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Forgive me, this will be long, involved, and occasionally technical. Hopefully, for those who are into it, it will be of some value.

Every artist has a style, a way of creating that ensures anyone consuming their work will instantly recognize it as that artist’s. Style differences come from within (the composer’s collective experiences, habits, opinions), and without (historical settings, social issues, life events). Sometimes stylistic differences are very subtle, and only serious students may be able to discern them. An artist may even vary stylistically across their whole body of work. (As an example, Aaron Copland wrote pieces that would seem alien to fans of his “Appalachian Spring” or “Rodeo.”)

I’ve attempted to create a musical style that is my own. As is true elsewhere on this website, I try to be transparent about my work. So, on this page I describe that style, and how I achieve it.

Instruments. I almost left this off, since I’ve made a conscious decision to focus on traditional Western European instruments for totally selfish reasons. Exotic instruments like the shamisen, tabla, synthesizer, sampler, all are valuable sources of musical sounds, but I already know what violas, bassoons, harps, piccolos sound like, and have a sense of how they’re played. I’m drawing an arbitrary line in the sand here for the sake of familiarity and time management. As a result, my style isn’t dependent on, or necessarily associated with, instrument selection — any reflection of instrumental style has to do with programmatic use (what an instrument is supposed to represent), or a striking and fun combination (like double bass with piccolo). 

Tonality, Rhythm, Form. If you’ve listened to any of my work here, you’ll know that, despite the traditional instruments used, things don’t sound like they were written when those instruments were more popular. I’ve definitely made several firm decisions about how I approach the composition process which don’t fit those earlier traditions. I am especially enamored with tonality — how pitches and chords sound and move — so that gets the most attention.

• Tonality — Keys vs. Tonal Centers: Most music written in the last 400 years uses a set of tones (a scale), a set of rules for how those tones are assembled into groups (chords), and how they move through time (progressions). All of these things are implied by a selected “key.” Although my music owes a lot to those traditional values, I prefer the concept of “tonal center” rather than “key,” since the music I build doesn’t depend on the things that “key” implies. In addition, “progression” happens very differently here — I prefer to shift chords without warning, ignoring procedures implied by a “key” (traditional theorists call them “cadences”). I also ignore the “circle of 5ths” which has historically provided an almost mathematical underpinning to the entire world of chord progression. That does not, however, mean I ignore math — my tonal center changes reflect other mathematical relations besides fifths (descending major 3rds is a favorite, though simple 2nds are also common). The end result is much more dramatic and demanding of the ear than Mozart or Brahms, but still a very far cry from the atonal work of early 20th Century composers (for whom “tonal center” was, itself, to be avoided).
• Tonality — Chords vs. Clusters: I’ve tended to view pitches played together as splotches of color rather than chords — as I imply above, two adjacent splotches may bleed together, or occur quite separate (though adjacent) — without a progression or cadence. For me, “clusters” is probably a more descriptive a term than chords, since the latter implies all of the hierarchy and structure implied by “keys” (see above). That isn’t to say that I select the members of a cluster arbitrarily — a careful analysis of my clusters shows identifiable tonal centers, referenced scales (often exotically modal), and added tones (2nds and 6ths appear a lot). I build these clusters by ear (see “black box” below). I tend to avoid traditional triadic structures, or the 9ths and 11ths common to jazz. I only rarely go completely atonal (usually just for temporary effect). Although I am a fan of extended melodies and use them, it is also common for a section of a composition to be simply a series of these clusters moving as I describe above.
• Rhythmic Traditions: I have, on several occasions, selected a historical form which implies a certain rhythmic approach, but I do so mostly to provide something familiar. I almost invariably abuse the form’s original rhythmic concept, to separate my piece from its historical roots. (My dance suite, Je danse, J’apprends, is a perfect example of this.) I sometimes select meters and tempos for completely abstract reasons (“September‘s” use of 7/4 and 7/8 meters are an example). The goal is to have just enough familiarity to help the listener, but to provide variation for interest. But just as I avoid atonality (it doesn’t sound good to me), I avoid a lot of exotic rhythmic changes for their own sake — my treatment of rhythm in general is conservative, but with variation for reasons of interest.
• Form: The 18th and 19th Centuries in Western European music is the great age of “Sonata-Allegro,” a form with a structure recognizable in the first movements of virtually any significant musical work from that period. It is a two-part thematic exposition, followed by an extensive “development” (where the themes are varied in interesting ways), and then a return to those themes (“recapitulation”). This form tends to generate very long pieces, often lasting up to a half-hour or more. Since such approaches to form are intellectual and abstract, your ability to appreciate them requires a lot of familiarity, knowledge, and attention. I applaud such works, but you’ll find nothing like that here. My forms are occasionally “purely musical,” but if so, I prefer simple forms: ABA, rondo (recurring, repeated themes), theme and variations (playing with a musical idea), or simple polyphony (fugues). I’m more likely to leverage real places or events to generate form — “The Coast” provides a great example. I have strived to make my form selection as easy to recognize as possible.

Of course, this doesn’t cover a lot of the nuts-and-bolts work that any composer must apply — taking the motifs, clusters, progressions I’ve created, and developing them across an entire composition. I’ve tried to make things simple and easy to follow, but as any composer knows, there’s a fine line between repetition which produces familiarity, and repetition which produces boredom. Variation is required, and I vary my repeated motifs in a way that would be familiar to other composers, but hopefully not so much that the similarities are lost to most listeners.

The Black Box: Not all creative excellence happens for technical reasons. The aforementioned “composer’s collective experiences, habits, opinions” is often referenced as his/her “ear,” though I prefer a term from computer science, “black box,” which is defined as “…a system which can be viewed in terms of its inputs and outputs…without any knowledge of its internal workings” (click here for the Wikipedia entry). This is very much like the old art layman’s phrase “I don’t understand it, but I know what I like.”

My ear is my black box. I use software to throw notes on the staff, and then just play it back to see if it sounds good to me. If it doesn’t, I change it. If it does, it goes in. The black box inside my head, from which such choices flow, owes its value to LOTS of musical input across more than 74 years on this planet, as well as a lot of mental processes that I have the barest of understanding. I do apply intellectual and formal values to generate the flow of a final composition, but most of my themes, melodies, motifs, clusters, and sequences are often complete accidents. They just sounded good to me.

There is, of course, always a risk that this process will produce something that was actually stolen, since the black box contains already-existing musical ideas. (Ed Sheeren and George Harrison are two songwriters who came up against this legally!) My black box seems to scramble things up enough that there hasn’t been any danger so far. But the end result is that I’ve produced music here that I LOVE to listen to, because I selected the sounds through listening rather than building them intellectually or abstractly.

No disposable art here, no “Oh, I’ve grown so much since then, I can’t believe how bad that is!”, no second guessing/continuous revision problems. As a matter of fact, I often listen to my compositions here and wonder “How the heck did I write that? That’s AMAZING!!” All artists should be their own best fans. If it doesn’t give pleasure, why do it?

[For more specific style thoughts about each of my works, read their respective “project pages.”]