How I Didn't Learn to Compose

I never wanted to be a composer. I ornamented tunes and slowly learned to improvise but just never had any desire to write music or even to attempt to replay tunes I came up with. Sometimes I experimented with recording my improvisation which did eventually help me remember snippets but it still didn’t seem I was writing music. Certainly I don’t feel the music rattling in my head the way poems do, demanding to be written before I can sleep at night. Music simply flows out my hands through the flute and into the air with no particular effort and no request that I keep going till they are done. Poems clack and bang about insisting I work them out before they let me go. So it didn’t seem as if there was any reason for me to be a composer. Even if the tunes I could recreate were slowly increasing. And the variety of improvisation was expanding and becoming more interesting to me. By the time I started playing the Ren Fest, I was beginning to suspect that there was more going on than I had guessed. Spending entire weekends working on my music has done amazing things to my composing. Nothing else ever caused me to actually write music the way the regular focus on my own improvisation did. All the theory classes, music writing exercises, jazz and Baroque improvisation turned out to be just prep work. After one or two years, recording a CD seemed natural. There was so much music pouring out of me that it was nearly impossible not to recognize and develop some but it still seemed a long way from composing. By the time the second CD came along I knew I was going to have to admit to composing music fairly soon. Where I am going with this creation or it with me, I still don’t really know but I do know that the music spins round my head now, not quite the way poems do but just as inescapably. And unlike poetry, there is no demand, no insistence that I do anything about it. The music doesn’t stop (or rather settle quietly) just because a tune has been worked out. Harmonies, melodies, variations, dances and laments overlapping and separating, sometimes one at a time and at others dozens competing for an audience. All exist with me or without. But oh, I am so glad they have come to live in my head.

Why Feral?

My father once said he was an indigent farmer and I was one of the indigents he was raising. How right that joke was. I grew up in the forest. With goats, chickens, coyotes, wild raspberries, weeds, overgrown creeks and deep still ponds. My parents did very little to change the forest, preferring to let nature decide how things should grow and letting us kids run loose in the growing wilderness. As a result, I feel out of place in towns and cities. There is just so little wildlife there, so little green plant growth. I don't navigate very well without tree trunks surrounding me and find street signs an oddly awkward way of marking trails. In many ways, I feel like a feral creature; one who comes from a domesticated species but now lives wild.
When I went off to study music, I studied Classical. It is actually difficult to get training on the flute that isn't Classical but I would have gone that route anyway because I love the music. Yet, Classical training is, in a sense, the domesticated form of the modern musician. The teaching program is well worked out and fairly similar for each person. Classical musicians are not encouraged to go out and play on street corners for random strangers. Instead, they are trained to perform indoors and only to play Classical music, not folk. Even Jazz is somewhat suspect by some teachers.
Now I love playing in concert halls for audiences who also love Classical music. But I also love playing Celtic music, Middle Eastern music and as many different musical ideas as I can. And I especially love improvising - the magic of creating music on the spot is wilder, freer, more feral than anything else I have run across.

Program Notes or What I'm on about in my albums

Digital downloads available in all the usual locations.

Link to buy CDs of Amaltheia... 

Amaltheia's Lullaby-program notes-
In Greek Mythology, Amaltheia is a nymph or a goat who raised Zeus the God of thunder. Pan, half God half Goat, is the God of the wilderness. There are many different stories of Pan’s birth and antics. As the son of Amaltheia’s goat, Pan was raised in a cave with Zeus. Another story says Pan and Arcas were the twin sons of Zeus and Callisto a nymph who was changed into a bear. In yet another story, Pan helped Zeus after his sinews were stolen by the guardian of the sacred oracle at Delphi. Pan often plays a panpipe or a syrinx that can put anyone to sleep. A Labyrinth is a maze with only one path in and out. The version often seen in Crete, where Zeus and Pan were said to have been raised, has seven corridors.
The four notes F G C and E-flat are a call to Pan according to some. All the pieces on this album relate to these notes.

1 Cave Lullaby---alto flute

2 Bear Dance-Cub Steps---flute

3 Bear Dance-Tempo Challenge---flute

4 Transposing Delphi-Lament and Lure---alto flute

5 Transposing Delphi-Mirror Dreams---alto flute

6 Beggars Pan---glass piccolo

7 Labyrinth-1^st Loop-Lulling---flute

8 Labyrinth-2^nd Loop-Memory Game---flute

9 Labyrinth-3^rd Loop-In the Garden---flute

10 Labyrinth-4^th Loop-In and Out---flute

11 Labyrinth-5^th Loop-Weaving---flute

12 Labyrinth-6^th Loop-Turn About---flute

13 Labyrinth-7^th Loop-Rainstorm---flute

14 Rain and Flood Lullaby---flute

 

 

 

Link to buy CDs of Waking...

Waking the Devas-program notes-
A while ago, a friend of mine was telling me about her new garden. It was in the country across the road from a forest. It made her happy just seeing it. It overflowed with life as if little spirits were peeping out around the tomatoes, morning glories and grass. Even the bugs that ate plants down to the ground had a magic to them although that didn’t make them less of a nuisance. The garden became a nursery for nature devas, a safe place for them to gain strength as they step, roll and rush out into the world. This got me thinking about waking the devas, fairies, nature spirits in the world around us. Drawing them into the cracks in our lives and letting them run wild. Messy sometimes but more than worth it for all the joy they bring.

1 Lament’s Balm---glass piccolo in C recorded in a forest clearing

2 Rain Dare---glass picc during a rainstorm with a few cows

3 Thaw Longing (Sun in January)---flute as a wind front built up

4 Wind and Rain (Waking Lullaby)---glass picc in a garden during a break in the rain

5 Flood Drops---flute on a sunny winter day in a greenhouse

6 Drawing Out---glass flute in G on a windy sunny day in a greenhouse

7 Fireflies-Here and There---flute at early night on the edge of the woods with crickets

8 (Enter Chorus) How Hummingbird Sees Time---baroque flute on an afternoon in a forest clearing as the cicadas warmed up

9 (Fireflies) Spying on Starfall---flute at night on a lane in the woods with crickets

10 Chorus in the Elm---baroque flute on an afternoon in a forest clearing with cicadas

11 Fireflies-World’s Rim---flute at night on the edge of the woods with crickets

12 Perseids-Night’s Overflow---flute, rattle at midnight on a lane in the woods

13 Cicada Antiphony---baroque flute on a summer afternoon in a forest clearing

14 Perseids-Some May Yet Sleep---flute on a lane in the woods under meteors

15 Lament’s Balm/Lemon Balm II---flute at night on a wooded lane

16 The Fairies’ Hounds---flute. The hounds in question scrambled across a tile floor (click, clack go the claws) but refrained from howling till the recording was done.

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Link to buy physical CDs.