The composers of the Baroque, Classic, and Romantic periods provided many of those indelible impressions of childhood that inspired and motivated the directions I would take throughout my life. As a public performer since the age of fourteen, having won the first of a series of Young Artists’ Auditions followed by a nationally competitive scholarship to Interlochen, I spent the next decades performing myriad solo and chamber music concerts on both coasts, including concerts in New York’s Weill (Carnegie) Recital Hall and Merkin Concert Hall, Boston's Symphony Hall, Jordan Hall, and Tanglewood, as well as on both coasts and abroad.
0:00 Beethoven Sonata in F major, op. 10, no. 2 (3rd movement: Presto)
2:53 Liszt Rigoletto Paraphrase
11:16 Robert Helps Trois Hommages (Hommage à Ravel)
15:41 Bach-Tausig Toccata and Fugue in D minor
25:36 A Liszt interlude ...,
31:42 Haydn Sonata in D major, Hob. XVI/24: 1st movement (Allegro)
35:50 Haydn Sonata in D major, Hob. XVI/24: 2nd and 3rd movements (Adagio, Finale: Presto)
Then in 1990, after years of performing and studying the music of others, I composed a single movement piano concerto. Shortly thereafter, the work was performed at a contemporary music event in Boston with the composer as pianist. If in the past I had felt a keen sense of exhilaration weaving the musical lines of other composers, it was now an altogether fuller sensation, captivating a throng of people with a piece that belonged to the present, and in fact, belonged to me. This performance led to my debut, as both pianist and composer, at the 1990 Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music.
After Tanglewood, my thoughts revolved around the next pieces I wanted to write, and in particular, the expressive voice I found within. This undertaking entailed another current in my life—electrical engineering—an odyssey that began when, out of curiosity, I picked up a copy of a journal devoted to music of the future, published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I did not understand a word of what was written since the articles were quite technical. However, struck by the fact that the authors were primarily electrical engineers, I asked two questions destined to augment my life: What would happen if a professional musician acquired the tools of the engineer? Might a breakthrough for contemporary music emanate from an artist who acquired the tools of the engineer? This quest fired my imagination, motivating a return to school for a Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, while earning my living as a pianist in New York.
Music had taught me how to plunge deeply into something and emerge with discovery. This happened repeatedly, whether I was preparing for concerts, writing a piece, or analyzing a score. In engineering school, I found myself studying for exams the same way I worked musically. There were tremendous similarities. So it was natural for me to want to pursue the scientific language in more than a cursory way—to speak it with a strong foundation. While at The City College of New York, I was one of two students selected nationally to receive the Society of Women Engineers/Bell Labs Scholarship in Electrical Engineering. After graduating Summa Cum Laude in electrical engineering, I received the CCNY Engineering Alumni Award for Excellence in Electrical Engineering. In the fall of 1987, I entered the graduate program in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. At the time, I planned to work on the development of a system able to follow a performer much the same way an orchestra with conductor had followed me in the past.
But shortly after arriving at MIT, I read that something similar had already been done. So I began to articulate a more primary goal: namely, to create a contemporary voice from the merger of music with a topic I had become intimately connected with at MIT—chaos science. I believed that this science, already fuel for my musical imagination, could engender an elegant tool for artistic expression.
While at MIT, I received several fellowships awarded by the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science: the Vinton Hayes Fellowship in Communications, the Clarence LeBel Fellowship in Acoustics, and the Barbara and Frederick Cronin Fellowship. Dr. Jerry Wiesner, President Emeritus of MIT, secured unsponsored research funds that supported my work for the period 1993-1995. Up until that point, I taught recitations and tutorials for various electrical engineering courses for seven semesters, including Acoustics, Signals and Systems, Circuits and Electronics.
Then, steeping myself in the intricacies of systems that exhibit chaos, I designed and built an original circuit manifesting chaotic behavior and strange attractors not previously cited in the scientific literature. The new circuit became the result of my Master's thesis, completed at MIT in 1991. The thesis was strictly technical in content. This was on purpose. I was trying to immerse myself in chaotic dynamics in order to think in mathematics almost as intuitively as in music. It was crucial since I would be combining the two in my doctoral thesis.
