Beautiful - 1 Minutes 39 Seconds

Short, delicate piece written for strings and piano that gave me hope

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Follow Your Dreams – that’s what they say. Move to Los Angeles, become a Rock Star – or not. Choose to study, to practice - to the detriment of the normal niceties that are supposed to accompany a life. Everybody has their own journey and no-one’s is the same...

I live in terror of not being good enough, of being the delusional incompetent who has spent his time unwisely and probably selfishly in pursuit of something that was never going to be. I suspect that every creative lives with this, although I’m pretty sure that people like B.B King or Paul McCartney don’t sweat the small stuff anymore.

This piece had something in it that allowed me to continue; to believe that if I just worked hard enough and long enough, that everything would be OK. It’s not really music2work2, more of a marker on the way to what music2work2 would become, but it gave me hope at a very dark time and for that – I called it Beautiful.

The photo is my beautiful wife - Wendi - on our wedding day

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Jax Wedding Theme - 5 Minute 27 Seconds

String piece written for Jackie's wedding. Always thought this would work well for the signing of the register - very pensive, subtle but uplifting

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When I first started to develop these sessions, I would get people to give me two numbers; one between 45 and 200 and one between 2 and 13. I used these to set the tempo of the piece and the time signature. As I started playing with different numbers I started to use any combination: birthdates, meeting dates, age, etc, etc to come up with a tempo and signature to start with. This session's tempo and signature were set by combining the birthdays of the happy couple and then applying a "Top-Secret" algorithm.

When I think of wedding pieces, I am heavily influenced by the traditional church ceremonies I experienced growing up. As a Cathedral Chorister I loved the big sweeping sounds the church organ would make and the sheer size of the pieces that we would sing. When writing this piece I was thinking of how this would sound in a huge space played by a large orchestra - the keys that come in at the end are an indication of where the piece was going.

Jax is happily married to Chris and they have twins - another good outcome!

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