About the Composer

One of the things that I knew I would miss about San Francisco, especially my Richmond District neighborhood, was the fog horns I could hear lowing from the Golden Gate.  It’s a narrow path with a lot of shipping traffic in notoriously poor visibility, so there’s a fairly elaborate concert that goes on whenever the weather is foggy (read: always).  It seems there’s at least one on the shore, and if there’s more than one ship passing through, you get some very beautiful low brass chords.

Well, as luck would have it, over here in Oakland, from my Lower Hills perch, I can hear the trains at all hours as they run up and down the line along the bay a little more than two miles from here.  I love listening to the different train horns, even in the middle of the night, although I imagine they must drive the folks in the flatlands absolutely bananas.

The train horns are tuned to five or six-note chords that are beautiful and sometimes surprising.  You have the standard “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” type of configuration…

…as well as another fairly standard pentatonic-based offering.

Sometimes there are beautifully voiced major seventh chords…

My favorite is this more sinister one that seems to have been lifted from Bernard Herrmann’s score for Vertigo.

There’s another even creepier one that I keep hearing, but I can’t quite work out the pitches.  Another time, perhaps.

After my longest blogging hiatus in three years, I hope there are still a few readers out there by RSS and otherwise.  Today I attempt to get my feet wet again.  We’ll see if I’m able to stick with it. (In case anyone is seeing this via Facebook, I should mention that this is actually a post on my blog at www.AboutTheComposer.com.)

Following an incredibly stimulating and positive experience at the National Performing Arts Convention in June, the summer dealt me a couple of situations that rendered blogging among the lowest of priorities.

For starters, after 14 years living in San Francisco, we made a last-minute decision in June to move to Oakland, and it needed to happen by September.  All aspirations related to music (except one) were shut down at that time, and they’re only now beginning to resurface. It was a frenzy of house hunting and wondering whether we’d get it done in time. (We almost did.)

Why did we move? The East Bay had been beckoning us for several years.  As for why the rush, I’ll just invite you to peek at the madness of the San Francisco Public School lottery.

Despite its problems, which are highly publicized, Oakland is a lovely city of 400,000-or-so people.  In 14 years in the Bay Area, like most San Franciscans, I never took the time to get to know Oakland, although the Oakland East Bay Symphony has been kind to me on more than one occasion.  We found a neighborhood in what’s known as the “Lower Hills District” where the streets are tree-lined and the 1920’s-era Craftsman-style houses are charming and distinctive.  Life is easier here. There’s rarely a traffic jam, parking is plentiful.  I dare say people are nicer.  And, San Francisco is just over there if I need it.

From my living room window I can just

What else is going on?

So now, having more-or-less settled in, I can also announce that I’ve just joined the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory’s Preparatory Division, where I’m teaching musicianship, theory and composition, which has so far been nine kinds of inspiring.  I suspect that many future posts here will have to do with that.

A very promising large-scale project I’d been nurturing for a couple of years (and not discussing here on the blog at all) has stalled out completely now, owing to some legal issues that I can’t afford to untangle at the moment.  So, in the meantime, I’m tending to some unfinished things that were interrupted in the past, including a violin sonata that I set aside in 2005 when I got the commission for Letter To Hungary, which incidentally is also when I started this blog.

So, onward!  Del segno al coda…