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I'm not the self-promoting type (I was born without that gene), I don't have a manager or publicist, and I occupy a portion of the Brandeis website anyway. I get a free web page (10 megabytes!) with my Earthlink subscription, and verily I say unto you, I'm not passing up any free stuff, at least not today, this month, or even this year. If you think this web page is kind of poopy, well, tough. You can always turn the page. In general, self-promoting composer sites make me anywhere from slightly to violently ill, and this one isn't much different (I'm suppressing a gag reflex as I type this). Like all composers, I am, after all, at least secretly self-obsessed. I am endeavoring not to use that breathless press-release style prose -- especially the stuff written in third person -- that so many composers use on their sites, as we prefer first person plural. Meanwhile, if you prefer your self-promotion to be more official-lookin', click on the "Brandeis page" link -- though I am extremely unfond of that picture of me there. It should be fairly self-evident that I haven't paid a professional to put this page together. And by the way, I used to have hair.

There are four pages of "Reviews". I include both good ones and bad ones, because they are equally true. "News" is a sort of weekly or bi-weekly diary, and it's really, really boring. Yet there are people who tell me they love reading it, and they hound me when it's late. The number of regular readers is well into the low two figures.

My friend Gregg says that the Worldwide Web has become little more than a huge, bad J.C. Penney catalog (which may be redundant). This web page doesn't try to fix or disprove that. But they say that the first step is to acknowledge the problem. Thanks, Gregg.

The picture on the left is me (partly obscured by scarf), Beff, and Christine Schadeberg, in a cafe near Carnegie Hall after Christine had performed Beff's "Not Dressed For This". It was taken in 1994 when I was still on the faculty of Columbia; I still have the shirt. The picture in the middle was taken on June 8, 2003 in our dining room soon after I had figured out the timer function on a Nikon Coolpix 4500. Feel free to compare my forearms to Popeye's. The picture on the right was taken by Ines Huergo at JB's Seafood Shack in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, on June 3, 2005. I was soon to stuff myself with the best grilled tuna I had had all day. If you stare at my lips in any of the pictures for a really, really long time, eventually you will have to go to the bathroom.

I write music. Concert music. Texas tea. The music is difficult (it's not just hard, it's damn hard, or in Maine, wickid had), not tonal in the traditional diatonic sense ("tonal" is an imprecise word, and in many senses, my music IS tonal -- it has also been called "atonal," "with more tonal centers that you used to have," "sounds like it's in a minor key," "pretty," and "unremarkable"), and somewhat traditionally structured -- and it has lots and lotsa notes. People who use language imprecisely call the music "Modernist." Others have called it "Romantic", "total rockout", "borderline Neoclassical", "zany", "too melodic", and "not melodic enough". Go figure. I live in Massachusetts and Maine with my wife Beth, and we own two red canoes. Both of us grew up in Vermont near Lake Champlain, me in a dairy farming region (where we don't talk about our feelings, we don't talk about how much we make, and the word "cow" has between five and six syllables) and Beth in the ultra-cosmopolitan Burlington. I teach composition and music theory at Brandeis University, and Beth teaches composition, theory and clarinet at the University of Maine in Orono. Thanks to our long-distance marriage, we have two of many things, including cats, houses, mortgages, cars, vacuum cleaners, back yards, refrigerators, garages, lawnmowers, iPods (actually, we have five), back doors, mud rooms, attics, futon couches, driveways, kitchen sinks, basements, washers, dryers, belly buttons, and fingernail clippers. And now, also two canoes (both of them red), thanks to a recent co-inheritance in Vermont. And six computers. And six printers. Including a color laser printer (bitchin).

My students, both graduates and undergraduates, have permission to call me Davy, as do my colleagues. I do not know what any of them call me behind my back (this expression would not make sense if I were a mobius strip). Other very good (but strange) friends, and relatives, call me Uncle Davy (note: "Davy" is a four-letter word).

If you have read this far, you probably need a life.

A little bit of Davy on the web

(a program that is fantastically easy to use, and that crashes over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over)

Other David Rakowskis on the web that aren't me

Part of my collection of friends and acquaintances whose first and last names both have five letters

Hayes Biggs
Susan Orzel
Candy Chang
James Ricci
Dewek Huwst
Emily Brown
Daron Hagen
Shira Dentz
Kathy Dupuy
David Adjmi
Hiram Moody
Jason Uechi
Galen Brown
Yotam Haber
Yu-Hui Chang
James Siena
Steve Burke
Linda Toote
Mikel Kuehn
David Horne
Chris Dietz
Jason Cloen
Janey Pater
Jason Royal
Bayla Keyes
Aleck Karis
Emily Smidt
Alexa Glane
Peter Bayne
Gilad Harel

Composer web pages (Variety-Pak) (* studied with me)

Anagrams on "David Rakowski"

Work avid as kid.
Work a Davis kid.
Dr. Kiwi's a vodka.
I vow a dark disk.

Kirk voids a wad.
Dr. Wok (via a disk)
Kid saw Kirov ad.
Kirk avoids wad.

Kid, I was Dvorak!
Sid Krakow, diva.
Dr. Wok said "Kiva."
I work. Ask David.

Peter Child
Frank Oteri
Elena Ruehr
Craig Walsh
David Froom
Eliza Garth
Keith Fitch
Gilda Lyons
Lynda Schor
Becky Davie
Afton Cyrus
Linda Matos
Peter O'Shea
Susan Horan
Elena Sisto
Brian Hulse
Sarah Helen Brady
Pablo Ortiz
Nikki Smith
Emily Stone
Ethel Farny
Debby Norin-Kuehn
David Hoose
Steve Ricks
Katie Davis
Cathy Remus
Bruce Taubb
Rossy Bauer
Martn Butlr

photo by Bradley Wester

My collection of people who want to be on that list

Robert ("Bobby") Ceely
David "Szmuk" Smooke