LB: Music

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Music was the first endeavor of mine. My parents started me off on classical piano when I barely knew anything else, and I continued rather seriously through high school. In college I thought of studying music for a bit. I took a harmony course, and failed so miserably I figured music was never going to be an academic subject for me. Playing for enjoyment, though, is great and I'm lucky that at MIT there is quite an active music performance community, and plenty of great people to play with.

Classical piano

After a rather quiet period in college, I've picked up playing the piano again in graduate school. The current repertoire I'm working on (or should be working on) is:

And everything I can remember ever studying mostly in reverse chronological order all the way to the beginning except where I've grouped pieces a set:

I'm not exactly sure how useful this list can be to anybody, but it's almost all great music My memory is pretty fuzzy about many periods in my childhood, so I probably left out quite a bit. Maybe some time I can go home and look through my old music and recital programs and sort things out. I especially have little recollection of the chamber music I've played (which, for the most part, never got completed anyway). Pieces I've played in competition are marked by an asterisk (*). I began my studies in 1987 with Inessa Litvin, and studied from late 1995-1999 with Leonid Levitsky. After coming to grad school, I was encouraged to take up piano again by David Deveau at MIT who taught me for three years. Currently I study with Julia Bernstein in Boston.

MIDI Sequencing

Back in junior high school, I was introduced to computer music synthesis by a good friend of mine (thanks Min!). Actually I had experimented with DeluxeMusic on the family Amiga-1000 years ago, but had forgotten all about it. In any case I was quite taken by the beeps and buzzes that came out of the new SoundBlaster 16 FM soundcard, and proceeded to gain experience writing music using MIDI sequencers. I started off using MIDISoft Recording Session, and eventually moved to Cakewalk Home Studio when I bought a keyboard off a friend for cheap (thanks Brian!).

Buying a SoundBlaster 32 Wavetable daughterboard was the best $20 I ever spent (I now have a BS Live). Most of my MIDI compositions were tweaked with this wonderful (to me, at the time) wavetable in mind. I continued writing slowly through high school, but in college I suffered from rising expectations and lack of inspiration. So, my most recent sequences date back to 1999 or so. They are listed here in reverse-chronological order.