Pantelis Vassilakis had played music without formal training beginning in childhood, he says, and like many young men, he and his brother formed a rock band with some friends, making a couple of records released in his native Greece. But when he was ready to pursue a higher education, Pantelis concluded that music was "not a money maker."

He enrolled at the National Polytechnic of Athens, Greece, to study electrical engineering. "I found-and I still find-math and physics fascinating," he says, but a career as an electrical engineer was another issue. Soon, Pantelis was combining his education with work, first as a fashion model and later as a photographer. His worktime travels offered the opportunity to play with musicians around the world.

"I would give up everything else I was doing to get involved more with music," Pantelis says. In 1990, "I decided it was time to do that seriously," and he moved to London, where he studied music composition and music technology on scholarship at Kingston University in nearby Surrey.

But Pantelis would travel several years and a few thousand miles longer before his interests in math and music, technology and aesthetics, came together in the graduate program at UCLA, under the aegis of two systematic musicology professors named Roger.

On the empirical side, there's Roger Kendall, an expert in music cognition and acoustics. On the philosophical side, there's Roger Savage, an authority on musical aesthetics. "Both of them know so much more than what they are supposed to teach," Pantelis says. Unwilling to choose between their different but fascinating approaches, he combined them in a dissertation that links a specific acoustic property of sound with its perceptual and musical significance.

The property Pantelis chose to study is amplitude fluctuation, a product of sound interference. Manifested as fluctuations in loudness referred to as beating, or as a rattling sound referred to as roughness, amplitude fluctuation produces sounds that Western musical traditions often label dissonant and therefore avoid. However, Pantelis found plentiful examples in ethnic music.

In nominating Pantelis for a dissertation year fellowship, Dr. Kendall pointed out that his student's "explanation of the transmission of energy by acoustical beating . . . overturns previous simplistic models presented in acoustics textbooks." His dissertation work will mark "the start of a significant career," Dr. Kendall believes Pantelis is equally enthusiastic about his mentor: Their conversations were "the most productive time I've spent in the university," he says.

Pantelis hopes to follow his mentor into a career as a university professor. But if an academic appointment is hard to find, he has lots of relevant work experience.

Having begun his study of computer applications to music at Kingston University, when it was "the new big thing," he recently taught a course in Teaching Ethnomusicology with Technology for UCLA's Office of Instructional Development. He has made significant contributions to the ethnomusicology website, and he is one of the engineers using computers to restore the Ethnomusicology Archive's reel-to-reel collection and save it on CDs.

Pantelis has also been a musical composer, arranger, and producer. Through a summer job at the English National Ballet, he got the opportunity to submit ethnic-music compositions for a carnival marking the 100th anniversary of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite.

This wasn't as much of a stretch as it would have been for the young rock musician in Athens. Homesick in London, Pantelis had begun to enjoy Greek music, then became familiar with African and Indian music. "Before I knew it," Pantelis says, "I started finding rock music so simple-and simple-minded."

Drawing from this enthusiasm for ethnic music, Pantelis eventually composed three dances for the Tchaikovsky program-Chinese, Arabian, and Russian-interpreting story lines from The Nutcracker in their national musical styles.

As a result of this effort, the London Chinese Orchestra invited Pantelis to compose the first original music it had played in its 20-year history. This association led to the following very special evening: a string quartet led by the Greek native, playing with Chinese musicians, a Latin American percussionist, and a computer, for a dance-club audience composed mostly of African emigres. The unlikely ensemble performed for 2 months all over London and received the London Arts Board award for new approaches to musical tradition.

Pantelis hopes to be part of the same sort of fusion on a larger scale. For this to happen, Western cultures must "not simply consume other cultural artifacts," he says, but also "allow them to infiltrate our lives, the way we produce and think about music. It will take time."

Looking at his own life, Pantelis knows that significant change is not impossible. "I came to UCLA as a composer with an interest in the acoustics and aesthetics of music," he says. "Now, for better or worse, I haven't touched a musical instrument for the last two years. What I touch now is computers, and I write papers instead of music. It was a change as drastic as the one from electrical engineering to music."

The latter drastic change was followed by a creative reunion, so perhaps a new synthesis-this time of composing and research-still lies ahead.

Published in Fall 2000, Graduate Quarterly