About

I am a cellist, composer, and bass guitarist based in the Philly area. While the majority of my training is in classical music, I love playing all kinds of music including, jazz, rock, country, theatre, and folk music from various parts of the world. Cello helped me develop my personality as a soloist, a chamber player, and a presenter; bass guitar taught me to lead by supporting and to support by leading, and I have encountered all kinds of cultures and rhythms by accompanying different artists. Composition allows me to engage people in an incredibly unique way, both by showing them a unique layer of my personality and relating to my audience through highly personalized, heartfelt original and arranged music.

I believe that teaching is the final evolution of performing art. It is the purpose that drives everything I do in music, and I love to incorporate teaching my performing and composition. In this way, speaking between pieces is one of my favorite ways to relate to my audiences.

Music

The music I play comes from all over the place. There are classical pieces that I learned in school when I studied with Dr. Kwang Yu and Udi Bar-David; there is jazz music that I learned from playing trombone at the Kimmel Center Teen Summer Arts camps back in the 2010s; and I have learned and arranged crowd favorites that I picked up from performing for various communities, including solo cello renditions of "Somewhere" from West Side Story and "Oh Danny Boy."

I believe that musicians are conduits through which art flows, and exposure is enrichment, especially for composers. My writing contains a lot of learning-by-doing, which often means that I will write a piece in the style of Bach, Brahms, Mozart, Rachmaninoff, Ellington, Bernstein, or Gillespie after playing and studying works by those artists.

My goal is to broaden my musical horizons as much as possible, meeting and learning new people and then honoring and relating to them through music that I play, write, or both.

Videos

Past groupmuses (1)