Origin Story
“All those years spent seeking enlightenment and all I needed was a piano!”
I was blessed with a family that encouraged music. An early memory is of classical music playing on multiple radios throughout the house. I began piano lessons at age 6 at the Yamaha school in Hamilton. I still occasionally hear musical phrases in the formative ‘doh, re, mi’ language that I learned there.
A year later I began Saturday morning group violin lessons in the Suzuki method.
Within a few years I was receiving private tuition for both instruments which continued until I finished high school, playing in various groups and orchestras along the way.
During high school, when rock music predominated (it was the 90s), I discovered a passion for jazz, especially the violinist Stephan Grapelli. I began experimenting with jazz chords and progressions and awoke an innate ability for improvisation. I used to make myself jazz backing tapes on the computer and go busking in the city playing jazz violin.
My first inkling of interest in composition came at high school music where I was introduced to ‘Encore’ music notation software on the new Macintosh Plus computers. The weekends I was able to borrow the computer and midi keyboard from the school were when I first experienced creative flow and inspiration.
I’d do nothing but write music the whole day. This was pure innocent inspiration and total enjoyment.
At the same time, through my music lessons and school music studies I was being exposed to many classical composers. I loved the impressionists and the romantics, I would borrow CDs and scores from the public library and paw over them as I listened.
I developed my aptitude for composition, by pure interest and absorption.
During my final year of school I composed two pieces for orchestra which won a University competition for young composers, the prize for which was a trip to Dunedin to have my pieces played by the [then] Dunedin Sinfonia conducted by the late Jack Spiers. The pieces were subsequently played on the National Radio station.
I knew then, that I was a composer.
The following year I began a major in composition at Victoria University in Wellington. These were intensely formative years for me as a young man socially but in hindsight I recognise that the music curriculum at the time was unfortunately unbalanced by a major bias towards the ‘atonal school’ and totally lacking any grounding of standard composition technique so there was no support for building on what I’d already discovered for myself thru playing in orchestras and reading about orchestration etc.
Throughout musical history, the mentor relationship has been a cornerstone of honing a composer’s style. Unfortunately I didn’t find a mentor. At university to study music, I lost sight of my original innocent inspiration to compose.
If music has to be explained, it has missed the point.
Immediately after completing university, I went to a New Year’s music festival with some friends, during which I had a sort of spontaneous ‘spiritual epiphany’. I became interested in meditation and began a journey of self enquiry.
Some years later I was living in Auckland and I decided to attend a Vipassana ten day silent meditation retreat. I was profoundly changed by the concentrated self enquiry. I needed to get out of the city and went to live off-grid in the Coromandel bush for a couple of years.
Later, now in Christchurch, I found myself drawn into living in an intentional community, which was to become my whole life and focus for more than fifteen years. Much important learning and self discovery came during my first few years there. I went to retreats in many different countries and met people from all over the world who, like me, were interested in self enquiry.
I began to be able to recognize the difference between Me, and my thoughts, and to know a deep stillness behind everything.
During this time, while I continued to play music here and there and create some ambient electronic pieces for meditation, the musical inspiration dwindled. For a while my creativity was channeled into graphic design, but it wasn’t my natural creative language and there was no flow as I’d know with composition. Eventually I ended up in business administration.
At this point left brain logic entirely dominated my work and my creativity was at an all time low.
I began to recognize incrementally that I’d lost myself in the insular belief systems of the community. Over a few years I slowly drew away and grew a new life together with my partner. I went thru a crisis period of giving up on the deeply instilled ideal of becoming self realized and coming to terms with being an ordinary, possibly mediocre, man.
Where I had once been full of innocence and inspiration for life, I found myself quite cynical. I began to deeply question why I no longer felt any of the inspiration I had had in my teens and early twenties when I would spend hundreds of hours working on a piece music.
I hadn’t know then that inspiration could leave me. I hadn’t understood its preciousness.
As if in answer to my questions, life led me, in the way it does, to purchase a beautiful piano. This was an instrument beyond anything I had ever owned, perfect clarity and warm tone; a joy to play… and as I played it I began to rediscover my love for musical expression and composition. I began to write again!
All that time spent seeking enlightenment and all I needed was a piano!
Inspiration fully returned while camping at the Mōkihinui river mouth over Christmas 2023. I wrote a set of four pieces for clarinet and string ensemble, evocative of different natural aspects of the area and brimming with that original innocence from before University. With this, I came to finally realise that…
I have to write music… it’s who I am and it’s what my life is for.
On my first day back at work in 2024 I let them know I’d be leaving later in the year to concentrate on music. Over those following months I completed about twenty new works. I would take a week off work each month to compose. I was finally moving on with my life and the music was back.
Within an hour of leaving work on my final day I felt the power and lightness of new freedom, as my beliefs of the everyday life lived for ‘security’ fell away and the certainty that a different way is possible took their place. A way where right and left brain work in harmony - groundedness and logic meeting inspiration and flow.
I’m past half way and I’m not scared anymore. I’m ready for my life now. Cue the Music!
