And now for some drama. My first theater project was to write a musical called The Skyladder. The Skyladder was an experimental piece...

In addition to getting some of my ensemble pieces performed at the Portland Conservatory, I also presented three solo piano performances....

This blog segment deals with performances of some of my ensemble compositions during my first years at the Portland Conservatory. At...

In my first five years at the Portland Conservatory, the third and most prominent spoke of the teaching wheel was the private piano...

So now we move from a world of unfortunate kids who are locked up, to the world of Rock Camp where kids are dropped off by mom or dad in...

One of my first teaching assignments through the Portland Conservatory was to teach piano and music skills to incarcerated youths at...

The poet Rilke said that "Heartbreak is the handmaiden of art." This was born out in my life for the next several months while I lived in...

In life as in music, transitions can be difficult, scary, and sometimes messy. Without conflict or flaws, there would be little drama. ...

As my live performance opportunities became more limited, I relied increasingly on recordings to push myself to the highest possible...

At this point I wrote about a half dozen more songs and then switched over to instrumentals. I joined the Maine Composer's Forum where I...

I was officially off the road now, secure in the knowledge that you ignore rock and roll at your own peril. During my six years with the...

As anyone who's been reading this can see, I'm all over the musical map from 12 tone fugues to jazz and funk to musicals to top 40 rock...

Once upon a time, there was a world where it was possible to have fun without fear, guilt or recrimination. It was a world where live...

My classified ad connected me with a bass player and a guitar player. The three of us were rehearsing some jazz standards, funk and...

And so the adventure continued.... I had been studying, composing, playing and working in and out of the music business in New York for...

NY has its charms. And before it got too full of itself, it had class and character. As Edna St. Vincent Millay once said, "The presence...

So I had made a really good connection with Warner Brothers Publishing. The work was plentiful and it paid well, for a while.... After a...

So off I went into the world of the self employed music copyist. The first job I did which was provided by my music copying teacher was...

After working a year and a half or so at Portnoy's, I decided it was time to find a job closer to the music, so I found a job printing...

The title of this post may as well be the title of my working life. The next stop on my journey to pay the bills was a wholesale...