Hi, I’m Rudi Seitz, nice to meet you.

I believe that meaning in life comes from connecting – to one’s inner self, to other people, and to the infinite or divine – and that every person has the potential to experience these three forms of connection through creativity, starting with appreciation, which is itself a creative act.

On this blog I share my own creative efforts as well as insights I’ve gained along the way about making art and aspiring to mindfulness.

As a composer, I’m focused on counterpoint — the interaction between two or more independent melodic lines — and specifically on the canon form, where one line imitates another. I’ve released two albums dedicated to this form: Canons (2017) performed by my collaborator on the harpsichord and Meteorite (2023) performed on the clavichord.

Whether you know about canons already or not, I’d love to share the music with you — along with my process of creating it and finding an audience for it — in a way that might interest you.

As a guitarist I focus on free improvisation, often playing an electric guitar fingerstyle — and you can see some of my improvisations on my YouTube channel. I’ve also recorded a few arrangements of standards.

I’m also a fledgling songwriter, an admirer and sometime student of Indian classical music, and a singer who learned to sing in his thirties. And I’m learning clawhammer banjo.

As for photography, I like creating abstractions by taking closeups of everyday objects. I’m fascinated by texture and I like to take photographs that excite the sense of touch. Sometimes when I print a photograph and I’m afraid that the water droplets depicted in the image are going to spill onto the floor, or the sand is going to scatter, or the light is going to reflect against the wall of the room — that’s when I know I’ve gotten it right. I try to create visual sentences by pairing photographs from different times and places in such a way that they seem to snap together like lego pieces, or like words in a phrase, expressing a compound meaning.

I’ve been working on writing for much of my life, in part by blogging here. Starting in my twenties, well before this blog existed, I kept a voluminous journal, tried writing a novel, and created a word game website called Quadrivial Quandary — a daily challenge in sentence-length fiction — which is dormant and awaiting a revival.

I’m good at software engineering and that’s how I earn my living.

I’m enthusiastic about Mastodon.

I was born in New York City in the mid 1970s and I live in East Boston, MA where I serve on the board of an urban farming nonprofit called Eastie Farm.

I attended Stuyvestant High School in New York and went to college at Yale where I earned a BS/MS in Computer Science in 1998. From there I, entered a PhD program in theoretical computer science at MIT, did two years of graduate work, and decided to leave.

There’s lots more to say — that’s why I write this blog.

Here are some photos of me taken by Agnieszka Rytych-Foster, holding some of my paired prints:

Oh, and according to Amazon, I’m no longer available.

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