For those who want to know what my own creative music sounds like, there is an extensive archive of freely improvised music on my Soundcloud account, as well as some scores and recordings of my compositions. The majority of those improvised pieces are for solo piano, but many ensemble improvisations are being uploaded shortly. It has always been a bit ‘scary’ to play a completely improvised solo piece of music in front of attentive listeners. Like most everyone else, I don’t want to ‘mess up’ or look stupid or self-indulgent. I don’t want to just ‘jam’ over an ostinato, but rather create something unique to the moment. And I don’t want to waste the listener’s time with various kinds of insubstantial “filler,” such as the expression obvious, imitative or overly derivative musical ideas. That puts a certain pressure on performance, since I may inadvertently be imitating my own past ideas. However, I have no choice but to ignore the temptation to edit as I play — especially since ‘negative’ thinking, i.e., trying NOT to do things, is a sure-fire way to lose the creative thread. So I am satisfied that most of these solo pieces allow the listener to really hear a creative process, to hear the delicate navigation of decisions taken on the basis of the ongoing interaction of melody harmony, texture, rhythm, form, and and the thoughts, feelings and movement which leave those sounds in the wake of their action. That’s a really poor sentence, eh?

There is also a large-scale experimental presentation of improvisational creation: The Grove. (My colleague, Taras Petryk, created the software to allow the piece to work. However, the sound files are disconnected at the present time. !! Sorry….) It offers over 100 freely improvised pieces, all branching off from one of seven musical tree trunks, each with the identical starting point. The root of each tree begins with a single note, “A”, which is hidden in the base of the tree. Just click on any of the topmost leaves. Each branch traces a different continuation of an initial musical impulse sounded by each of the seven trunks. And a cute little ‘caterpillar’ shows you where you’re going and what you’re listening to. The intention of the piece was to demonstrate how the creative process repeatedly bifurcates to produce many different branches and sub-branches.

There is also a score to a book of original piano music based on the wonderful tunes of Canadian fiddler Oliver Schroer. Composing those pieces was my tribute to Oliver and if you have the chops to handle them, they will give you great pleasure. The book is called “Covering Oli: Duets for Solo Piano.” There is a link in the “store” in the main menu (or click here on Covering Oli). It is lovingly printed on the model of Henle Urtext editions (with a sewn binding), but you can also find a link to a free online PDF version.