I grew up between a studio pianist father and the legacy of an opera singer grandfather, fell in love with making theater in a high school production of Ragtime, trained in jazz and opera, burned out, quit, and came back through a writing workshop I entered on a whim. Now I work as a music director, performer, composer, and voice teacher in New York City — and I teach because every one of those experiences lives in the room with me. This is the longer version.

My father kept a piano in the house. He'd played sessions in New York in the 1970s — studios, late nights, the whole thing — and my grandfather had been a professional opera singer. Music wasn't something our family did. It was just what the air was made of.

I don't remember not loving it. The Beach Boys cassette I wore out at three. Billy Joel, then Queen. In second grade, Mariah Carey's Fantasy on repeat until I had every run memorized — and around the same time, sitting at my father's piano picking out the opening of Moonlight Sonata by ear until I got it. Nobody showed me. I just wouldn't stop until I could do it. Something about that felt important.

My mother put on movie musicals — Sound of Music, Grease, Mary Poppins — and I fell in love with female singers. Karen Carpenter. Linda Ronstadt. Voices that could break your heart in a single phrase and make it feel like a gift. In fourth grade I picked up the saxophone and jazz got its hooks in me. Meanwhile the bus was full of Eminem and the TV was full of TRL and I was absorbing all of it without any sense that it was supposed to be contradictory. It didn't feel contradictory. It all felt like the same thing — people making sounds that meant something.

Somewhere in early adolescence the music got more private. I found Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. — the ease, the swing, the way they made performing look effortless — and then Damien Rice and Nick Drake, which was the opposite of effortless, which was music that sounded like it cost something. I started writing songs around this time. Just voice and guitar, just for myself. Unrequited love, mostly. The things you feel so strongly you have to put them somewhere because you're too afraid to just say them out loud. I never showed anyone. That wasn't the point.

High school opened things up. Concert choir introduced me to Whitacre and Lauridsen — the way a room full of voices could become something larger than the sum of its parts, something that felt almost physical. Then I found the New York Voices, and something clicked into place: jazz and choral singing weren't separate worlds. They were the same world. I spent years chasing that sound, decided I wanted to study jazz, applied to a handful of schools and left the outcome largely up to fate. The New School was the only one that said yes. I know now that was exactly right.

But before I left there was Ragtime. I was cast as Tateh, and I wasn't prepared for what happened in that rehearsal room — not the show, but the people making it. The way everyone showed up for each other, in the work and outside it. The way the thing we were building couldn't have existed without every single person in the room. I didn't fall in love with musicals in that production. I fell in love with making theater with people. I've been chasing that feeling ever since.

The New School was jazz, full immersion. Then SUNY Fredonia for vocal performance, where I music directed a production of Pasek and Paul's Edges and felt something new stir — the desire to write for the theater, not just perform in it. I kept that quiet too, mostly. Then CCM for a master's in opera, where I fell in love with classical art song, with Schubert, with the specific way opera holds grief and joy in the same breath. I kept writing privately through all of it. It was always the thing I did when the rest of it got to be too much.

After graduate school I was cast as the lead tenor in the first workshop of Ricky Ian Gordon's opera Intimate Apparel. We workshopped it at the Metropolitan Opera. And then I got sick.

Not just sick. Rundown — by the illness and by the industry simultaneously. The way it treated people. How little it paid. How much you could give and how little came back. I'd been pushing toward something for years and I couldn't see it anymore. I lost my passion for singing. I lost myself a little. And I quit.

For a while I floated. I sang in professional choirs to pay the bills, but it felt like going through motions that belonged to someone else. The writing was the only thing that still felt like mine — theater songs, quietly, for no audience, just a way to stay tethered to music when the professional version of it had stopped feeling like something I could live in.

Then I saw an ad for the BMI Advanced Musical Theater Writing Workshop and submitted three songs on a whim. I don't know exactly what I expected. What happened was that I discovered I knew what I was doing — as a writer, as a collaborator, as someone who understood how a room of people make something together. I started music directing for my peers. I started performing for them. I found my way back into rehearsal rooms. And somewhere in all of that, without quite meaning to, I came back to the thing I had loved since Ragtime — not musicals, but the people making them.

I never planned the career I have. I applied to three colleges and only got into one. I quit and came back through a door I stumbled through by accident. But it all comes from the same place it always did: someone who loved music too much to choose just one kind, and who kept finding his way back to the room where people make things together.