Not sure what I’m trying to accomplish here, so I guess I’ll just address things as they come to mind.
I’ve been doing this microtonal thing for quite a few years now (here’s an interesting bit of history…
Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup makemicromusic Ralph Jarzombek's Microtonal Music) and so I’m kind of at a crossroads as to what part microtonal music should play in my future. Recently there have been two significant developments in my life:
1. I had been using freewebs.com to host the website for my microtonal compositions, but recently Vistaprint shut down all the freewebs websites and so now my microtonal compositions don’t have a home. I don’t know if many people had been listening to them the past few years (I wasn’t keeping track of that data) and so I’m not sure what I want to do with them at this point. Since my first microtonal compositions had been on the freewebs website since the early 2000’s, the website had made it onto some microtonal music lists on the internet over the years, and so now I guess those links will just go nowhere.
2. I was recently diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer, and so with other things in my life having become much more important, I don’t see me composing any microtonal music, at least not in the near future. I didn’t really seem to have much time to dedicate to composing microtonal music even before I was diagnosed with prostate cancer anyway, and it doesn’t help that I‘m not a prolific composer in the first place. Since I composed those early microtonal pieces, it has been encouraging to hear the quality of microtonal music being composed since that time, and I would like to think that in at least some small way my microtonal compositions influenced other composers in their composition of microtonal music and that my microtonal compositions helped more people enjoy listening to microtonal music. I feel pretty good that the small group of people who were into microtonal music when I started has grown to a much bigger group of people, and that so many more people are interested and are talking about microtonal music. I guess it comes with seeing my mortality much more clearly at this point in my life, but rather than use any available time I might have to compose more microtonal music, I feel the time would be better spent passing on ideas and discoveries I made while composing microtonal music over the years to other composers (there are some things I had planned to use for composing future microtonal pieces but never got around to it, but hopefully someone else will be able to put them to good use), and if it is helpful to someone in their composition of microtonal music, then I feel I would have accomplished my goal.
Perhaps we’ll just have to wait and see how things turn out for me. I am hopeful you will be hearing from me every now and then.
All compositions are in 14edo unless otherwise indicated.
From this point onwards, the names of the pieces are the date they were composed.