During the summer of 1993, I came up with the design for musical variation that became my PhD thesis. As I had sensed years earlier, the science of chaos held the key. It was by delving more deeply into the mathematics behind it that I was able to grapple with the door. In trying to understand a definition and its consequences, I realized a natural mechanism for variability inherent in chaos could be tempered via a mathematical mapping.
By January 1994, I had musical results. At the end of the year, the chaos writer for Science News, lvars Peterson, wrote a two-page article about my work entitled “Bach to Chaos.” This led to a series of six concert/lectures entitled “Musical Variations from a Chaotic Mapping” in Chicago and Hong Kong. At the 1995 International SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) Conference on Applications of Dynamical Systems, “Musical variations from a chaotic mapping” was the unanimous choice for Best Poster Prize. A few months later, the Encyclopedia Britannica invited me to contribute an article for their Yearbook of Science and the Future. In April 1996, Islamorada for piano and percussion, written for the New England Conservatory Percussion Ensemble, was performed in Jordan Hall by the Ensemble with the composer as pianist (DS Dabby, 1996). This was followed by Trio Sonata (1997) and Invention for Two Hands (1997), with world premieres in 1997 and 1998, respectively.
In 1995, after defending my thesis Musical Variations from a Chaotic Mapping, I received my doctorate in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. At that moment I could look back on the recent past—from matriculation at MIT to graduation—as a synthesis of my work as composer, pianist, and inventor. I had done everything I said I would do—up to a point. The thesis was really part of a larger vision for variation that I have articulated over the years. Recognizing this, MIT continued to support my work. In September 1995, I received a grant from the Dean of the School of Engineering and an equipment grant from the Dean of Humanities. Funding was renewed the following year by the Provost and the Provost for the Arts. Thus, I became a Postdoctoral Associate (1995-97) and Artist-in-Residence (Spring 1997) in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. A nationally competitive fellowship sponsored by Tufts University (1997) resulted in my teaching a course in their EECS Department (Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos with Applications in the Arts and Sciences). Invited concert/lectures sponsored by the departments of Music and Electrical Engineering at Princeton (1998), the Center for Applied Mathematics at Cornell University (1998), the Math and Music Seminar at Cornell (1998), the Mathematics and Music Departments at Middlebury College (1998), the International Symposium on Information Theory (1998), the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Colloquium at MIT (1998), the 36th Annual New Horizons in Science Briefing International Conference for Science Writers (1998), the Arts in Science Series presented by FIRST Place of New Hampshire (1998), the Honors Colloquium at UMass Dartmouth (1999), the Women in Music Series at Tufts University (1999), and the Department of Music at Dartmouth College (1999), provided opportunities to present and discuss my work. For five of the above concert/lectures I performed the piece written for the New England Conservatory Percussion Ensemble (Islamorada) and then played two different variations of a “fughetta” which bifurcates the piece, thus showing how a contemporary composer might use the variation technique I’d invented.
Then in January 2000, I saw an ad for a college that didn’t exist yet: Olin College of Engineering. Olin was hiring faculty to help design a school that would offer four-year tuition scholarships to all admitted students, including room and board. Such a generous gesture inspired me: I imagined a good student from modest means reading about this new college, becoming motivated to reach for it, and thus access all Olin had to offer, regardless of ability to finance such an education. Realizing this was a once in two lifetimes’ opportunity and that Olin would attract excellent students, I applied. Despite receiving offers from several colleges and universities in Spring 2000, I chose Olin, a decision I’ve never regretted. Yet when I signed that first five-year contract, I had no idea what the future would hold. In a sense, that was part of its appeal. Perhaps the biggest surprise has been the addition of another ‘hat’, an entrepreneurial ‘hat’ to those I already wear: musician (composer, pianist, orchestrator), educator, and electrical engineer. Many of my heroes—all those dead composers—also had entrepreneurial streaks. They were able to take an idea from inception to full realization, an undertaking that defines entrepreneurship. My musical variation projects now span music, electrical engineering, and entrepreneurial thinking, resulting in a “three-part invention.”
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