A New Chapter
In 2014, as many friends and family already now, I decided to change the course of my musical career by taking an extended break from performing as a cruise ship musician. In the months that followed this decision, I dabbled in a variety of projects including a full scale performance of the Jeff Buckley Grace Album, routine gigs at a local Mexican Restaurant, and donating my services at nursing homes and senior living communities. During this time, I also began recording and helping to arrange instrumental parts for my buddy Matt Burmeister as he published more trop rock music for international radio stations. These endeavors earned us a couple live interviews and performances on a local country radio station. During the summer of 2015, inspiration found it's recipient, and I proceeded to compose a full length halloween musical with script, arrangements, and studio recordings. Days before halloween, my cast and I debuted this show at the historical Irving Theatre in Indianapolis, IN. A couple months after this debut, I began composing a modernized Madrigal piece in dedication to the bicentennial of Indiana. The publication took place on July 14, 2016. This recording can be heard on my website, and the entire compilation of songs can be purchased through Doug Whisman through the Ji-Een Lee Music Academy (contact info on internet). Feel free to visit my Facebook page for additional video coverage of performances and other info. My career has taken a turn toward composition, and, in general, it has been quite fulfilling pursuing an artistic end of creativity where limitations of potentiality do not exist. In the modern age of digital technology, its extremely difficult to market oneself as a composer when music itself can be shared and stolen without regard to artists or efforts by which it derived. However, the longing to create and communicate encourages me to embrace the art as an end in itself in the midst of an undiscerning public. When I use the phrase "undiscerning public," I intend to state that popular belief exposits that innovative arrangements of sound equate with well-written music. With this presumption, I disagree to the point of critiquing a lot of music written beyond the 1940's as being highly innovative, yet merely simplified regurgitations of the brilliance of past works. The writing and subsequent recording of my bicentennial Madrigal piece brought home this realization. Although polyphony and counterpoint will reasonably be more difficult to perform than homophony, I can not help but observe the ostensible generality whereby singers in the present do not have occasion to sing this sort of music very often. Does the simplicity of pop music cater to a general complacency, or has a commercial society liquified excellent art into a lukewarm message that even the cerebrally deficient can comprehend? It surprises me that the human race has not demanded excellence in response to 75 years of regurgitated sound in simplified form. Regardless, composers and musicians who understand the truth of what once existed and what has devolved can continue to strive for extraordinary ends and fall the tree even if nobody hears the sound.