Music's one of the major passions in my life, and has been ever since I was old enough to stand up at my mom's piano and plink out simple melodies on those fascinating black and white keys.

My family and I currently live in North Carolina, in the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill "Triangle" region. We moved here in 1993 from New York's Hudson Valley region, where for many years we lived just outside Woodstock. There I served as a board member and played the violin with The Woodstock Chamber Orchestra, sang with the Ars Choralis chamber choir, and performed regularly with the Tacet String Quartet.

I first picked up the violin when I was 8, dropped it for a few years in my early teens, then picked it up again in the late 1960s when, thanks to bands like It's A Beautiful Day and The Flock, it once again became "cool" to play the violin. In the mid-1970s, I studied for 5 semesters at Montclair State College in Upper Montclair, NJ, pursuing music performance and instruction, then left to eventually acquire engineering and computer science degrees and write software for a living. My violin teachers have included Beverly Somach, Jerome Landsman and Betty-Jean Hagen, and I also studied concert harp with Rosalie Pratt, piano with Ruth Rendleman, and chamber music performance with Chaim Zemach.

In recent years I've also taken up the mandolin, and there's also a mandola and an octave mandolin in the instrument collection, as well as a small Irish lap harp and a mountain dulcimer.

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