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THOMAS MAY BIOGRAPHY:
After spending his earliest years in Milwaukee, Thomas May was raised in the Washington, D.C. area. He received a degree in classics from Yale University and, following a year studying German literature at the University of Tubingen on a Fulbright grant, pursued graduate studies in comparative literature at the University of Michigan.
Mr. May began writing about classical music for The Washington Post in the mid-1990s. His writing has appeared in such publications as The Opera Quarterly, USA Today, the Web sites classicstoday.com and andante.com, and The Washington Review (where he was theater editor for several years). Mr. May’s notes and essays frequently appear in the program books of the San Francisco Symphony, the San Francisco Opera, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony. His Viewpoint columns have been a regular feature of the San Francisco Opera programs for the last two seasons.
As the Internet revolution was gathering momentum, Mr. May joined its ranks by becoming one of the first group of editors on Amazon.com's music site, for which he is now Senior Editor. His music profiles also appear on Seattle's NPR station, KUOW-FM.
Mr. May is a member of the Music Critics Association of North America and lives in Seattle. His Decoding Wagner: An Invitation to His World of Music Drama was published in 2004 by Amadeus Press, and he is editor of The John Adams Reader: Essential Writings on an American Composer, scheduled to appear in spring 2006.
Mr. May recalls his first experiences with Wagner: "As a teenager when I had just begun to discover classical music on my own via radio programs, I happened upon a radio broadcast of the Ring under way---possibly from Bayreuth, I’m not certain---and it changed my life. This serendipitous encounter (with, as it turned out, Die Walkure) led to a summer-long obsession with the whole Ring, which then spread out to encompass all of Wagner’s music. Wagner became for me the entre from a previously existing love of theater and literature into the entire world of music".
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