Mark Walsen - Children's Suite for piano

[Mark W]

Hello Djim, MG, and David,

It finally feels like I'm joining you all in making music. Djim, thanks for your blessing on my beginning of, or return, to a journey with music making that might hold for me joys similar to those you all have everyday with music.

Last week I had two days of idle time in jury duty, waiting to see if I would be on a jury (which didn't happen), and so the first day I took a book on C++ programming. I still love to do programming, and I'm doing more of it than I have in the last several years-- I'll be making announements about that later. But on the second day of jury duty, I thought I'd try something I've never done before: compose away from the keyboard. So, with the Parallel Intervals for Piano piece fresh in my memory, I started to write one last interval piece, for octaves. It was fairly easy for me to do in my inner ears, without the keyboard to confirm what I was writing, because the octave piece reuses the themes from all of the other interval pieces. When I got back home, I found that I couldn't trust my inner ears very well, and had to rewrite some of the octaves piece and then finish it at the piano. But it was a small taste of what I had longed for my whole life-- to be able to compose in my head away from the keyboard. MidiNotate and Composer were conceived as tools to compensate for my deficient inner ear.

The final octave internval piece is done, and so last evening I started recording the entire set. On Thanksgiving today, I hope to get some recording of the piece done; and will indeed be very thankful for the luxury of being able to do this, knowing how so many people in the world are thankful just to be able to have food on the table.

I tend to be a glutton about eating on Thanksgiving day, and similarly, I'm already starting to be a glutton about music making. At the same time I'm returning to music writing, I'm also returning to playing 8-hand piano, with the help of the Internet to invite local pianists to play on my two pianos: http://www.meetup.com/Bellevue-8-Hand-Piano/ I hope someday to transcribe some of my favorite orchestral pieces to 8-hand piano. It will be relatively easy to do, starting with orchestra MIDI files that others have already labored over.

This is really fun!

P.S. If you wonder where Sherry is in all of this, she has been on the side, trading emails with me, with much encouragement about my return to music making. Sherry has been hugely inspiring to me in many ways.

Cheers
-- Mak