciation for modal music and atonal theory, and began listening to 20th century works from Schoenberg to Satie to Prokofiev to Mahler.

Although I wasn't a performance major, I still continued piano lessons. However, the teacher was keen on changing my technique to a different method, and I was not interested in that. So I soon switched to organ lessons, an instrument I had always wanted to play. There's nothing quite like sitting in an empty church and playing a 64' stop at full blast! During freshman year I purchased a Hammond Spinet organ and actually stuffed it in my half of the dorm room! After leaving that organ at a drummer's house where it stopped working, I bought a Baldwin full-size church organ, complete with 2-octave pedals and Leslie cabinet. It took up most of the bedroom at my first apartment, and my piano took up the rest of the room. I slept in the living room for two years... Apart from organ, I also continued playing piano as an occasional accompanist for recitals, as well as for theory purposes, but without the long hours of practice Liszt and Chopin has pretty much left the fingers.

I became seriously interested in jazz in college. One semester, a theory class was about jazz harmony and scoring, using Big Band units, like four trombones, etc. My second year at CIM I was roommates with a percussionist-drummer. We began to play jazz together with a few other musicians, and eventually started doing some gigs. People considered my jazz playing to be Impressionistic in style, probably because I was studying a great deal of Debussy and Ravel in theory classes and I had those sounds floating in my head. Although the personnel changed several times, I continued playing in jazz groups through college. I listened to Monk, Brubeck, Coltrane, and Davis, as well as Ornette Coleman, Jim Hall, Charles Mingus and Horace Silver.

When I visited home in New York, I would continue to play with a few ex-bandmates. By this time I had purchased a bass and an acoustic guitar. The bass was terrible: it weighed a ton and had a mediocre sound, but it was only 10 dollars at a yard sale! The guitar was a 1985 Guild D-15M all mahogany dreadnought, which I thought sounded great for the price. I purchased this from my good friend Rudy Pensa, owner of Rudy's Guitar Stop in NYC. (I had also purchased my keyboard from him.) So I learned to play the bass and the guitar a little during college as well.

During my last two summers in college, I attended the three week Spoleto Festival in Charleston, SC, as a staff engineer, and the ten-week Tanglewood festival in western Massachusetts, also as a staff engineer. Both were intense recording experiences, usually with two or three recordings or live sound gigs per day.

My college degree culminated with a translation and analysis of two German Treatises on form and melody, for the Theory major, and a group of recordings of various ensembles for the Audio Recording major. The most interesting recording was one of Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint. It is an overdubbed multitrack piece written for guitar, but I teamed up with a percussionist to record a version of it with marimbas and vibraphones. Here I got interested in minimalist music and repetitive melodic and harmonic forms, something I incorporate into my playing and writing now, and which is prevalent in many forms of music from classical to trance.

During college I had been able to assist on some recordings for the Cleveland record company Telarc, and right after college I was hired by them, while Jenny finished her master's degree in harp performance. I started as an editor, and soon was also doing mastering, computer work, and technical and production assistance on recording sessions. Telarc was one of the first recording companies in the world to use the new Direct Stream Digital recording system developed by Sony. Soon after I started, we acquired the first prototypes. Although the units were fraught with huge problems, we worked through them and mastered the first SACD's ever produced. I also had the opportunity to record and meet some great jazz artists, like Dave Brubeck and McCoy Tyner.

Apart from working at Telarc, I was hired to the faculty of CIM after graduation, a position I held for 3 years. I taught two Audio Recording courses in the sequence there. In addition I taught some music theory. I also worked for a local guitar repair shop, and learned to setup and repair all manner of instruments. With some of the expertise learned at the shop, I built a classical guitar for Jenny. The owner also played in a hard rock/metal band, and occasionally I played drums or bass with their group to fill in. This rekindled an interest in punk and hard rock groups like Green Day, Metallica, Primus, and Barbra Streisand.

