I rejected an offered college education, but living in Ann Arbor put many wonderful resources at my disposal, including many fine Steinway grands sprinkled merrily throughout the campus. I had many musical adventures in those early days, such as playing Liszt’s American Steinway at the Smithsonian Museum in an impromptu recital that drew quite a crowd. I improvised madly (after all, this was Liszt’s piano), and the crone that ran the joint nearly had a stroke as she screamed at me to STOP STOP!!! STOP!!!, and I was summarily ejected from the premise. I became an NPR-affiliate producer with WUOM, WVGR, and WFUM out of the U-M, producing hundreds of weekly programs in my decade there - including The Musical Theatre, New Music, New Releases, FrI rejected an offered college education, but living in Ann Arbor put many wonderful resources at my disposal, including many fine Steinway grands sprinkled merrily throughout the campus. I had many musical adventures in those early days, such as playing Liszt’s American Steinway at the Smithsonian Museum in an impromptu recital that drew quite a crowd. I improvised madly (after all, this was Liszt’s piano), and the crone that ran the joint nearly had a stroke as she screamed at me to STOP STOP!!! STOP!!!, and I was summarily ejected from the premise. I became an NPR-affiliate producer with WUOM, WVGR, and WFUM out of the U-M, producing hundreds of weekly programs in my decade there - including The Musical Theatre, New Music, New Releases, From the Monophonic Era, Music of Our World, Excursions, andNocturne. One of the highlights was a carefully-engineered presentation of all nine symphonies of Beethoven, played simultaneously. The night it premiered some listeners called the cops, who stormed the studios looking for classical music felons. There were dozens of phone calls. Half the callers thought I was the coolest DJ ever; the other half wanted me dead, as soon and as painfully as possible. Now THAT’S good radio. In 1980 I founded Sinewave Studios. I produced about 20 concerts, and conducted the North American premier of Karlheinz Stockhausen's Fur kommende Zeiten at the Detroit Institute of Art. The writing part of my career started in 1984 when I wrote and self-published a booklet on starting a classical record collection. Borders agreed to carry it, and it finally made its way to a publisher from a place called and Book, and thus was born Classical Records, Starting Your Collection. I took it to the Ann Arbor News and asked them if they needed a music reviewer. Turned out they did, and so while I had the radio gig I was reviewing the best acts in the world. Before all that I worked in record stores, moved pianos, sold sheet music, managed U-M's record and sheet music store, and wrote for national music journals. In 1998, I was headhunted by a visionary fellow named Michael Erlewine, who decided it would be a good idea to get hold of every album in the world and put every bit of information on it into a database, included a photo of the album, artists, and sound samples. The company Erlewine founded was called All Media Guide (www.allmusic.com). Erlewine asked me to assume the post of Director of Content of Classical Music. I jumped at it, and in four years my amazing staff and I amassed the data, created the classical website, and produced the reference book, AMG Guide to Classical Music, which I edited and which was published in 2005. My books include Prince of Pines, the dystopian male-adventure novel set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula; Eight Short Stories; and the most recent Jophiel, a rare fantasy novel about the classical music world, and an angel sent to Earth to help rejuvenate the dying Arts. Musically, I've to-date got about 80 songs published in three SongBooks, many chamber and orchestral pieces, piano works, a full-length Broadway-style musical called Penelope, choral works, and a large orchestral piece known as Sinfonia Matrix. Available CDs include Mythos (piano pieces based upon Greek myth characters, recorded in recital and in studio), Five Fantasy Nocturnes for piano, Campfire – The Burning Psaltery (a phantasmagorical piece for an innocent 12-string psaltery), Seven Solo Songs from Penelope, and 15 Songs and 15 More Songs from the SongBooks. Not-actually-available is a CD of Beethoven’s Nine Symphonies Played Simultaneously, because it is also the most magnificent copyright violation of all time – 9 in the space of 1. Plus I don’t fancy ending up in Classical Music Prison. I’m a good-lookin’ guy and there’s some mean hombres in there, especially the violists....more