Michael Arenella


Michael Arenella grew up in Georgia with parents who were artists from New York City. He sang in the church choir and studied music from an early age, working as a professional musician by his teens.

Among his formative influences is his life-long obsession with times past. He has always loved trains and jokes that he was a brakeman in an earlier life. As a boy he could often be found exploring abandoned railyards. The story of those trains' forgotten routes were illuminated when he heard this old music. Suddenly he saw new worlds.

Michael is also a composer, with a considerable body of work written for string quartet up to large chamber orchestra. His style is comprised of elements gleaned from Baroque through to Impressionism. This background helps him to break-down and reassemble the fragile orchestrations of '20s dance music. He knows that Claude Debussy and Bix Beiderbecke would have really dug each other.

Like his Jazz-Age avatars, he moved from rural America to New York, where he entered music school. Disenchanted, he shortly made his departure from the gloomy conservatory halls and set out to bring his lost music into the daylight. Though his initial audiences were subway commuters, he eventually made his way above ground and founded his Dreamland Orchestra.