Music

In my early teens, I took a few months of guitar lessons, and later, a few months of piano lessons. Despite having no formal training in musical theory or composition, I was drawn to composing and wrote a number of light classical pieces for piano. Without the benefit of formal training, composing was slow and laborious, but nevertheless satisfying. My musical start was interrupted by 4 years of active service in the Navy. Since I didn’t have access to a piano while in the Navy, I began composing for the guitar also, which music might be categorized as ballad, folk or popular type music. However, they may all be categorized as Easy Listening music.

My earlier piano and guitar compositions totaled about 90 pieces, all of which were handwritten in pencil on loose score paper. Years later, I bought a software program that allowed me to put these music scores into the computer and have them printed out in standard sheet music form. Next, I wanted to get them recorded onto CDs so they could be listened to. Never a good enough musician myself, I found pianists and guitarists to record them under my direction. Later I worked with two violinists and made these pieces into duet arrangements. I then made them into arrangements for the keyboard with a beat that made them more exciting and interesting. Finally, I tried my hand at writing an ensemble piece for piano and 4 stringed instruments. This piece was dedicated to my sister Christine who died young from the same kind of cancer that took my mother. Before her death, I took the melody of this ensemble piece and had it played on a range of instruments and made into a special CD that I dedicated to her and to my brother and 2 other sisters. All the CD recordings are contained in the 18 CD set shown to the right and represent the music composed between 1962 and 2002.

In 2017, after a 25 year long hiatus where I was involved in renovating the 1894 home we bought in CT, raising a family and working on my career, I began writing again and wrote 200 light classical pieces for the piano and recorded them on a series of 21 CDs which are shown to the left. In 2018 and the years following, I continue to write and record as shown below.

The sheet music for all the guitar and piano pieces are contained in spiral bound books in my personal files.

Listening Suggestion: Since there are a lot of CDs, one might want to start with the those CD labeled “Selected” which will give the listener a good representation of the music. An even more concise representation of my music is in the 2019 2 CD set labeled: (CD 1) Selected Pieces 1962-1991 and (CD 2) Selected Pieces 2017-2019 and I would start there.

I have received favorable comments and reviews about my music from musicians, music teachers, professors of music and musicologists, who found them deceptively simple but well-written with nice melodies that are expressive and often with a haunting touch of melancholy. For me, the only objective I have for them, is that they be found to be individually musically interesting, or in a collage, as Easy Listening or pleasant background music.