As a composer and artist I acknowledge John Keats’ simple maxim—“Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” For me, this translates into an embrace of the Classical ideals of coherence, multi-dimensionality, imaginative variety, and hierarchical structure, as well as the Romantic ideals of expressive urgency, personal experience, and aesthetic intoxication. I heed Charles Baudelaire’s exhortation to “always be drunk…on wine, poetry, or virtue as you wish,” personally opting for poetry—which I interpret poetically to mean art in general. My passion for the Platonic virtues of wisdom, courage, self-control, and justice informs my work as an artist. I take self-control to mean not a denial of pleasure, but the power to master the internal forces of egoism, greed, deception, and pride. An inveterate idealist, I envision a world in which humans reject the substitutes we have invented—parking lots in place of paradise, and stock-index-worship in place of genuine community. I see my work not only as an expression of heart, mind, and spirit, but as a form of opposition to the materialist hegemony in economics, which worships money, and in philosophy, which denies higher Levels of Being. As a creator and human, I acknowledge the Higher Level of reality—name it what you will—and create art in light of its goodness and beauty.
August 2020
