DR. KENT GUSTAVSON :: NARRATIVE BIOGRAPHY

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Dr. Kent Gustavson lives in East Setauket, NY, one hour east of New York City, a few hours from the nearest mountains, but near the Long Island Sound. He received his PhD in classical composition in the spring of 2007 at Stony Brook University in New York. He has a B.A. in Music and German from Middlebury College in Vermont, and graduated from high school in Shreveport, Louisiana, after a youth in Minnesota, and a year in Germany on the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange Scholarship.

Kent's father takes credit for the beginning of his musical education. When his older sister was taking piano lessons, Kent, at age three, insisted that he wanted to take lessons as well (a bit of banging on the keys of the piano had something to do with the conversation).

He grew up in the Lutheran church, singing hymns and midwestern bluegrass. His mother was a liberal poet, working on and off as a psychotherapist, and his father was a pediatrician and neonatalogist. Both were both singers at home, much to Kent's joy, and alongside Saturday nights in Lake Wobegon, Kent's background in music came listening to his mother sing in his little Lutheran church's bluegrass band, named "The Bloodwashed Band" by the pastor, much to the chagrin of his blood-imagery-disliking mother.

Kent met Micah Schonberg in college, who re-taught him countless tunes that he had heard and sung as a kid, and the two friends re-discovered old-time gospel and bluegrass music together.

Kent also began to work with an organization called Seeds of Peace, an organization focused on the reconciliation of Israel and Palestine through simple co-existence in a summer camp in Maine. After college, he had the 'change the world' bug, and, as many young passionate folks tend to have, and decided to return to Jerusalem, where he had studied the conflict there for 6 months through Wesleyan University. He used his contacts, this time, to start an organization of his own, called 'Sound Peace'. Gustavson wrote the curriculum based on sound as the foundation for friendship between enemies. After initial success, the program faltered due to exacerbated violence in the region, and Gustavson decided to return home.

A close friend of Kent's, Asel Asleh, had been killed in the first weeks of the fighting. He was a wonderful 17 year old with vision and intelligence, fluent in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, killed in his Seeds of Peace t-shirt, running the wrong way in a formerly peaceful demonstration, wanting to help a friend who had been injured. His memory is something that continues to inspire Gustavson.

Kent retreated into the mountains, to a small retreat center called Holden Village, in the Cascade mountains of Washington state. He took his banjo with him into the wilderness, and made much use of it during his years there. It was also there he met his fiance, Katharina.

Mountain Vespers, the evening liturgy that Kent wrote during his time at Holden, is still played frequently at Holden Village, and across the country. His other worship resources have been similarly received by congregations around the country, and he is a frequent leader of workshops using his music.

Kent is also a composer of intellectual music, and classical music, as well as being a singer/songwriter and musician. He has released over a dozen recordings, and is actively engaged in his first major release, Troublin' Mind, due to be finished in the coming months.