20. Home Game

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 was able to share some of my work with other composers and got access to a couple of opportunities to have my music played. The first was a concert in Brunswick where I played Syzygy, my Triptych for strings and brass on synthesizer, and Footprints in the Snow, a postlude for piano dedicated to a friend I had lost recently to suicide. The second performance opportunity was a reading of my three movement Easter Suite for Flute and Piano by two first rate musicians at the University of Maine in Orono. At that time I also wrote a Fanfare for Trumpet which was used to open a J.R.R. Tolkien conference in England and started recording my work on a four track Tascam Recorder.

Other things I was doing at the time to keep my music chops going included working on and maintaining a classical piano repertoire which I played at monthly concerts of the Portland Rossini Club, recording a demo for a film company, playing pipe organ at some weddings and playing as a substitute for Sunday services at a local church. And finally, the local R & B band I had been playing in morphed into a new band of first rate musicians called Wavelength which was promising until our lead singer had an alcohol related melt-down on stage which caused us to downsize to four pieces. But the live music nightclub business was (and still is) in a slump from which it never recovered which caused Wavelength to ultimately fizzle out. But hope springs eternal, and I'm happy to report that I'm still here.....