My Music
Click on the titles to hear the selections. Sound will vary depending on the sound card you're using. Most media players will have to be stopped before you can play another piece, or you'll get a "device in use" error.
"The 1st of 21"
I wrote this for my high school music theory final project. We performed all of the projects in class on (I think) the last day of school. My arrangement had parts for 9 or 10 high school musicians, none of whom had seen their poorly legible parts before the day we, uh, performed it. Perhaps "decimated" would be a better word. Recently I entered it into a sequencer so I could hear what it was supposed to have sounded like. I still like it even though four bars in the middle sound suspiciously like the theme from one of my favorite old TV shows (recently made into a movie I didn't like...). I don't remember the meaning of the title but the melody was supposed to have conveyed the angst of being an unloved teenage guy, oh this too too solid flesh, and all that nonsense.
"Winter"
Around the time of those brilliant performances of our senior projects our teacher, Mrs. Williams, said to our class, mostly college-bound seniors, "None of you are actually going to major in Music, are you?" Despite this encouragement I boldly went on to major in Music Theory at college. This little piano piece was written for an exercise in the sonata form for my freshman music theory class (taught byDr. Beeler, one of my favorite teachers).
"Can't Wait (To See The Sun Again)"
This MIDI file contains an instrumental version of the chorus for a song I never finished. The words had something to do with a nuclear holocaust; I'll spare you and omit them here. It's a bit repitious as is. Sorry about that, it was supposed to be just a short intro which led into a pulverizing P. Floyd-style wall of sound. I'll get to that one of these days.
"Dream", excerpts
Theory majors were required to take several semesters of composition. For the most part, these turned out to be the kind of classes you look forward to but but end up hating. After two or three meetings of Dr. Timm's composition class I thought it would be the worst of the worst. I started writing what I thought was a neat little rock-classical piece and brought it to class. After I sat at the piano showing it to him and the rest of the students in the group, he spent the rest of the hour ripping me and the piece to shreds, verbally. I don't think I've ever been as angry at a teacher as I was then; maybe at anybody. One of his comments was that it was an "arrangement", not a "composition". I don't remember what else he said but it felt like he'd said I was an "insect ", not a "person". I came that close to leaping over the piano and doing something that would have allowed me to spend the rest of my college years making license plates in confinement. But I didn't, and he left me alone for the next three or four weeks while he ripped the rest of the class to shreds, one at a time (those guys deserved it, too), and I went off and wrote a long piece which I called "Dream". Two short excerpts of it are presented here. Although it seemed astoundingly complex and revolutionary to me when I wrote it, it's really pretty tame. But Dr. Timm liked it, and told the class so. We only had four people left in the class by that time, unfortunately.
These days I do a little recording of MIDI and audio on a computer … Here's a small excerpt in two formats: the 1st is a monstrous .WAV file which contains about 10 seconds of sound. The 2nd is an MP3, so you need an MP3 player to listen to it, but it's longer, about half of the actual song.
Spike's Revenge (wav, excerpt)
Spike's Revenge (mp3, longer excerpt)
Music has always been a big part of my life. As a kid I dreamed of someday becoming another Paul McCartney, John Fogarty or Jimmy Page. After I begged my parents for years to get me a guitar, they finally gave in when I was eleven and bought me an inexpensive nylon-string acoustic for Christmas. In my early teenage years, learning to play the guitar became a way for me to develop self-esteem and discipline. I saved $100 and replaced the nylon-string with a Fender Mustang electric; later I replaced that with a Gibson L6-S (a great ax). And I kept learning. I worked out the parts to Led Zeppelin and Kiss records by playing the 33 1/3 RPM records at 16 RPM (an octave lower, and half as fast). In junior high I formed bands with friends (including Darryl Duncan, John Reynolds, Doug Lefler, Mike Henderson, and Robert Marcum -- hey, guys!). At Eastern Kentucky University I majored in music and played guitar for several semesters in their jazz band (I confess I never liked jazz that much, but it was a great broadening of my musical education). And there were other bands, most of which fizzled before we played "out". In 1981 I joined what I still consider to be a great local band, Prisoner. There were several different lineups but the one I liked best was Eddie Riley, Ray Adams, Neil Singletary and myself. During the mid-80s we played lots of bars and other places around central Kentucky. We never made a record or made much money but those were some of the greatest experiences of my life.
And yet all through the fun, there was a growing dislike of music as practiced in academia, and the realization that I did not want to pursue a Ph.D. in music and teach so-called twentieth century compositional techniques (most of which, including atonality, are worthless outside the classroom). Nor did I want to keep travelling around and playing in bars; I just didn't have the looks or competitive personality for that kind of life. So my long-suffering but patient parents let me finish my music degree and go back to the knowledge trough for more classes, including computer electronics and, later, programming. (Computer programming -- what a great job! What would I have done in the dark ages, or the 1940s? I'd had to actually work for a living! Shudder!).
Today I'm a parent and computer programmer and still enjoy making music when I have time. Some of the music I wrote for school projects has made it into MIDI files, so I've shared them here.
I sincerely doubt that anybody would be interested, but if you'd like to use these on a personal web page, or for any other non-profit application, feel free to do so, but I'd appreciate it if you'd give me credit by name (it'd probably look silly if you used my social security number).
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ã Copyright David T. Jarvis 1997