About Me
While attending university during the 1960s, I came under the influence of the big folk music revival, but took up classical guitar quite by accident. Having never learned to read music, I had been strumming chords for folk songs on my guitar. This had to change when I wanted to try writing my own songs. For this I needed to teach myself music notation, so I studied a classical guitar method, which contained a chapter on the rudiments of music.
My major subject was German language and literature, but on visits to the university library I always found myself sidetracked into researching the composers of the pieces I was learning to play. Once the obsession had set in, I spent so much time with my instrument between classes that I neglected my course work and had to stay up all night to cram for exams.
A few years after graduation — yes, I did pass those exams after all — I managed to find work in music studios as a guitar teacher, even though I was still entirely self-taught. In 1971 I started teaching myself to compose. Those early compositions had to be handwritten. This was tedious, and often resulted in sloppy manuscripts, but the advent of music software made it much easier for me to produce legible scores. The pieces you find here were scored in MuseScore, as were the rest of my 377 original compositions.
In 1989 I started working as a computer instructor in various business colleges. This was followed by a final career translating German documents into English from 1996 to 2002. Music was always uppermost in my mind, however, and my eventual retirement allowed me to concentrate on composition as a pastime.