Month: February 2020

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Piano Sonata No. 2 (Complete)

1. Lovejail – Read about this movement here.
2. Looking for a Sunset Bird in Winter – Read about this movement here.
3. Gavotte – Read about this movement here.
4. A Joyful Adventure – Read about this movement here.

Today I completed a new piano sonata. What a relief to be finished. I can’t believe it’s over. I feel that I’ve completed something epic. I’ve climbed a mountain.

I started this music in Spring of 2016, during a difficult time in my life, and continued working on it until today, February 20, 2020. In fact, a good chunk of the second movement was written back in 2008, as a completely different piece which has now been dismantled. So this music’s been with me a while.

This music guided me through many life experiences, and was in turn inspired by those life experiences. As a result the sonata takes the listener on a real journey through my wants and hopes and dreams and emotions. It’s a tour of my psyche.

As I’ve noted in other posts about this sonata, this music is riddled with hope. It’s everywhere you turn in this sonata. It’s the main theme of the whole damn piece. Turns out my psyche must have a lot of hope in it.

Oh there’s other themes too: love and healing and time and growth. They all wind around each other, they are all intertwined.

This sonata is also really dang long. I started to say something, then had more to say, then more and more and more. The story takes its time to unfold. If you listen to this whole piece, you will drink deeply from my well of creativity.

I hope this music inspires and touches you.

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Who Am I Stealing From Today? (Makoto Ozone)

Today’s big winner is….. Makoto Ozone!

Have a listen to some music I finished today:

“A Joyful Adventure” from Piano Sonata #2

It’s called “A Joyful Adventure.” I wrote it after listening to this enlightened set of variations by Makoto Ozone:

This is Yoshi, a Japanese pianist, performing Ozone’s funky arrangement of Chopin’s Waltz no.7. What Ozone did to this waltz was brilliant, such a lovely mix of jazz with romantic.

Ozone’s treatment of Chopin put me in a jazzy mood, and helped free my mind from the rut of writer’s block that creeps up on me from time to time. After listening to this a number of times, I felt very creative. I wanted to play around with these jazzy colors, so I wrote the music above as an homage to Ozone. And by homage, I mean I totally stole his mojo.

Play the video starting at 3:17, and you will hear the rhythm I lifted from Ozone. I wanted to take that exact soundscape and make it my own, to write something as tasty as possible.

Of course, once I started down that road my project quickly morphed into something new, something that doesn’t feel like stealing at all. The music packs its own flavor of punch. It’s got something new to say.

By the way, I was also listening to some Gershwin while writing this music, and wouldn’t you know it, some of his mojo got sponged up into my music as well.

Who will I steal from tomorrow?… Only time will tell.

By the way, this music is based very loosely on Mazurek Dobrowskiego, the Polish national anthem. It is also the final section of my 2nd piano sonata, which you can listen to in its entirety here.