About

I’ve been involved professionally in music and media for more than 30 years, and personally for even longer. After more than 20 years as a full-time professional reporter, critic, and editor in New York City and Boston, I am now Senior Copywriter for BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), a venerable and innovative institution I’d admired long before I moved to New York from Houston in 1993.

I’ve been deeply involved with contemporary music and living composers for decades, not least with the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award-winning blog titled Night After Night. In April 2020 I relaunched that blog as a Substack newsletter, at which time the original blog mostly became an archive for past work and a home for my weekly audio diaries.

Previously, I was the inaugural director of publications for the Brooklyn-based concert venue and performing-arts incubator National Sawdust, and served as the editor and lead writer for National Sawdust Log (2016-20), a respected online journal of music journalism and criticism that showcased writing by well-established professionals and gifted emerging writers, recognized for support by the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism.

I also have served as Culture & Arts Editor for WNYC (2022–23); Senior Arts Editor for NPR (2021-22); Assistant Arts Editor at the Boston Globe (2014–16); and both Music Editor and Classical Music Editor for Time Out New York (2001–14). As a freelance stringer for The New York Times (2007–14), I filed several articles and reviews every week. On returning to New York from Boston in 2016, I resumed writing for The New York Times until 2024.

I began my career in New York City media as the classical music industry columnist for Billboard magazine (2001–03). I’ve since embraced a broad stylistic range in my music coverage, which has appeared in the Washington Post, Village Voice, Musical America, NewMusicBox, Jazziz, JazzTimes, Down Beat, The Wire, Signal to Noise [RIP], Chamber Music, Symphony, Decibel, and numerous other publications.

I’ve written program notes for the New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Houston Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, the BBC, and other prominent arts institution, as well as liner notes for recordings featuring the Kronos Quartet with Laurie Anderson, composer Michael Gordon, the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, pianists Jenny Lin and Carolyn Enger, and composer-percussionist John Hollenbeck.

Along with my work as a writer and editor, I have extensive experience in public relations, radio broadcasting, and live interviewing, onstage and on camera.

I trained formally as a percussionist, and put what I learned to work with jazz groups in San Antonio, rock bands in Houston and New York, and the Long Island Gilbert & Sullivan Society. More recently I’ve performed at the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center, the Caramoor Festival, and the Ojai Music Festival, and in Make Music New York.

Home is Jackson Heights, Queens, where I live with my wife, journalist and scholar Lara Pellegrinelli, along with our brilliant daughter and two charismatic dogs.