At some point someone gave me a five string banjo, and I began to get interested in bluegrass music. I never really mastered the five string (never practiced, really), but listening to the music exposed me to the mandolin, which I instantly fell in love with. I soon purchased an Alvarez A-model Mandolin from the local folk shop, and began learning bluegrass standards. I also began working on Scottish and Irish music from Jenny's collection for harp. The mandolin felt very natural to me. Probably those violin lessons back in elementary school. Yeah right! I was drawn to David Grisman, Frank Wakefield, and Andy Statman as influences. I also delved into Irish and Scottish groups such as Dervish, Deanta, the Bothy Band, the Tannahill Weavers, and Shooglenifty. I will never forget the first time hearing the set by the Bothy Band that starts with Leitrim Fancy; that lit a fire in me that has yet to diminish.

I worked on over 50 internationally released albums while at Telarc. Although I was enjoying my work there a great deal, eventually I decided to switch careers, and return to college to study Astronomy and Physics. Thus Jenny and I moved to Tucson in the fall of 2000, and I began my next degree at the University of Arizona. Now I am in the Applied Math PhD progam there, doing cancer research. Ah, school never ends...

Soon after arriving in Tucson, I answered an ad for a keyboard player for a surf and alt-country band, Big Galoot. There I met Dan Hostetler and Dan Davis, guitar players, songwriters, and all-around good guys. I was invited to join the group, and played keyboards with them for two years around Tucson. Soon after joining Big Galoot, I found out they had an acoustic band called the Determined Luddites, with guitar, mandolin, and bass, and I joined this group as well. I had inherited my grandfather's 1935 Guarnierius tenor banjo, and my mother-in-law gave Jenny and me her 1905 family violin, so I played these, along with mandolin, in the Luddites.

At some point the bass player left town, and Jenny picked up the bass to fill in, and became the fourth and final Luddite. She purchased a DeArmond Starfire bass, which she lets me play sometimes. We locked in as a quartet really well, and began playing weekly at Zachary's pizza, developing the repertoire and our own style. In 2002 we recorded our debut CD, Better Luck Yesterday, which was well received by the local music community. Our second CD, String Theory, featured almost entirely original music, and was released in the fall of 2005.

While in Tucson, I worked for a few years at a local recording studio doing graphics, audio restoration, and occasional engineering. While there I composed and recorded the music to an album of poetry by local poet Tom Bullington. I also built two lever harps for Jenny, which was a great experience. I was grateful to the Dan's, one of whom is a wood worker, and the other is a piano refinisher, for letting me use their shops for some of the finishing.

In 2002, I was commissioned to compose the music for an hour-long ballet for the University of New Hampshire Dance Company, based on the legend of Sleepy Hollow. The music was written for a 16 piece chamber orchestra. The ballet was recorded, performed, and filmed at the University, and was shown on PBS stations in the Seacoast area in 2004.

A frustration with the tone on my entry level mandolin led me to trade up to a Breedlove A-model mandolin, purchased from Buffalo Brothers in Carlsbad, CA. I played over 40 mandolins before choosing this one for its pure, sweet, balanced tone, large dynamic range, and ease of play. For the styles of music I play, I generally prefer the open sound of the A-model body. My interest in Irish music also found me trading in my guitar and keyboard to purchase a bouzouki, a Kennaquhair hand-built instrument.

In addition to playing in the Luddites and Big Galoot, I began attending the local Irish and Old-time music jams, and playing in contradance bands.

I have entered and won some other competitions since that piano one so long ago. If you're interested in that sort of thing: In May of 2003 I won the Tucson Irish Music Competition on Mandolin and Banjo, as well as being the all around high points champion of the event. I twice have won the Four Corner States Mandolin Championship in Wickenburg, Arizona, in 2003 and 2006. Also, I was a Top Five Finalist at the 2004 National Championships at Winfield, in the mandolin contest. Another achievement was being voted 2003 Best Multi-Instrumentalist in Tucson by the Tucson Weekly Tammie Awards, an award I won in 2004 as well. In 2005 and 2006 I won in the String Player category, and in 2007, the Acoustic Guitar category. In addition, the three bands I was playing in (Luddites, Greg Morton Trio, and Crystal Ridge) won Tammie awards in 2004. On guitar, I came in third place in the 2005 Four Corner States Guitar Championship in Wickenburg, Arizona.

