Brian

My primary interest in music is classical orchestral music. I think that the Western classical orchestra might well be man's greatest accomplishment through history. My favorite composer is Mozart. I play the trumpet, mostly in orchestras, and while it is interesting it is also extremely frustrating. At the start of '07 I took up the viola, as well. My long-term goals include being able to play the Bach cello suites, and the viola parts to chamber pieces including the Mozart string quintets, the Brahms string sextets, and the Mendelssohn string octet. I am a composer. My interest to this end is finding ways to reconcile Modernist compositional techniques to old-fashioned, lyrical forms and consonant sonorities. I am keenly interested in history, especially in German history before Bismarck and in the Hellenic world and its influence on world history. I am always more interested in the beginnings of things, the ancient history, than in the more recent... the long-ago is so much more stimulating to the imagination. I like games. I play EA Sports NCAA Football on the PlayStation2, Civilization IV on my computer, and Axis and Allies Miniatures, the board game, and every fall I play in a college fantasy football league. I've tried several times to make a go of chess, the greatest of all the games, but have never gotten very far before I lost the motivation to study opening sequences. I like watching major league baseball and college football. I'm learning to speak, read, and write Mandarin Chinese. I've been at it since early '07 and really enjoy it.