I am a professional singer (classical and jazz), choral conductor and composer in Birmingham, Alabama, with diverse interests outside music, including art, architecture, photography, urban revitalization and politics.

Raised in the South but not bound by it, I have a great appreciation for local Southern history and culture but also for things modern and progressive. Birmingham, my home since childhood, is the cradle of the Civil Rights Movement and affords an intense ongoing education in human values (both good and bad). My great grandfathers worked in the Birmingham steel mills in the 1920s. My father was the first in his line to get a college degree, and with an ingrained Calvinist work ethic gifted me, for better or worse, a certain ideological frame of mind: Whereas he was a pre-Vietnam, Cold-War conservative, I became a post-Vietnam, Reagan conservative. This was a cocoon from which I have finally emerged (irony of ironies) as an open-minded, liberal butterfly, though still trying to make sense of that ideological divide.

In keeping with my newfound progressivism, I participate as much as is possible in my city as an active (and sometimes, activist) citizen, though I am now considering a shift (at least a partial one) to rural life where I can seek a greater communion with the natural world and revive my visual art. For all my love of the city, I have a natural kinship with Thoreau: chirping crickets, twinkling fireflies and the crunch of autumn leaves in the woods, they are all the stuff of my childhood. As my life proceeds, I feel an increasing inertia towards "natural religion," but as a good Southerner, I find it impossible to escape the "organized" kind. Spiritual contemplation has actually played a large role in my life. I have traversed a long spiritual journey, from the Baptist church of my youth to Anglicanism, Eastern Orthodoxy & Roman Catholicism. I've even spent time in a monastery, and not as a particular punishment.

I have an ongoing fascination with Russia and India, though not having actually travelled there. The coldness, the bleakness, of the Russian land, dotted with quaint villages and magnificent jewell-like churches; the hot climate and ubiquitous, riotous color of India; extremes that lure. Places I HAVE visited (and sometimes would prefer to live) include Paris and Canterbury, each of which reflects a distinct side of my personality: Paris, dense and complex, with its everflowing bounty of art and style; Canterbury, with its ancient Cathedral surrounded by rolling countryside.

I'm at times ebullient, gregarious and flirtatious, and at times reclusive and introspective. I love spontaneity and despise planning. I'm half Spock and half Scotty: at turns rationalistic and impulsive. I'm attracted to systematic thought (in which I love to immerse myself), and yet I inevitably become claustrophobic and seek release in an artistic chaos. I'm attracted to the idea of complementarity and mutual fulfillment in a relationship. In theory, at least: I do treasure my independence and solace at least as much if not more. Above all, I value intellectual objectivity and artistic license as sacred inheritance to my being. In the world, I see myself as more of an observer than a participant, though I am aware that I'm both. I much prefer behind the scenes to the limelight. I wish to give of myself for the sake of others and the cosmos, but---to borrow from a great scholar with whom I once had the pleasure of conversing--I'm more of a "flying buttress" than a pillar in the nave.

I'm in parts conservative, liberal and radical. I do believe that there are certain things in the world that are transcendent, permanent & essential to our nature. Human beings and society are not infinitely malleable. On the other hand, there are a lot of things in our past (and in our present) we need to reject, and things we need to open ourselves up to. Public protest and activism are necessary things towards this end. I believe the future, like the past,