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Wrote this in a day about a year ago. It's nothing special but thought it was decent for my first composition.

Music that reminds me of dog sitting Audio: Andante_Comodo.mp3 Score: Andante comodo.pdf I wrote this on a ranch. I wrote this at the radio station, late late at night. It’s a song of love. It’s a song about feeling alone. On the day I finished it, I also finished On Chisel Beach by Ian McEwan. This music wrapped itself around that story, and both were planted deep into my brain. Both the music and that story complain and ache and worry, they both drag it out when it doesn’t need to be that complicated. Both improve with age, with patience, with repetition. On the day I finished it, I fretted in my journal about composing too slowly. I wrote my journal entry on some sheet music. Writing words on sheet music is easier than writing music. Maybe I just need to write music as often as I write words. This song reminds me of sitting up until all hours of the night, on a couch that wasn’t my own, in a strange house, watching WWII documentaries and checking to see if we’d accidentally let the coyote eat the cat. It reminds me of the last grasping days of college. I was spending most of my time grasping, grasping at what?… grasping at something. It reminds me of emerging from a dark cavern to greet the morning sun. It reminds me of waiting, waiting, waiting to grow up. Years and years and years after I finished the music, I played it for someone. She said, “You’re really starting to get good at this.” I pretended that the music was truly new.

I just discovered the Jazz, Band, Pop, Rock page today. I honestly had no idea this place existed. So here's one of my Rock songs that I wrote, recorded and produced. It will be included on an upcoming EP that I have been working on.

I notice I have a bad habit of disappearing from this site and reappearing randomly with new music but here we are now. The title is a work in progress still. But other than that, this came to be a thing when I looked outside one morning and saw it was snowing outside and the beginning of the piece stuck in my head and the rest is history.

Audio: Allegro.mp3 Score: Allegro TOTALLY DONE.pdf The date was September 24, 2006, my 22nd birthday. Erica and I decided to have a picnic in Meadow Park, share a bottle of wine, and take a nap. It was during this wine-induced nap that somebody walked into our house, in the middle of the day no less, while we slept peacefully in the bedroom, and stole my laptop. This particular laptop happened to contain all the music I had ever written up to that time. Was it backed up somewhere? Of course not. After all, my laptop had never been stolen before, so why would I need to back up everything I'd ever created. Nope, it was all right there, and someone stole it right out of my house in broad daylight. I never saw it again. The thief did not take our DVD player. He did not take our television. He did not take my car keys or the stereo either. He didn't even take the laptop's power cord. Just the laptop. And of course my very reason for living. When I awoke from my cat nap, it took me a good half hour to realize the laptop was gone. I won't try to put into words what went through my head except to say this: all of my art was destroyed that day. I had no website, no hard drive, no printed copies. I felt like a victim of fire. I was completely alone with my grief. Ok I was able to salvage a couple things. While ravaging through my belongings looking for any sheet music I could find, I miraculously discovered some printed pages stuffed down into a drawer. The pages were the original versions of what would later become the third and fourth movements of my first piano sonata. I was also able to copy down from memory the scraps that would later become the last movement of my first string quartet. Other than those tidbits, everything else was taken forever. My entire career as a composer up to that point was a blank page. I'm not sure how long I waited until I tried to sit down and write something again. Maybe a month. Whenever it was, when I sat down in front of that blank page, I actually felt very free, despite my sadness (and rage). It was as if all my musical baggage had been tossed unceremoniously in the trash can. Whatever genre I had been trying to fit into, whatever musical puzzle I had been wrestling with, whatever inadequacies I felt about my completed work - they were all completely moot now. I was born anew. So I sat down and wrote a violin sonata. I had never written for the violin before, but my approach was to write as if the instrument could do anything I wanted it to do. I wrote that way for the piano too. No more feeling constrained by my own lack of pianistic ability. I put on that page whatever I damn well felt like. It felt good. And somehow, despite all the pain, the music was chipper. Even at my darkest moments, my music comes out chipper. Maybe it's just who I am, or maybe that's how I cope. My brain might feel all doom and gloom, but my music is sunshine and rainbows. This first movement is the first piece I wrote after my babies were taken from me. I completed the movement in March of 2007. It is very much a classical piece, straight up sonata form, repeat bar and everything. It might not be genre shattering, but it was a very open and freeing experience for me to write it. It's what I was feeling at the time. It's what had to come out.

Those lovely fast bits around 0:53 really added a nice dimension. This strikes me as confident composition; you seemed to know what you were going for, and you went there. It paints a lovely picture: a bit antique, warm and inviting but also a bit off-putting. I like it, and I'd very much enjoy to hear how it contrasts with other vignettes from the suite.

Interesting... It definitely does make sense to have a "sound." No sense attracting someone to follow your work with one piece, and sending them packing again with the next one. But it's possible to achieve the same commercial goal by specializing in music for a certain type of musical group, and still being able to play around musically with the sound from piece to piece. If you look at some of the big historic composers, they often carved out a stylistic niche based on the players who were consistently available to them. If you had trumpets and the cathedral in other important cathedral town didn't, by gum you were going to show off your trumpets as prominently as possible, and to balance that, you would make other stylistic choices. If the princess was studying harp, you would show a sudden interest in the instrument yourself, and that would lend itself to certain other decisions.

Sure. I should have given the question a little more thought. But I'm not sure there is a way to ask it without sounding vague or naive. I wanted to know if you think you have a style that is particularly unique within your genre. Such that when people hear it they know it's yours. Or if not, is it a goal worth working towards - if that is even possible. Composers with very circumscribed styles can be very successful, if only because they are recognizable. Minimalism comes to mind. Having a schtick helps in the commercial sense because your product is dependable and proven, like anything else for sale. Make sense? Now I was thinking about Hans Zimmer, who people have commented on right here. People seem to think that he has a style, a 'sound'. The Hans Zimmer sound. When film composers get hired the director might say, "I'd like to get that Hans Zimmer sound." But does he really have a sound? He did a couple of films like Inception and Batman and suddenly he's got a sound? But if you heard his score for "A League of Their Own" You'd say, that doesn't sound like Hans Zimmer at all. Now, when Hans himself gets hired for a film and plays his cues for the director, he might look disappointed and say, tactfully, "This is quite good Hans ... but what I'd really like to get from you is that Hans Zimmer sound." Now he must parody himself! (We should be so lucky to have his problems, right?) I am just wondering if people find the idea of being a totally original composer all important. Thoughts?

Thanks for your comments, Gustav. the good thing about suites is that you can add more on and take some off, depending on what works and what doesn't. I think I'll replace the second movement with something more in keeping with the others. The line you quoted is a written solo line and not meant to be developed except maybe if I had a relationship with some percussionists I could approach the score more as jazz with a lot of 'ad libs' peppered all over the place with repeats, as they soloed over the chords. As it is, I should probably stick with the hypnotic ostinatos. Your comments were very helpful!