classical music

The latest release of my music is a recording of the first performance of Siciliano for harp, beautifully played by Tijana Kozarčić in the rich acoustics and visual surroundings of the Auburn Uniting Church, Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia: https://youtu.be/jDe0jAKS6q4 Many thanks to Peter Lamshed of Salvage Films (www.salvagefilms.com), who took the videos, and to Alan Chuck and Auburn Uniting Church for the use of the church. Late in the afternoon, at the very end of our recording sessions, Peter asked Tijana to play it through one more time so he could experiment with different camera angles. This is the result, "take 2", a perfect performance in one take, a slightly different interpretation of the music and some great close shots and views from the hand-held [...]

“‘The peacock’s tail makes me sick!’ said Charles Darwin. That’s because the theory of evolution can’t explain why nature is so beautiful… Taking inspiration from Darwin’s observation that animals have a natural aesthetic sense, philosopher and musician David Rothenberg probes why animals, humans included, have an innate appreciation of beauty” (back cover blurb on his 2012 book Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science and Evolution). Our innate appreciation of beauty has led humans (and some animals) to create beautiful art for many centuries – until the 20th century. In modernist and postmodern art and philosophy, the very concept of beauty has been denied and disparaged. Artists, in all the arts, now very often deliberately create ugliness, carefully avoiding any manifestation of beauty (of course, if [...]

Nature is a frequent theme in my music and in the videos I have made with my music, and I regard my music as natural music. Here is what I mean by this: Natural Music Natural music is music in harmony with the laws of nature. Music is organized sound: sound organized into meaningful patterns by human beings (or by birds, which have their own music). Sound is, however, already organized in nature long before human (or avian) minds make their own patterns with it. Sound begins as waves of compression and rarefaction in the air, waves that embody mathematical principles. When these waves impact our eardrums, the vibrations in our eardrums are processed by the middle ear and passed on to the inner ear. [...]

Finally, after many delays, this website is up and running! The aim of this site is simply to make my music known and available to more people. I've been writing music for many years and a few of my compositions have been performed in public, but until now they have not been available to a wider audience. This site and my CD Baby page (link below) now make my music available to listeners anywhere, and to any musicians or singers who want to perform it. There is another aim to this site though. Many people think modern classical music is obscure, difficult, elitist, or just plain unpleasant. I want to promote the idea that contemporary classical music can be accessible, tuneful and user-friendly, and that [...]