I was born in a coastal Connecticut town in 1984; my family soon moved to suburban Chicago where I spent the next 17 years. My parents are both highly educated, inquisitive, and creative people, and raised me with a love of learning and exploration. While this site is about music, in reality I can’t separate my musical interests from my intellectual and cultural passions, which are wide-ranging and a little difficult to encapsulate. Perhaps this can be said of any qin player, as no musical tradition is more about the “music beyond the strings”.

From fall 2001 to fall 2006 I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, attending Harvard among other things. I then spent 2006-2007 in New York, completing an MA at Columbia; as of fall 2007 I'm a PhD student in Philosophy of Religion at the University of Chicago. So far I’ve been proceeding under the disciplinary heading of “East Asian Languages and Civilizations”, but I’m trying to refocus my work along the lines of “Study of Religion”. My research negotiates the interface between intellectual history (Chinese and comparative) and philosophy, or between what one might call descriptive and theoretical goals. Lately my work has focused on epistemology and philosophy of mind in early Chinese thought; I hope eventually to make contributions to the contemporary philosophical landscape, which has long been a shared (and elusive) goal for specialists in Asian philosophy.

I turned to the guqin in 2003 after many years of musical experimentation. I started learning Western classical violin at age 6, switched to more folkloric genres sometime in middle school, and went very far out on the limb of medieval music in high school. By the time I started college, I had a room-full of exotic reconstructed instruments, including three gut-strung fiddles that I played in several concerts and radio performances. However, I had already begun to feel that living traditions offered much more than a reconstructed dead one ever could, and I was actively dabbling in South Asian and West Asian styles of improvisation. One jam session with a Carnatic violinist convinced me that this path was leading me nowhere, and that I needed systematic grounding in a system that deeply gripped me, rather than ambling through the “musical marketplace” as I had been. From that point it was only a matter of time before I dropped years of bowed string experience and made the momentous switch to guqin. In this instrument and its tradition I feel like I have finally found my “musical destiny”, and while I now look to renovate the qin tradition from within and to cross-pollinate it with other systems, it has given me a grounding I will never lose.

I have many people to thank for their help, guidance, and inspiration in shaping my musical life. I dedicate this page firstly to my musical friends and companions: Jamey, Richard, Vivek, Russ, Bridget, Momin, Ivan, Peiyou, Ananya, and doubtless more waiting to work their own magic. And also to mentors: Shin-yi, Ravikiran, Todd McComb, John Thompson, Stephen Dydo, and others too numerous to mention. Your contributions shine on every page of this website; without you I would be nothing and nowhere.