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John Carey

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About John Carey

  • Birthday 07/26/1991

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  • Website URL
    http://www.johncareycomposer.com

Profile Information

  • Biography
    I can remember being a composer at heart since my earliest memories. Growing up in a very musical environment (my mother was an opera singer, my father her voice teacher), I recall improvising at the piano and imagining fully scored soundtracks in my head even in the very beginning of my childhood. Upon discovering the sonatas of Beethoven at the age of twelve, I (rather suddenly) developed a love for the piano which quickly sparked my interest in composition. From there I immediately became immersed in the process of learning as much as I could about this incredible, mysterious, life-changing thing known as music... a process that becomes more and more of an all-consuming obsession, yet somehow leaves me feeling more humble and less knowledgeable with each passing year!

    As a composer, my primary goal has always been to establish a voice that is unique and distinctly recognizable as my own. Throughout my compositional development (particularly over the last five years) I have tirelessly worked toward creating and refining my stylistic vision. Fortunately, my work has not been in vain, as I have found that the most consistent reaction to my music is related to the originality of my personal voice, especially my harmonic language.

    If I were to describe my music, I would say that most of my works could be categorized as neo-romantic, with strong elements of both impressionism and expressionism. My works tend to utilize harmonic ambiguity and dissonance within a mostly tonal framework (similar perhaps to composers such as Prokofiev, Szymanowsky, Scriabin, Sorabji, Reger, etc.), complex and freely structured formal designs, elaborate rhythmic devices designed to create a continuously organic feeling of fluidity and motion, implementation of modern approaches such as set theory, non-standard instrumental techniques, etc., influences ranging from Baroque/Classical-era composers to jazz, metal, and other non-classical genres, and a dramatically fluctuating sense of emotionality, intended to depict the universal duality of life and human emotion.

    My music is inspired by a large variety of topics, including philosophy, spirituality, synesthesia, consciousness expansion (transcendental meditation, hypnosis, the psychedelic experience, lucid dreaming, OBEs and other forms of mental exploration), surrealism, mental illness, and a variety of other subjects that I find interesting. Generally my approach to these topics is abstract, in the form of "absolute music," though I will usually always include background information pertaining to the deeper meaning and context of my pieces when I share them publicly.

    My hobbies include chess, hiking, theatre, travel, reading, musing on topics vastly beyond my own understanding, teaching (in most social situations this is more of a reflex than anything), meditation/hypnotherapy, and surfing YouTube in search of new music. I also am interested in recording/audio production, which I majored in for two years and continue to study/practice as frequently as possibly. I appreciate and actively listen to practically every genre of music there is (I am constantly open to the discovery of unfamiliar styles), and love art in all of its forms.

    I hope that you enjoy my music, and I always greatly appreciate any and all feedback I receive from listeners. I encourage all those interested in my work to visit my website (www.johncareycomposer.com), which contains a complete list of free recordings of my major works (in multiple genres), as well as a large variety of information about how to purchase or rent scores/parts and employ any of the several professional services I offer. I also would recommend checking out my YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/johncareycomposer), which contains videos of my pieces with the scores provided, as well as live performances I've given of my own music and the music of other composers.
  • Gender
    Male
  • Location
    West Hartford, CT
  • Occupation
    Composer, pianist, teacher, life-long student
  • Interests
    Chess, Hiking, Mental exploration, Theatre, Philosophy, Religion, Cinema
  • Favorite Composers
    Beethoven (my favorite composer and greatest influence to this day), Sorabji, Rachmaninoff, Liszt, Berg, Ravel, Gershwin, Prokofiev, Mahler, Reger, Szymanowski, Scriabin, many others
  • My Compositional Styles
    Neo-romanticism, neo-classicism, neo-impressionism, post-modernism, electronic, jazz, rock/metal, musical theatre, you name it!
  • Notation Software/Sequencers
    Finale, Garritan Personal Orchestra, Logic Pro, East West Symphonic Choirs
  • Instruments Played
    Piano

