I didnt discover I could write music until I was nearly forty. Those were my road warrior days, and there was a hotel in Atlanta with a piano in the atrium where I used to give impromptu concerts. My musical training was as a classical pianist, and I thought of my music then as being in that genre (although they were very popular. People used to hang off the balconies in the evening listening to me play).. When I retired, I started to write novels. When I published the first one, I mentioned in the biography that I was also a composer. On a whim, I recorded some of my music and sent it to the editor. Shes a big rock fan, but she loved my soothing piano music.
So, here are some pieces for you to (hopefully) enjoy. You can find my novels, also, under my pen name (W Richard St. James) at clublighthousepublishing.com . Youll see that the music may be mellow, but the books are very spicy!
A meandering path, no doubt. I'm a mathematician by training, programmer by trade. I was always writing poems, but not music until midlife. So some of my early compositions were settings of poems I had written years earlier. The some piano pieces. Then new lyrics for new music. Also since I retired a few novels.
I used to play in hotels all the time, when I was on the road. Now that I'm retired, that doesn't happen so often.
Well, my two main influences are Beethoven and the Beatles. Of course, the Beatles paid a lot of tributes to Beethoven in their own music. The Beethoven I like isn't what you are probably familiar with -- it's the late piano sonatas. If you can imagine Beethoven writing with the Beatle's melodic style; -- that's what my music is like. Sort of.
A Sohmer five foot grand piano to play and for my earlier compositions. Lately I've been using MuseScore to compose and also to generate midi files (I'm presenting the compositions not my ability to play them, although I still have to do the singing). I use Audacity to put together the parts and create the mp3 files.
