My Adventures in Writing Music – Part One

It was my fiftieth birthday and when I got up that morning I decided to celebrate by giving myself the day to do anything I wanted – something that I had always wanted to try and had never allowed myself time to do. I decided to try to write music. It seems unbelievable that I had been playing piano since the age of four and had never tried to write music of my own. It just never entered my head that I would be able to do this. I didn’t believe I was intelligent enough.

When I began composing, the music and lyrics would flow out in complete form. I would sit on the couch in the evening watching TV and writing words and music at the same time. Sometimes I didn’t even listen to them until the next day. Many of them were about places and things and events in Colorado. I wrote songs about everything and everybody. I realize now that the compositions followed my own experiences with music. I worked my way through folk music, country, blues, pop, show music, even some rock, and then the music started turning spiritual with new age lyrics about a visionary world.

At one point I was in contact with one I called Frances, as I spelled it for a long time until it was corrected to Francois. A couple of years after that the last name came down and it was Couperin. Francois Couperin was a famous French composer and musician, a harpsichordist for the court of Louis IV and the teacher of the royal princes and princesses.

A year later, I began to receive information from a spiritual source that flowed the same way as the music. Some of the information came from a being named Sashuyon and one of his former incarnations had been as Tchaikovsky and this is where the Russian influence came from in the music.

Eventually I was in touch with the Musical Universe and the Science of Music started coming through. This science will give the world much needed new technology by applying music to seven established sciences for new ways of healing not only humans but also the earth herself.

The day I decided to start composing music, the first song I wrote was entitled “Walk, Walk, Walk with the Angels.” I hated it. I didn’t want to write religious songs. Then I realized that while writing the song I was seeing a vision of angels parading across the top of Grand Mesa, a 14,000 flat top mountain close to my home in Grand Junction. I decided it was meant to be and went on to write another song. This one turned out to be very different. It was about the female singer in my dance band. It continued on from there.

One evening while driving to choir practice a song started coming through and I had to write it on a piece of paper while driving the car. This was kind of hard to do and also kind of dangerous. This song was entitled “When the Columbine Turns Blue Again” and was inspired by a trip we had made up onto the Grand Mesa to cut firewood for our fireplace. I was later informed that this was a reflection on a previous life I had.

By the time I had twenty-five songs written I decided to write a musical play and fit the songs into it. I called this play “Boomtown, U.S.A.” Our area was a boomtown at this time based on the oil shale development that was going on at this time in western Colorado. (This play will soon be available on my website www.chrysalispub.com).
As I worked the songs into the plays, I began hearing arrangements for them and tried to incorporate these arrangements into the piano accompaniment. Most of the music in this group was of a country western flavor. Besides piano, I playedorgan, accordion, guitar, mandolin and violin and my sister and I sang at various events as teenagers. I know this influenced these early songs.

The music eventually became a little more in the line of pop music with some influence by early 50s rock and roll. It still didn’t stop me from writing about everyone and everything. One night as I went into choir practice I heard someone ask “Where’s Joe.” The answer that came back from another member was “Joe’s not here.” This became the title of another song and was in the blues genre. This happened quite often.

For some songs I drew from events that took place in my childhood. The song “Daddy was a Bootlegger” was a true story because my Dad was a bootlegger. He ran a still in the blackberry bushes on our property and he quite often spent some time in jail when caught. My Mother hated this song, but did like most of my other work.