Last spring, following a fifteen year break, I started composing music again. The result is the album Delight, which is available on iTunes and YouTube along with videos I’ve created. During the years I wasn’t composing I barely touched a guitar or piano. What changed? In a word: technology.
By the mid 2000’s I’d published over 500 instrumental pieces, many of them orchestral. Though the first call NY studio musicians who’d recorded them did a great job, the results sounded….small. My dream was to hear my music played by a symphony orchestra. The largest group I worked with was 25. A symphony has at least 70 and can run up past a hundred players. .
My dream came true in 2003, when I flew to the Czech Republic to record with the Prague Philharmonic. Within minutes I heard my dream turn to a nightmare. The conductor didn’t speak a word of English and me not a word of Czech. That wasn’t the main problem. The explaination that requires a little trip into the musicological weeds. The musicians, while competent, weren’t versed in the musical idiom of pop syncopation. The music I grew up with (Beatles, Joni Mitchell, Jimi Hendrix, etc.) is steeped in it. Notated, that music has more notes off the beat than on. But the feel of that syncopation is completely different than in classical music. Like most orchestral players of the time, Czech ones had trained in conservatories where the pop feel was not taught.
Back from Europe I returned to writing for small groups but I pined for that mythical big sound. I faced a new obstacle. I’d sat at the piano most morning for years and new musical ideas had flowed. Now all my musical gestures – chord progressions, rhythmic motifs, melody shapes – felt old. I was repeating myself. After 500 pieces maybe the well had gone dry.
In part that was because I’d a lost a source for replenishing my musical ideas. For years I’d started my composition morning by playing Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. The pieces had worked their way into my brain and fingers, steering my music ever farther away from the pop music of my youth. I developed serious hand problems and stopped playing classical piano.
When we moved from Oakland, CA to Petaluma near the start of the pandemic, my wife Judy found me a nice grand piano for the cost of moving it. My hand problems had been in remission for year so I started playing Bach fugues. I wondered – how could I have ever stopped playing music? It felt like returning to a younger, happier self. Soon I was up to practicing 5 hours a day. My neck hurt. Then my back. And the hand problems from years ago came back. I was more than willing to play but this old body was not.
Back when I was writing orchestral music before recording with real musicians I’d mock up my pieces using samples. Though they improved every year – thanks to Moore’s Law of computer memory doubling every two years, hearing the real thing in the studio proved how lame those samples were.
In recent years I’d noticed in the TV series I watched that the samples had gotten so good that it was hard to tell them from the real thing. So in the back of my mind was the idle thought that if I took up composing again I might finally be able to put Prague behind me. But I was probably still burned out of ideas….
What if my theory about classical music in the morning was right? Bach had certainly rekindled my musical desire. It’s funny how reality can suddenly hinge on an idle thought. I bought a super Mac, a couple of sampled orchestras, grand piano and a choir…and was composing again. In dollars, the whole rig cost a fraction of my adventure in Prague. The toll on my peace of mind is another story. I spent a couple of months tearing out what little hair I have left mastering the technology required to make a symphony orchestra come out of a silver box. Imagine those pesky problems we all have from time to time negotiating our phones, computers, and the Internet itself, and doing that all day every day. Many of those days I questioned the wisdom of this endeavor.
But as I approached the summit of that great learning curve I got ever more frequent glimpses of a magnificent view. Listening to music can be a great joy. Playing more so. Nothing beats making it.
The same is apparently true of visual art. A fellow musician suggested that people might be less inclined to click away from my YouTube videos if they had visuals with motion. Just as I’d fallen into composing again, I fell into making videos. And practicing something I’m not good at – collaborating. I’ve been working with Judy and with two fine painters I know – Janey Fritsche and Eric Kaye. I went to the De Young museum for the first time since the pandemic and wondered why I wasn’t getting the same buzz from the paintings I used to. Because I wanted to be creating them.
