BCI is governed by a dedicated Board of Trustees with members from coast to coast and many stops in between. This feature provides a periodic snapshot profile of our leaders.
Professional background and skills: I recently retired as a Professor from the University of California at San Francisco. My research area was in neuroscience, which I also taught to graduate students, dental students, and medical students. My skills fall largely outside music, the arts, and nonprofits, but this evidently did not bother the folks who nominated me for membership on the board some 10 years ago (Peter is completing his final year of service in April 2021).
Hobbies/interests: Cello.Tutoring math to high school students. Making (and drinking) beer.
Your idea of happiness: Being content with things just as they are in the present moment.
Do you have a personal motto or guiding inspiration: Add value.
A favorite musical experience: In the summer of 1967 I and my Amherst College classmates in the Glee Club toured Europe and Russia, giving concerts in a dozen different countries over a two month time period, including at the Acropolis in Athens. Our first stop was Paris, where we sang Josquin des Prez’s Missa Mater Patris during mass at Notre Dame cathedral. The highlight was not the mass itself but the rehearsal the evening before, in which we sang through the mass, a capella, in an otherwise empty cathedral. Heavenly.
An interesting or unusual fact about me that people might not know: As a senior in high school, I had my father as a teacher in math.
Why BCI matters to me: Because it regularly performs miracles by taking a group of singers who have never sung together as an ensemble, putting them through a carefully orchestrated week of intense study under the guidance of outstanding conductors, faculty, apprentices, and staff, and then bearing witness as they make beautiful music.
