Mark and Adrian are her sons (1991/2012) from String Quartet

August 8, 2012

On 31 August 2012 at New Hall, Sydney Grammar School, my dear friends the Acacia Quartet will perform Mark and Adrian are her sons, an excerpt from my composition String Quartet which is an ongoing memoir I’ve been writing since 1988. I tell the story behind the work below. A recording of this performance will […]

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New album on iTunes: Rendezvous with Destiny (with Bob Carr)

July 12, 2012

This is very exciting: this week, the new recording of Rendezvous with Destiny went on sale on iTunes. And in coming weeks, it will also be available on Amazon, Spotify, eMusic, Google Play, Last.fm, Myspace Music, Rhapsody, Spotify and other digital outlets. You can hear a preview of the work here. You can read the […]

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The Moon Never Beams (Part 2)

May 21, 2012

In his book Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond coined something he called ‘The Anna Karenina Principle’. It’s based on the famous first sentence of Tolstoy’s novel – “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Diamond is an evolutionary biologist. He developed the Anna Karenina Principle to explain […]

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The Moon Never Beams (Part 1)

May 13, 2012

You are the cause of every meaning in the world that you perceive. In 1986, Patrick Duffy’s parents Marie and Terrence Duffy were shot dead by two teenagers trying to rob the tavern they owned in Montana. Though I’m not Buddhist, I come across a lot of Buddhists – quite regularly, in fact. I’m sure […]

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Untitled, for Steve (from Solo Piano)

March 18, 2012

Untitled, for Steve (2008/2012) I wrote this piece as a gift for Steve Pavlina in December 2008, and revised it some three years later. In mid-2008 I was beginning to realise how much I’d been living in a fog. It took catching glimpses of clarity to understand the fog was even there. There’s an old […]

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Wisconsin Cowboy Lullaby (from Solo Piano)

March 18, 2012

Wisconsin Cowboy Lullaby (1989) There’s almost nothing to this very short story. But I’m telling it because it led me to write a piece of music I’ve grown quite fond of over the years. It was October 1989 and I was at a sparsely attended Homecoming game at Camp Randall, the stadium in Madison where […]

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Performances in March: Liberty & The Pursuit

March 1, 2012

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December from “Then, gently, the world began anew.”

December 20, 2011

No matter what the song says, what the world needs now isn’t love. Not the garden-variety love people think of, anyway. It needs the special kind of unconditional love called forgiveness. Christmas and New Year hold such power and it’s nothing to do with religion. After all, Christmas is not the most important feast of […]

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November – from “Then, gently, the world began anew.”

November 23, 2011

Meatballs on Old Smokey mountain. There’s this song, I’m sure you know it. On Top of Spaghetti is a frivolous children’s ditty about the fate of a meatball that rolls off a mound of spaghetti because someone sneezed. The lyrics are by singer Tom Glazer (who’d regretted writing it to his dying day), but the […]

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October – from “Then, gently, the world began anew.”

October 9, 2011

Life (and the universe and everything, to borrow from Douglas Adams) is intent on giving us second chances. From what? Well, from life, the universe and everything – from mistakes, from illness, from choices made. From natural disasters and other acts of God. Inevitably, an installment of this calendar would deal with recovery, since one of […]

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