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I improvised on one of your melodies to show how development is worth the effort and btw its a beautiful melody and well written, its wrong to leave us with just half a story! 🙂You keep creating some really good ideas but maybe you're not aware of how good they are and then just want to create more rather than develop them. You are a mystery to me.

Thank you very much that guy. I have no self confidence in music because I've not studied it like others have and I learnt to play and compose by myself through my ears if that makes sense. I just don't know if I'm creating noise or music sometimes. Up until I was 11 years old I never listened to classical music. My only exposure to it was through adverts on TV or TV shows and movies. Then one afternoon my elder sister of 2 years came into my room and gave me a magazine. It was a first edition of a new magazine that had just come out about composers and their music with a cassette tape of some of their work. This was back in 1992. She didn't want it and only bought it on a whim because of the price. It was about Tchaikovsky and featured some of his ballet work and his piano or violin concerto, I can't remember. I found the music captivating, I never knew music could make me feel such emotions and create such vivid pictures and tell stories. Before that I was into Michael Jackson and Bryan Adams. I enjoyed reading about his life and learning about the history of his time. Then the second edition came out and I bought it with my pocket money and a switched turned in my head. It was about Mozart and had Eine Kleine Nacht music on one side and his Jupiter Symphony on the other. OMFG! My mind blew! I can't put to words how it made me feel, it was like a landscape of a foreign world. The night music was amazing to my ears but the Jupiter symphony just pulled me away into my minds eye. The minuet for example created pictures of Spitfires chasing Messerschimtts, you know how they turn and dive. Might seem odd considering it's a minuet but to a boy of 11 the counterpoint triggered those images. Everyday after school I would go to my room and listen and unwind. I wore the tape out! I ended up collecting all the editions for quite some time and enjoyed hearing the music and reading the history and biography. A second Mozart edition came out and I was hooked. This time it was his piano concerto 26! Magnificent! Eventually I got tired of not knowing what all the blobs and lines meant, how they related to what I was listening to so during the summer break when I was 14 I taught myself to read music. I learnt to play basic melodies on my little sisters toy piano. It had two octaves and my fingers could just about land on a single key without hitting a neighbour, it was that small, but I delighted in playing melodies from the magazines I had bought which all had easy play renditions of the music on the cassettes. I learned to play the melody from the second movement of mozarts 26th and Boccherini's minuet. By this time music was playing in my minds ear almost constantly, I think because of my anxiety. I didn't know I was autistic, Aspergers wasnt really a thing back then. I just knew I was weird. After the summer break I asked to study music but I had already chosen art which I had a gift for so they said no. I showed the head of music a composition and he said, OK, you can do the exam and if you pass it you can study music. I passed it 97%. It was really basic anyway so I ended up doing music and just doing art in my spare time. I had access to a real piano now! My music teacher would give me the keys to his room which was an old out-building with a mini grand piano. I would spend 30 minutes everyday after school just playing some of the melodies I learnt and realised I could play my own melodies. I saw patterns that I could reproduce but didn't know how to define any of it. It was so exciting to play, I can remember the adrenalin of excitement kick in as i approached the piano and lifted the lid. It was magic! After a few weeks my music teacher heard me play and was impressed enough to ask me to play in front of the school at some assembly. I improvised a small piece in C major. My fingers were trembling but I managed to create something listenable. Then he entered me into a competition. I got to play a Steinway in front of a large audience and play a second run of what I had played previously. The judges didn't know what to do, I was the only one improvising and that wasn't quite what they were looking for so they gave the award to a trumpet player. I didn't mind, I was more interested in the sound of the Steinway. A few months later I was attacked walking home from school. The area I lived in was in a city that had a really high crime rate and many boys from my school were battling the boys from a rival school. Two boys from the rival school saw me in my uniform and knew I was easy prey. This was the third time I had been jumped in recent times and my trust of my safety outisde took a long time to rebuild. I stopped playing after school. In fact other than listening to music and following the scores I didn't play that often except during lunch breaks where a crowd would gather to listen. About this time my mental health deteriorated because of the constant violence where I lived and the ptsd, I retreated further into my own world, music was my escape. It was more than sound, it was a language I began to understand and my sensitivity to it grew. I realised I had a juke box brain and could listen without listening and music would be constantly playing in my minds ear. I would play around at trying to listen to entire concertos and not lose concentration in my minds ear. Sometimes other music of the same key would interfer and it was frustrating, or my mind would change the melody. I found that if I had the score I could hear more detail. I loved Cosi Fan Tutte, especially the trio when the two women and the old guy sing about the ship leaving with the two soldiers, so I enjoyed reading that and hearing the voices too. It was mostly mozart I listened to, but also my own. I could play choral music, hear the Kyrie, I would make it dramatic, plan out the instruments. I dreamt of being a neoclassical composer and being able to play the piano professionally. I was 16 and I left school to go to college. I didn't choose music, I became obsessed with languages instead. Music became just something I listened to and hid, it wasn't cool to like classical where I lived in a working class inner city estate. I quit college after a year because of social problems and mental health and just had menial jobs like cleaning, factory work, construction work. I was chronically underemployed throughout my life because of autism and its affect on me being able to socialise and deal with sensory problems. 12 years ago when I was 30 I bought a digital piano and started playing again. I didn't take it seriously and played whenever the whim took me, mostly when I was emotional and needed to release some trapped feelings. Emotions get stuck in me and I found playing would calm me down and release them. Especially happiness, that gets stuck and it makes me dizzy but I can release it by dazzling at the piano, which is mostly noise though. When lockdown happened because of covid I started composing minuets and watch YouTube videos on music theory. I composed a few shirt pieces using midi software. As my piano playing gotta but better I dropped the midi composing in favour of paper composing at the piano when I composed the set of D major variations. Life got in the way again, I divorced my wife and moved into my own place with my piano a few weeks ago. Now I can play as much as I like and its been wonderful to share my improvs, especially as I've got some good feedback. I really do doubt myself. Looks like I've written another book. I'm hyperlexic, that's my excuse. If you made it this far, thank you! Darren.