Many people say that music is not a competition, and I agree for the most part. In its purest form, it's not. And in entering these competitions, I've met some astounding musicians and been able to share music and jam with people I would otherwise never have met. The point is not to win, but to go out and play the music you feel inside, and have a good time. Definitely some people take it too seriously. But on the other side of the coin, the music business is a competition. You compete for gigs, radio play, CD sales, band members, etc. So exposure is good if you want your music to be heard in a pure form. Personally, I like hearing good music played, and I also like it when someone appreciates the music I have played, when I've made a connection. Entering contests provides an outlet for playing in front of a large listening audience. Unless you're famous and on tour, there are not many opportunities to play your music in front of hundreds of attentive music fans.

In fall of 2003 I started playing with amazing Tucson guitarist Greg Morton, a musical relationship that developed into an almost ESP-like link on stage. We quickly added Jim Stanley on bass to form up a trio, called String Figures. Recently we added the incredible violinist Heather Hardy to the lineup, bringing the energy to a whole new level.

In 2005, I met Tim Wiedenkeller, a phenomenal banjo player. Despite my being in Tucson for over four years by then, I'd only heard rumor of Tim in that time. I heard his playing on the radio, a cut from his newly released classical banjo CD. That led to meeting and playing music together soon after. Tim composes some beautifully complex music which provides an outlet for playing some rather non-standard (and difficult) things on the mandolin.

In 2006 I joined Tucson Irish band Round the House, playing guitar and bouzouki. Mike Smith, their long-time guitarist and a good friend of mine (he backed me up at Winfield several times) tragically passed away in January of 2006. Playing in an Irish band has been a long time dream, and despite the terrible circumstances I was honored to be asked to play in the group. We released the group's third CD in 2007, and it has gotten decent national and international attention, including plays on Clare FM and Thistle and Shamrock.

I have been part of many other musical projects too: I played for a while with bluegrass band Crystal Ridge, and I enjoy sitting in with local groups like the Wayback Machine and the Street Minstrels on occasion. Jenny and I also play together for weddings, parties and events, with her playing harp and me playing either piano, mandolin, bouzouki, or violin. I also play events with a swinggrass group called the BarnJazz Quartet, which put out a live CD in 2005.

I write instrumental music, probably considered progressive acoustic, but drawing on many different influences. The writing is somewhat influenced by baroque and Spanish harmony, modal melody, minimalism, and energetic rhythmic elements. Despite the music theory training I've had, I don't use theory directly to play or compose. It's just a bridge between what I hear in my head and how to play it on my instrument or write it down. It's like spelling and grammar in language: they don't provide expression, merely the tools for expressing.

So that's where I am. I have had the good fortune to have met and played with some great friends and players in Tucson like Greg Morton, Dave Firestine, Sharon Goldwasser, Claire Zucker, Tim Wiedenkeller, Debbie Daly, Dan and Dan from the Luddites, Trevor Smith, Mike Smith, Jim Stanley, Rudy Cortese, Kristen Beaton, Jim Lipson, Peter McLaughlin, Tim O'Connor, Kevin Pakulis, and many more, all of whom have influenced my playing in some way. Currently I listen to a mix of Irish and Scottish music, progressive acoustic music like Mark O'Connor and David Grisman, Gypsy swing music, minimalist stuff, trip hop, opera, tango, and occasionally some lite Bette Midler.

Well, if you got this far, you just may have too much time on your hands. Therefore, support local music, and go out and hear live musicians! Hope to see you at a gig sometime!

Cheers,
Mark R-T