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Best Teacher Award

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Gigmasters - Booking Online Since 1997

Piano , Keyboard,Classical Style, Pop Songs, Beatles, Motown, Chopinesque, Old Music, New Music, Christmas, Techno, New Age, Old Age. Short Notice OK.

ICE SKATING OR GYMNASTIC PROGRAMS YOUR MUSIC OR MINE QUICK TURNAROUND. ONE CHAMPION with QUEEN OF UKRAINE. E-MAIL for details.

Here are some links to CDs, one titled ICONS (piano) the other ASTERISK (mixed piano, techno, new age.)

I composed a piano concerto. See that musical score up there on top of this page? Click on it and you can get a rough idea of how an orchestra would sound if they played the piece. Its a piano concerto in one movement.

Some Recital Repertoire

Music I composed: Queen of the Ukraine, For a Figure Skater, The Black Madonna (This is the piano solo, not performed by computer, that goes with the orchestral score, which your computer will play for you if you click the musical score at the top of the page.), Cafe Mozart, Notre Dame...

CDBABY

My favorite challenging repertoire is the Grieg Piano concerto. I like the Chopin piano concerto in E minor too, and I have made a version for small recitals also without orchestra.

Some institutions I perform for, have me come in and play pop music. I bring in keyboards and even guitars and play music you hear by clicking the colored buttons. A hand injury in 1998 forced me to find a way to keep the recital dates on the calendar as a right handed pianist. The events were informal enough to sing some songs and they wanted to do more songs.

HOME Challenge me with anything true.

Family

I have had Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim and other Christian piano students that get along fine with me. I have also been pleased to have been acquainted with some good people that don't make a statement of faith, but I am Catholic and I hope......

To Rise From The Dead by the power of Jesus Christ

Compositions:

The Black Madonna began as i dashed between the radio where i just heard a Mahler Symphony in C# minor and the piano where i found a C# then made a minor chord and then began to find the 4th and the 5th chords of the C sharp minor scale that go with it. (F#m and G#).There is nothing new about this kind of composing.

It requires a tremendous amount of dedication, no its AMBITION, to see through to the completion of a piece of work like a piano concerto. Coming from the void of non-existence, arriving at a chaos of themes that switch in and out randomly as a composer forges his way through drills and exercises of arpeggios and scales and various improvisations in C# minor, the solo begins to take some form. Then maybe a framework or plan...Loud abrupt beginning, tranquil after that... growing in drama and building in instrumentation...to a sort of climax, and key change from the somber minor to a triumphant major key, then recapitulate Recapitulate... A term for repeating some part. Finally .. the cadenza... the solo where the holsters its instruments for a few minutes and the pianist shows his stuff and the drama of the composition is highlighted... before the orchestra comes back in to join the soloist for a grandiose ending.

Just like anyone, for a composer there are ANGRY days...days when YOU'RE IN LOVE.. depressed days......days when you think you can CONQUER SOMETHING!!!... and all the themes can come out in the music when emotion makes them gush forth more easily than the days of the routine grind.

I wish i had written the Grieg Piano concerto... but i didn't. So I would check the score and get some ideas, because Edward Grieg is dead and i can't ask him about his approach to this work. I took some structural ideas from the Grieg piano concerto: Dramatic intro, forte or loud, into a tranquil theme... some variations, repeat it in a second half, ...a cadenza and a dramatic finish. I checked Tschiakowsky's violin concerto for some more ideas, where in the first movement where he got scored an 18 minute movement without a key change. Some of the musical impressions of Rodrigo's guitar Concerto D' Aranuez, and even the theme from the t.v. show The Virginian, and other musical themes came into my imagination from music I heard even as a kid. One professor of composition that I heard n the forest at the summer conservatory in Northern Michigan had said, "You don't compose with your HANDS! You compose with your mind!" I didn't reply to that. I just contrasted it against the hours and hours that I hacked crudely at the piano keys, working the themes over and over to form them into some logical progression.

Well if you click on the SCORE page above you will hear the results of my composing the BLACK MADONNA PIANO CONCERTO. At the moment it is a midi file. midi = Musical Instrument Digital Interface. The computer plays all the dots of each note in the score. However, it is distorted because the midi file was created as a byproduct of scoring the music for publishing. The other way to do it, is to inter all the notes in a "sequencer" or sequencing software and tweak them to sound like a performance. In other words, one system of arranging the notes is just for printing for real musicians, but it can be played by a computer. The other system is entering the notes with the goal of having a result SOUND like an orchestra played it, and you don't have to beg, plead or pay an orchestra to perform your music. An example of this would be "AMERICAN ANTHEM" which you can hear by clicking one of the buttons in the button section. Sometimes you want it to sound like you had a real orchestra, sometimes you don't care because well... take a listen to AMERICAN ANTHEM and you'll see where I didn't care if it didn't sound like an orchestra after a while. Either scoring music on paper or sequencing it for a recording, it takes a lot of time and focus. Tschaikowsky used to go to the wilderness. I think it was Puccinni, who said he composed all his work while everyone else slept.

Queen of the Ukraine..... This piece began on a Saturday morning on a quick dash between the radio and the piano. I just heard a song sung by the Red Army called Polushka Pole.' The song was about the galloping cavalry. I was watching the 1994 Olympics and Oksana Baiul just won the gold medal in figure skating. So this cool idea was going to be a piece of exciting figure skating program music. It took 45 minutes to rough it out. For the next year i polished it. I lived in Poland four months of that year. and Four months the year before. The piano professor that I knew at the University of Warsaw (Chopin Academy, Andrezej Dutkiewicz.) critiqued the piece for me once. I asked him where he thought i got the idea for The Queen of the Ukraine. Being Polish he was very familiar with Polushka Pole' He was surprised when i told him I got the idea from Polushka Pole' but he thought the new one was a beautiful piece.

Queen of Poland, was one of the few that I tried to score on paper before i played it. I am a good improviser and I find that I can make a new piece of performance much more easily than I can score a paper score. It is much more practical too. I have more people interested in live performance than paper music.

There are many other pieces. Some of them are interesting I think. Most of the pieces were odes to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

See the little red ICON at the top of the page? It was an 8 1/2 by 11 that I blew up from the size of a about 3 by 4 inches on a prayer book that the priests gave me in Poland. On the front it says in Russian alphabet Krev Krista Spacee Nas. In English this means "Blood of Christ Save us." I walked up to the side of the ice rink in Connecticut to ask Sergei Grinkov if I could interest them in listening to this music and maybe they could use it in their ice skating program. Kids were swarming him for autographs. It was August 1995. He looked so tired because he just came off the ice from his workout... well I just said, "Hard work being a star huh?... especially the details!" as the kids thronged around him. Well God Bless Sergei Grinkov.

here's how i do a starlift.

Well in a little while I showed the score to Oksana Baiul, who was walking along with Victor Petrenko... she just grabbed it and said, "I don't know nothing about music notes." (or something like that) and then she put her signature on it and Victor Petrenko grabbed it and signed it. Well thanks, but I didn't even think of an autograph. I wanted to give them the score and a recording of Queen of the Ukraine and then they would use my music, or so I thought. I was an Olympic figure skater music program composer wannabee.

Oh well. I had my piano in my car and a job to do in a nearby parish... so seeya later. Dozvidahnya Spyceba!

Later, in Virginia, one of my piano students really liked Queen of the Ukraine and she used it for her ice skating program. I recorded it at 1 minute and 30 seconds when she was little, then 2 minutes when she was older and finally she won a big championship with it. Well, I suppose if it was really big, you would have heard of her and my music already.

KIDART

MULCAHY MULCAHY MULCAHY