Musical Compositions

I started playing trumpet when I was twelve years old. I was never very good at the instrument but I can say that marching down the street in a band playing snappy marches was an early experience of ecstasy for me. Some years later I took up guitar, which led me to a brief career as a rock 'n' roll musician in a band called The Shrews (Well, we were from Shrewsbury, Massachusetts). A few years after graduating from Mass College of Art I took up the study of music more seriously. In the late 1970s I had the good fortune to receive lessons in jazz improvisation from the late Charlie Banacos, a highly sought-after musician and master teacher. During those same years I studied composition and music analysis with the contemporary composer Richard St. Clair, who conducted small private classes in his home. I read with interest that St. Clair became a Buddhist practitioner during the 1990s and has written compositions based on Buddhist texts. Both Banacos and St. Clair were influenced by Margaret Chaloff, who was then in her eighties. I had the good fortune to meet her myself. While I wasn't able to study piano with her, my two personal interviews with her rattled my cage. She approached art and life at the most profound level. Around 1980 I became friends with the late composer Peter Lieberson, whose kindness and instructions remain with me today. In 2001, after quite a few years of musical inactivity, I returned to the keyboard and began learning the varied and marvelous possibilities of digital music composition.  I'm experimenting continuously and will be adding to this page regularly.

Classmates I

Classmates I is a volume of musical compositions for various instruments and field sounds. The track titles are names taken from my high school graduation yearbook. It was Shrewsbury High School in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts in 1967. As I've been working on this series I can't help thinking about my former classmates - we spent many, many days together many years ago but haven't had much of any contact since then. Some of them are no longer alive. I have lived in Colorado since 1985, very far from Shrewsbury. The music is not intended to be portraits of individual  people; it simply honors their names. 

The link will take you to this album on my page at SoundCloud. It's free. Have a listen!

Dominica

A collection of compositions for various orchestral and electronic instruments. The album takes its name from Dominica, a small Caribbean island of great natural beauty. All the track titles are place names on the island, with the exception of Mrs. Dalloway, the title character in a Virginia Woolf novel. None of the titles are intended as portraits of places or people. If they happen to work that way, then, why not?

The link will take you to this album on my page at SoundCloud. It's free. Have a listen!

Classmates II

Classmates II is a volume of musical compositions for various instruments and field sounds. As with the Classmates I collection, the track titles take their names from my high school classmates. It was Shrewsbury High School in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts in 1967. As I’ve been working on this series I can’t help thinking about my former classmates – we spent many, many days together many years ago but haven’t had much or any contact in the intervening half century. Some of them are no longer alive. The music is not intended as portraits of my classmates; it simply honors their names.

The link will take you to this album on my page at SoundCloud. It's free. Have a listen!