As my vocation continues to unfold, I return again and again to a fundamental drive to create and compose music in response to the larger world around me and the presence of God within it. Music encodes, contextualizes, and explores the pain and wonder of life as well as the systems of thought we employ in an attempt to make sense of it all. In following my vocation as a composer, my hope and prayer is to make pieces that do not flinch from the pain of daily living but that also embrace the hope of a loving and forgiving God.
As a teacher of music, I have the opportunity to crack open the universe at one of its seams and share the wonder with others. The realizations of Truth and Beauty that such sharing brings to my students and to myself give academic study a level of meaning and worth that is otherwise easily lost.
In the arts and academia, meaning has again become relevant as a concept of thought. How we learn to reintegrate meaning into aesthetics and where we choose to place meaning in the broader context of thought will determine future forms of creative and cultural expression. To be an artist means to be aware of one's surroundings and the changes taking place within them. In response to the changes I see, I try to write pieces that are neither warmed-over, nihilistic percolations nor well-intentioned, pagan graspings. Rather, I try to ground each work—whether it be abstract or in some way representational—in an aesthetic that radically embraces an absoluteness of meaning and the objective reality of Truth. This aesthetic in no way limits the choices of material, technique, and aural language available to me as a composer, but, perhaps surprisingly so, it enables me to see and create beauty, pattern, and form in ways unexpected and unexplored.