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  1. John Carey
    Thank you very much; I glad you enjoyed it! I found that it was definitely one of the most difficult pieces to write, simply because of the amount of considerations one has to make when writing for harp, but it's great to know that the hard work paid off!
  2. John Carey
    I realize it's been a while since I posted this, but I noticed that a fair amount of people listened to it and yet there are no replies. Any thoughts at all...? All comments are greatly appreciated.
  3. John Carey
    Not a finale per se, but the end of the 5th movement of Havergal Brian's Gothic Symphony is the most apocalyptic section of music I've ever heard:
  4. John Carey
    My favorite is the Busoni concerto; it's just such an incredibly unique piece on so many levels. Busoni's style is rather unusual, which makes it a somewhat difficult work to digest at first. However, after a few listens the genius of the writing becomes apparent. His use of thematic material in particular is mind-blowing... the work has a rather operatic character, and it ends appropriately with a male chorus singing the main themes of the first four movements. Truly a remarkable work -- I highly recommend checking it out!
  5. John Carey
    The first pieces that come to mind are Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 8 (particularly the 2nd movement) and Symphony No. 5. As mentioned previously, Penderecki and Ornstein both have plenty of pieces that would fit the bill. George Flynn's Wound also portrays similar emotional qualities.
  6. John Carey
    Augmented 4th/diminished 5th, augmented 5th, major 9th, augmented 11th. As you can probably tell, I tend to gravitate toward "jazz" harmonies, though my music doesn't really sound much at all like jazz; I just love the lush, misty tonal ambiguity that one can create with such harmonies.
  7. John Carey
    Does anyone have any feedback?
  8. John Carey
    I thoroughly enjoyed them. They had some good tunes and the harmonic content was nice (and did some unexpected things, which was refreshing). Also, the writing was pretty pianistic in general, which is also a nice change compared to a lot of contemporary music I've heard/played recently. I think some of them might be improved slightly by adding a few runs here and there (in a Chopin-esque sort of way), but I'm not saying that the piece needs that necessarily... just something to consider. I'm not always convinced that certain sections fit in as well as others; I would suggest listening to them all really carefully and seeing if every part is relevant to what comes before/after. Great work, these seem like they would be enjoyable to play.
  9. John Carey
    Neither the MP3 nor the score work for me.
  10. John Carey
    Good job on this. The melodic content was unified throughout the movements, and the form worked nicely. My main critique would be that your harmonic language is a bit bipolar -- your tonal sections are quite tonal and your "atonal" sections seem to come out of nowhere and have very little to do with what preceded them. I would strongly suggest "spicing up" your tonal sections with some added dissonances and chromaticism... not constantly, just often enough so that the less tonal sections don't seem so wildly out of place. Also, you could do a lot more with the instruments (especially the piano). If you're not a pianist, I'd recommend studying some chamber music scores with piano by great composers; perhaps you'll get some ideas as to how to make the piano part more elaborate. And, as mentioned previously by another poster, conversational interplay between the instruments will make your piece a lot more varied and interesting. Nice work!
  11. John Carey
    I've written quite a bit of techno on a keyboard. I've used a Korg Triton workstation as a stand-alone instrument/sequencer, and I've done quite a bit with Logic and any keyboard I happen to have sitting around. Both Logic and the Korg Triton are rather expensive, so you should probably hold off on getting those until you know you'll be able to put them to good use. But to answer your question, yes, to my knowledge techno is generally always played on keyboards. But, if your keyboard doesn't double as a sequencer then you'll need some other software to record your music.
  12. John Carey
    How contemporary? The first thing that came to mind for me was:
  13. John Carey
    It looks like it has potential to be useful. I feel like composers with more "contemporary" harmonic languages will be less likely to need something like this, however. Probably the simplest solution to avoiding writing melodies that sound too much like Mozart would be to... well, not compose like Mozart! ;) And even so, according to Stravinsky: "Good composers borrow, great composers steal."
  14. John Carey
    Back when I was considerably less experienced, I would probably trash the majority of what I wrote. Well, not "trash" exactly -- I had a folder specifically designated for works I thought were too bad to finish. I never wanted to throw my music away though, because I figured a lot of these "pieces" had elements that were salvageable (possibly even just one phrase or chord). I find nowadays that I practically never do this anymore, which has a lot to do with the fact that I often have deadlines to finish my pieces by, which certainly helps me focus my attention on the compositions I'm working on enough to force myself to work with the ideas I have, even if they don't appeal to me immediately. If you don't like something you wrote, I think it's good to challenge yourself to make it work anyway... who knows, maybe you'll end up writing a much better piece than you imagined? As for sections of music within a single piece... A LOT ends up in the trash before I consider the piece complete.
  15. John Carey
    Here is my most recent composition. Being my first extended work featuring harp, it proved to be a challenging but rewarding experience. My aim with this work was to further develop the harmonic language in my String Quartet, which was quite a task considering the harp is often thought to be a rather harmonically limited instrument. However, despite my initial concern about these "limitations," I discovered that one can write harp music that is *very* chromatic and pushes tonal boundaries. My harmonic language is based primarily on polytonality, which I used extensively in this work. The main "key" of the work is E, which is juxtaposed rather constantly with the key of Eb throughout the piece (particularly in the fourth movement). The first movement ("Rubato") begins by introducing the main theme of the work, which appears both directly and subtly in all of the movements. The movement continues to develop freely, moving the theme through an assortment of variations before reaching a climax. The intensity of the music quickly drops, leading to a transitional section where rhythmic and thematic motives from the second movement are introduced quietly. The movement ends unresolved and the second movement begins abruptly, a dance-like scherzo characterized by a motive based on alternating 5/8 and 6/8 meters. The third movement ("Adagio") features the harp extensively and places a greater emphasis on textural experimentation. Building up to a dramatically virtuosic section for the harp, the music fades to nothing and is followed by another transitional section which emphasizes the polychords that are featured prominently in the fourth movement (the aforementioned E-Eb, and also Eb-G). The fourth movement ("Presto") moves perpetually, eventually reaching a climax where the cello plays the main theme of the work adorned by polytonal harp flourishes. After falling back down to pianissimo, the beginning section of the "Presto" returns. The music builds once more and then ends quietly, with the cello resolving in E and the harp in Eb. Sonata for Cello and Harp
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