I have a number of friends with interesting websites.

Here are some links to their web pages, organized in alphabetical order by last name. If you consider yourself a friend, you have a web page that I don't seem to know about, and you have happened across this page, please send an email!.

Joshua Anderson
Joshua was one of my best friends growing up in the Reading, PA chess scene. He has an endless love of the game, and an insatiable love of its lore and history. In addition to playing chess, he has made himself into one of the highest quality of promoters of the game for future generations, serving as an outstanding tournament director, editor, journalist, community organizer, and teacher. He brings a spirit of fun and happiness as well as strength and integrity to his work. With people like Joshua Anderson involved in this way, I have high hopes for the future of chess in this area and also nationally!

Aaron Berkowitz
Aaron was the most talented of my early piano students; I still remember well his recital of Schumann, Brahms, and Liszt. One year from completing his medical training, he changed course to pursue a diverse curriculum of musical studies in the Harvard music department, including ethnomusicology, sitar playing, and composition. Please refer to his website for more details.

Jolie Bookspan
Jolie is a brilliant and revolutionary researcher of human physiology and is an expert in back and neck pain. She teaches an amazing Warrior Yoga class in Philadelphia, which is where I met her. Since then my back problems have gone away. For anyone else who has suffered with such problems, I would highly recommend her books and classes. Jolie is also a blackbelt in martial arts, a kickboxing champion, and a highly courageous woman who has used her own methods to recover from several nearly debilitating injuries.

Ya-Ting Chang
Ya-Ting is a fine pianist, a fellow student of the Ann Schein studio at Peabody. She now plays with her husband Peter Sirotin in the very successful Mendelssohn Piano Trio, and both now run the wonderful Market Square Concert Series in Harrisburg, PA. Please refer to their website for more information and concert schedule.

Trish Doll
Trish has done some excellent publicity work for me over the years, much of which can be seen on this site in the News and Reviews section. Her persistence ultimately helped with getting me to Performance Today on NPR accompanying the great violinist Joshua Bell!

Noam Elkies
Noam is a math professor at Harvard, and also an extraordinarily talented musician, composer, chess player and chess problemist. Since our greatest interests intersected so broadly, I was fortunate to get to know Noam well as an undergraduate. Check out his witty and diabolical chess problems and his equally clever and effective musical compositions on his site!

Madeleine Forte
Madeleine is a great pianist, a student of Cortot, Kempff and Rosina Lhevinne, who has a particular flair for French repertoire. A woman of great energy and intelligence, she is the wife of the recently deceased great musician and music theorist Allen Forte. Madeleine has lived the most remarkable life in music, and I would highly recommend both her recordings and her fascinating memoir Simply Madeleine.

Tom Kang
Tom was one of my roommates from Harvard. He is a real computer whiz (I wouldn't use the term lightly); he always used to help me out of my technical problems. He knows the industry very well, and has worked for Microsoft and Google. He is also a violinist, and generally a great music enthusiast as well as an avid photographer.

Jeremy Martin
I met Jeremy first at an interview at Princeton University, but we both wound up at Harvard and were roommates our last three years. Above all we shared a great enthusiasm for the game of chess; certainly his keen competition helped more than anything to improve my own game so much while at Harvard. Jeremy is also very clever in math; being more enthusiastic and able than I am, he earned a Ph.D. in combinatorics at UCSD. He is now a professor of mathematics at the University of Kansas.

Matthew Monticchio
Matt is a fine composer, pianist, and theorist of music, currently located in Lancaster, PA. I played his "Sonata One" for piano in Philadelphia and at Orleans, France. Please see his website for more details on his musical activities.

Phil Straus
Phil is a go playing friend and neighbor in Philadelphia. A former president of the AGA, he has been a real student of the game and an important organizer for American go. He is a man of many interests, including mathematics, marathon running, musical composition, and as you will certainly see on his website, photography.

Tilman Skowroneck
Tilman was a very close friend from my Cornell days. A wonderful harpsichordist, fortepianist, Beethoven scholar and instrument mechanic (his father is renowned harpsichord builder Martin Skowroneck), Tilman is one of the most thoughtful people you will meet on many musical topics, especially performance practice relating to early keyboards. I was fortunate to have many in-depth conversations with him, and you will find much great information on the blog at his website.

Haskell Small
Hal is a friend I met as a fellow go enthusiast at many local tournaments. It turns out that he is also a concert pianist and a wonderfully imaginative composer as well. I had the opportunity to perform his piece for two pianos, A Game of Go at the 2009 US Go Congress in Fairfax, VA, and I am looking forward to more opportunities to perform his music. If you are interested in go or piano music, please have a look at the YouTube performance of his composition at the link above.

David Bennett Thomas
Dave was a composer friend from a 20th century analysis class at Peabody. I re-encountered him in Philadelphia, and have played a number of his solo piano pieces, such as his Etudes and Second Piano Sonata. He's an excellent composer, jazz pianist, and an interesting musical conversationalist; you can find his recordings and dossier on his website.

Ron Thomas
Ron is a pianist, jazz pianist, composer, and knowledgable all-around musician in the Philadelphia area. He is the composition teacher of Dave Thomas (see Dave's entry) and Matt Monticchio - a fine group of interesting composers and musicians. You can find many provocative musings about music at Ron's site.

Return to the links page.