Dylan’s passion for music ignited at the age of five when he began learning the cello. Intent on becoming a composer at this very early age, he has dedicated his musical journey, through high school, music college, and beyond, to that end. At 22, he committed to bringing to life extraordinarily large-scale musical experiences and after an 11-year-odyssey, the premiere of his six-hour ecstatic opera, Stranger Love, about love and the cosmos and communal joy, was presented by the LA Philharmonic, at Walt Disney Concert Hall. This proved to him that he could manifest his idealistic visions.
How did BPC influence your musical career?
“BPC's expansive approach to learning was crucial for my becoming a composer. Being an artist, particularly writing music — creating work that exists in both the abstraction of music and the physicality of its experience — is a way of life that is always looking beyond itself. In order to create, the primary skill is not craft or music itself, it's seeing — it's being able to look at the world, to look at time as it passes, and to wonder, to care, to find what is there that is worth holding onto and sharing with others. That ability to see is at the heart of BPC's educational philosophy, that we should always be looking, searching, wondering.”
Which BPC teachers did you connect with during your time at BPC?
“I had lots of amazing teachers during my time at BPC, but the person who made the biggest difference in my life was Lawrence James, the head of school when I attended. Mr. James made the world seem endlessly fascinating at all times, and his 7th-grade history class was particularly extraordinary, as he was able to show the history of our world not as a list of dates and rulers but as an infinite amalgam of experience, of lives that contain as much fullness and complexity as the only one I knew. Mr. James's vision of the excitement of history launched the yearning I've felt ever since to imagine the impossible everythingness of this planet's vastness, horizontally and vertically in time, which is at the heart of my work. My current project, another six-hour work, History of Life, about the Odyssey and Darwin's Voyage on the Beagle and the history or organic life on earth, wouldn't have existed without Mr. James.”
What is one of your most vivid memories from your time at BPC?
“There are so many, but one that stands out was the extraordinary History Mystery. With the entire middle school, teachers and students alike, we embarked on a week- (weeks-?) long mystery filled with twists and turns in which we were active participants in trying to put a massive puzzle together that required incredible thought and curiosity ranging across the world. I'll never forget that early chance to feel so strongly like the world and its history were not out there but a story in which I was a character, that what happened in my life would be a small part of this vast unfolding story of our lives.”
We understand that you have been BPC 7th grader Owen Gettell's music composition instructor since 2023. What do you see in Owen that speaks to a BPC education?
“Owen is filled with curiosity, which is at the heart of what I think of when I think of BPC. To be able to look at the world and ask questions, to wonder always how far something goes and what could be around the bend in learning about each new thing — these are skills and ways of life that BPC encourages, and which Owen carries with him at all times.”
