In my own words

Music has been at the center of my life since before I remember.  I come from a very creative family.  Papa, my grandfather, played violin, and had his own jazz combo as a young man that performed in the greater Cleveland area.  My mother, Carol, and her sister Lorrie were accomplished singers, and were regulars on the Art Godfrey show years back.  Neal Sandler, my father, was an accomplished dancer of international repertoires, and an influential figure in the folk-dance scene in the San Francisco Bay Area when I was a young girl.  Siblings and cousins are all active in theater, music, dance... it is inevitable in many ways that I would come to love what music does in me and through me.  I pursued the study of music in academia (UOP, CUA, UM), in Africa (ICAMD in Legon Ghana), and continue to study and deepen my intimacy with this art form with new teachers personal and professional, local and foreign, and as a teacher myself at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.  

In the words of some others

Burt Feintruch teaches ethnomusicology at the University of New Hampshire, and reviewed my chapter from Music and Cultural Rights for the International Journal of Folklore and Ethnomusicology: Journal of Folklore Research.  
Q&A with Jim Worman, director of the Trinity Symphonic Wind Ensemble in San Antonio Texas on his programming of Rosie The Riveter.  What a lovely performance they gave!
Dan Morgan reviews the Naxos Recording of the percussion work that the NEC percussion ensemble commissioned from me, Pulling Radishes.
Geoffrey Weiting reviewed Musica Sacra's performance of Laus Trinitati for the Music Intelligencer.
Here is another review of Musica Sacra's performance of Laus Trinitati.  I particularly like this one because Agarwala captures the splendor with which the choir so artfully performed the music!
There is a nice spot in this edition of the SF Choral Society's newsletter on my work and the setting I composed for them of  Time Does Not Bring Relief by Edna St. Vincent Millay.