Born in 1950 at Stavanger, Norway, al­though I had a moth­er’s aunt who was a piano teacher, I never re­ceived any youth­ful mu­sic train­ing be­fore leav­ing Nor­way with my moth­er in May 1958, to set­tle in the U.S.

Having had polio made playing some instruments dif­fic­ult, but I ac­quired a love for clas­sic­al music ear­ly on — es­pec­i­ally J.S. Bach’s. My mus­ic­al ac­tiv­ity blossomed in 1968 when I heard Ligeti’s mus­ic in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Pen­der­ecki’s St. Luke Pas­sion, and Rug­gles’ Sun Tread­er (thanks to the trom­bo­nist Joe Earl).

Soon after joining the LDS Church, feeling a desire to use music to up­lift peo­ple to­ward be­ing re­cep­tive to the Div­ine, I de­ci­ded to change from seek­ing to be­come an as­tro­phys­ic­ist, to a com­poser. I stud­ied com­po­si­tion with Mer­rill Brad­shaw, Rob­ert Man­oo­kin, and Da­vid Sar­gent at BYU, and won one of the BMI Stu­dent Com­po­ser’s Awards in ’73/’74, for Anamorphosis, an en­or­mous or­ches­tral work along the lines of Ligeti’s At­mos­phéres and Pen­der­ecki’s Flu­or­es­cen­ces. It has thus far not been per­formed.

My com­po­si­tion­al style has al­ways in­cor­por­a­ted a strong pro­cliv­ity for pol­yph­ony, and a ten­den­cy to seek for the sub­lime and mys­tic­al, of­ten using larger num­bers of parts with com­plex struc­ture fluc­tu­a­ting be­tween pol­yph­ony and het­er­oph­ony in a pan­to­nal con­text, seeking to achieve a syn­thes­is of the best of the past and present. Mel­od­ic lines are often plastic and a­sym­met­ric­al. Har­mony can fluc­tu­ate from con­ven­tion­al tri­ad­ism through ser­i­al­ism, to mi­cro­tones — what­ever seems to work best to achieve the des­ired result.

Getting deeply embroiled in the PC (personal computer) field, and even­tu­al­ly its ap­plic­a­tion in mus­ic­al rec­or­ding and per­for­mance, I re­ceived high praise for my work therewith.

But I began noticing hearing loss in the higher registers in the middle ’80s. On the pipe organ I could at first no lon­ger hear the 1' pipes, then the 2' dis­ap­peared. Med­ic­al at­tempts to deal with that sit­u­a­tion have been res­ult­less, and I’m now deaf above A3.

I’ve been heavily engaged in MIDI realizations of works by Ren­ais­sance and Bar­oque composers, as well as some of my own works, using ad­ap­tive tech­niques with com­puters to com­pen­sate for the en­croach­ing deaf­ness.