Compositions

Are you kiddin' me? Believe it or not, that's me as a 31 year old composer. I wrote my string quartet in 1979 and won a scholarship to study composition at
The Banff Centre of Fine Arts in Alberta, Canada. In 1981 that same piece won a composition competition by
The Santa Fe Chamber Orchestra. It was juried by the American composer John Harbison. By the time of this photo, I had already begun touring in Latin America with my jazz and blues group, The Jerry Michelsen Trio. Seventeen years later, the band split up and my career plans as a composer had changed. I still compose for my reformulated trio and continue composing for ensembles of all stripes.

As time goes on, this page will hopefully turn into a composer's blog and I'll be discussing composition and songwriting and will put online several of my compositions. My recordings of original pieces can be found on other pages in this site. But here, what I'll be interested in, is not recorded music, but instead, the written page and music notation.

Check back, and we'll see how this page developes.