• virtual music 1
• virtual music 2

As indicated, these are improvisations, not finished pieces, although I did do some tweaking of the Reason 4.0.1 files on my laptop. The set, two improvisations for synthesizer are dedicated to composer James Combs, who does a great job encouraging a bunch of us new music types to contribute improvisations/pieces for his improvfriday twitter feed at the end of every week. There are several of us who have day jobs, write music when we can because we have a strange compulsion to do so, and for the most part are autodidacts or else have very little formal training as composers. We’re the antithesis of the typical academic composer. If Reich/Young/Eastman/Monk/Palestine typify the “downtown” music scene, folks like JC Combs, Dave Seidel, Steve Layton, Paul Bailey, me and a few others represent the “outside.” Most of us are “downtown” in orientation, but unlike the “downtowners,” we don’t form our own ensembles and instead tend to write for virtual instruments since no one is exactly knocking at our doors to perform our music. So I think the term “outside” rather than “downtown” is apt. I do write music intended for “real” musicians, and will continue to do so. But the reality is that most of my works have been heard only because I can use various instrument samples and patches to simulate the real thing. And before I had software and hardware to do this, none of my music had been heard by anyone else for almost 25 years.

So I’m not going to keep writing for samplers and synthesizers to the exclusion of “analog” acoustic instruments. But these two short improvs I think stand on the own fairly well, and might form the basis of a future work for acoustic instruments (just as virtual music 1 was used to a large extent in one part of zichron)