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Music

Ted began learning violin at the age of 2. At 6, he began playing piano, and his first viable composition was performed in his 6th grade musicianship class when he was 10. He began playing horn (the “French” one) at age 12, and has since dabbled in viola, contrabass, acoustic guitar, lap harp, trumpet, percussion, mellophone, pump organ, and—most recently, as part of his 2011 American Philological Association workshop on music in Plautus (click here for a PDF version of the abstract)—recorder. Nowadays, the only instruments he owns are a piano and that pump organ (both mildly to drastically out-of-tune and in need of repair), but he still has a lot of fun banging on them from time to time.

Ted's musical tastes include Western art music (especially Prokofiev, Verdi, and the American minimalists), rap (Missy Elliot), techno (Crystal Method), loud rock music (System of a Down, Tool, Nine Inch Nails), and film scores (Howard Shore, Bear McCreary).

Ted is a member of Mu Beta Psi, National Honorary Musical Fraternity, a co-ed music service organization. After joining Alpha Chapter, at North Carolina State University, Ted served as local president, vice president, and historian, and held various other offices and committee memberships at both the local and the national level.

More than a performer, Ted is a composer, and he has written to date over 50 works, including pieces for orchestra, wind ensemble, chamber groups (especially wind quintet), soloists, and computer (both alone and with live musicians). He takes great interest in the potential presented by the use of a narrator as a thematic element in composition, and has seen performed four of his works featuring narrators (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Bakkhai, A Terrorist Survival Guide, and Aeneid: Proem), with another composition in the works (Forest Primeval, for narrator, clarinet, harp, cello, and drumkit, setting the introduction to Longfellow's Evangeline).

Ted's compositions have been performed at a variety of venues, including 3 universities and at the prestigious Tanglewood music festival. He is always looking for new opportunities for performance, and is open to commissions (or simply requests or suggestions) as well.