He studied music at Columbia University with Mario Davidovsky (composition) and Harvey Sollberger (flute). He has won special recognition for works that combine traditional instruments with computer generated sound. He has been commissioned by many renowned performers (Guido Arbonelli, Tim Brady, Bruno Schneider) and ensembles (Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Boston Musica Viva).
He is a Professor of Music at Brandeis University and Director of beams, the University's Electro-Acoustic Music Studio.
His honours include awards and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Recent performances of his works have taken place in Annecy, Beijing, Berlin, Boston, Bratislava, London, Los Angeles, Milan, New York, Padua, Seoul, and San Francisco. His music is available on such labels as New World Records, icmc, Intersound Net Records, seamus, and rrrecords.

What is Danced... (and what is not) . In this piece, I was preoccupied with two things. Musically, the narrative periodically begins to suggest a dance-like pulse when, in fact, this is an illusion - things never really get moving with any momentum. Throughout my work on the piece, I thought about the physicality of playing the harp (specifically of Lucia Bova who commissioned the work). If there is a dance, it is in the succession of movements the player uses to produce a wide variety of attack timbres.
A second concern was the sound-world of the piece. The electronic sounds are precisely synchronized with the live part and often work to sustain or enlarge the resonance of the harp, giving an illusion of a very different instrument. Sometimes this illusion is achieved by adding overtones or by using overlapping varieties of reverberation. In other cases, I have used granular synthesis to make continuous textures, much in the way harpists give the illusion of sustaining through trills and repeated attacks.