Statement of Purpose
I believe that we live at a critical historic time, where unprecedented technical progress has made it possible for anyone to make themselves heard. While this has provided many great advantages, unfortunately, for music, it has often resulted in the transmission of ideas that have bypassed long-established standards of music communication, thus sacrificing the quality and purpose of music composition in sake of originality and innovation. Consequently, the order which has brought our civilization to where it is today has become eroded, jeopardizing the survival of Western classical music that was built on 3000 years of cultural accumulation through the vast territories covering Europe and the Near East. To restore music’s capacity to speak to our hearts and minds, we must find a way to reconnect with the broken bloodline of our heritage.
Compositions
I started out as an avant-garde composer – primarily because of my strong aversion to the official music that celebrated Communist ideology. However, having discovered the limitations of modernism and postmodernism, I set out to explore different forms of popular and folk music, at first Western and then non-Western. As I began to realize that music operates in a similar way to language, I came to see that the approach of German Baroque composers, such as Walther, Mattheson, Heinicken, Scheibe, Marpurg, Kirnberger, CPE Bach, Quantz, L. Mozart and Koch, was generally right: one has to define the lexicon and the grammar of music before proceeding to execute its main function - the expression of emotions, which has to remain hedonistic even when the emotion is negative.
Research
Throughout most of my adult life, I have been engaged in the scientific investigation of music in 3 capacities: 1) acoustic measurement of sound recordings combined with the analysis of music structures, 2) improvement of the methodology of music teaching, and 3) optimizing melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, metric, and textural ear-training for different age categories. Nonetheless, I look at music primarily as a composer: how the meaningful structural elements of music are put together to express a specific idea. In this quest, I am interested in all kinds of music, from folk to popular, across the world, and from historic to modern classical. I look at all music through the prism of music theory, history, psychoacoustics, biology, anthropology, sociology, semiotics, and hermeneutics.