This new release features the music of composer Joseph Summer. Composer Joseph Summer began playing French horn at the age of seven. While attending the Eastern Music Festival in North Carolina at age fourteen he studied composition with the eminent Czech composer Karel Husa. At age 15 he was accepted at Oberlin Conservatory, studied with Richard Hoffmann, Schönberg's amanuensis, and graduated with a BM in Music Composition in 1976. Recruited by Robert Page, Dean of the Music Department at Carnegie Mellon University, Joseph taught music theory at CMU before leaving to pursue composition full time. For the next twenty years Joseph Summer concentrated his efforts composing a series of comic operas based on the bawdy stories of Boccaccio's The Decameron. Summer is currently composing his ever expanding collection of settings of the bard's ever living texts, which he titles The Oxford Songs, (titled thus due to Summer's support of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, as the likely identity of the author also known as William Shakespeare.)