Beginnings

My musical experience began early because my mother wanted to pursue being an opera singer. She played piano to accompany her talented classically trained voice and, when she wasn’t practicing, both my parents listened to vinyl LPs from many genres several times a week. I had significant early exposure to music and understood my extended family was a musical family. 
 

However, as I grew up and as my mother progressed in a semi-professional pursuit as an opera singer, both parents began strongly discouraging my own pursuit of music. As the result of several years of therapy and counseling, I have come to realize this discouragement was a form of low-level childhood trauma that has resulted in pervasive life-long emotional and psychological damage, clinically known as Childhood Narcissistic Abuse and Complex-PTSD. In my family I was conditioned to accept my circumstances of excessive servitude, which were in reality not normal and quite abusive. As a result of the abuse, I had minimal access to formal musical education, which is why my connection to and experience with music is truly a salvation and an essential component of my healing from the trauma.
 
I now understand that the trauma of my childhood returned to my life in the last several years as a result of several significant people in my life developing jealousies, contempt, and belligerent judgements about the musical efforts I have been engaged in. Unfortunately, I have felt this way too much from a few people in the last years. But, as my composition teacher said from the beginning, embracing music must happen in the "no-shame" zone. And I embrace composing these songs because they heal me and allow me to tell my stories. I really don't care if writing music makes me famous, but if this music becomes well-known and it brings people together, then my own personal miracle would be complete.

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"Singthinking"

At the core of my musical experience is “singthinking.” I have played a few instruments, but my primary musical experience is with my voice. Most of the limited formal musical education I’ve had has been in vocal performance. I am a classically trained singer, but over the last 2 decades, I have sung other genres on stage. I’ve also played flute, guitar, violin, piano, and saxophone in some capacity over the years. Hopefully my retirement from data engineering will provide avenues to re-engage more performance opportunities. I love performing on stage, but right now, composing is my primary musical endeavor.
 

I only recently started composing in April 2019, at a time of personal complex trauma. I needed ways to redirect my thoughts away from past trauma to conscious avenues of growth in several areas. I have experienced the deepest salvation from my past traumas through musical growth because much my deepest trauma resulted from those who were near to me, people who deprived and discouraged my connection with music, my “singthinking.” This was my immediate family experience in childhood and adolescence. Unfortunately, the trauma retriggered during the spring of 2019 with family and at work. But a silver lining was being fascinated by how intuitive the composing software came to me and my musical imagination.

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Contemporary A Cappella Passion

A few years ago, I became involved with a vocal group at work that performed contemporary a cappella music. I became quite passionate about this genre of rhythmic harmonic music, which  gets its signature amazing sounds from the human voice alone. Contemporary a cappella arrangements are based on other modern musical forms that feature elements of a rhythm section in the beatboxing and bass voices. This was a key distinction from the choral singing I had done in the past, in which rhythmic elements often came from accompanying instrumentation. I loved being able to be part of a purely vocal sound with the rhythmic elements coming from the voices themselves. Another key distinction was that my a cappella ensemble performed the music from memory, adding immensely to the performance experience.

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Rhythms in the Harmonies

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As I began to approach writing my own a cappella pieces, having rhythmic elements coming from the vocal parts became imperative, but I also began to recognize that there was definite room to draw rhythmic elements from other voices besides the bass and hand rhythms and/or beatboxing. For example, Catch a Flicker, Catch a Flame involves a rhythmic ostinato partially comprised of a combination of bass, tenor, and alto, along with a percussion. Driving Around and Round Again divided the rhythmic lines in the verses between bass and soprano. I saw a rich palette of possibilities.

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Learning Scales, Notation and More Voices

 

Another area explored was moving from traditional concepts of four-part harmony and rules to richer sounds with five and six parts. Although more parts adds to the richness of the harmonies, it also allows for harmonic collisions, unwanted parallel harmonies, and unexpected dissonances. On the other hand, more than four parts gives you many more chord possibilities. Another area adding to harmonic variety is the significant and deliberate use of modal scales in my music.

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As mentioned in My Story, it was just before the COVID-19 pandemic when I made a musical connection with my composition teacher, John Muehleisen. “I think I could teach you a lot about musical notation,” John said. I knew I needed all the help I could get and was amazed that my new song opened this door to learn composing directly from John, an award winning professional composer in his own right. (https://johnmuehleisen.com/) That February 22nd, 2020 was a most memorable day for me.

Influences, New Genres

 

I have been influenced by many different genres of music. A lot of classical music was played at home in my early years, especially with my mother rehearsing opera parts and arias. By my early teenage years, I developed my own classical music preferences separate from the opera my mother listened to and performed, and I was also getting into the amazing sounds in rock and pop music emerging in the late 60s and 70s. Every decade since then brings a new genre or two into my musical consumption. Jazz in the 80s, a little country and grunge in the 90’s and more hip hop in my listening since 2000. I am also strongly drawn to progressive and alternative genres, Latinx music and rhythms, and even sacred and gospel at times. I love it all!

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​About Alphasongs

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​The Greek letter alpha in Alphasongs is intended to be a moniker representing a plethora of pertinent "A" words I hope to attribute to these songs, including Amazing, Aspiring, Ambitious, Alluring, and Awesome Acapella Adventure!! In the logo, there are 2 notes above the Alpha note, representing a couple of friends who were angels that helped begin this journey for me. And now I can add ASCAP to the mix. Alphasongs LLC is an ASCAP Music Publishing member, and I am an ASCAP Writer member as both a Lyricist and Composer.

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Possibilities

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I believe my works have many possibilities for orchestration and ensemble size. The primary conceptual orchestration for my works is small to medium vocal ensembles with single to several voices per part. Some of these pieces have written hand rhythm parts (clapping, etc.) which are suggested but optional. There’s also room for more improvisational vocal percussion or beatboxing to be worked into the performance of these pieces, even the ones without written hand-rhythm parts. One thing allowed with the software I use is to easily remix the parts with a variety of instrumental sounds. I would be open to scoring my works for different instruments and orchestrations if requested.
 
So now, in private moments, I record my “singthinking” and later gather the thoughts onto score via the composition software, both Musescore and Finale. I assemble lyrical thoughts in my music journal, which contains many lesson notes from John as well as lyrical ideas. And now I’m humbly beginning to put songs together, a lifelong dream and an endeavor that I seek as long as I can continue to grow with it. It’s a special journey that I’m very thankful to pursue.

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General Performance Notes

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Every Alphasongs score has a Performance Notes section for that specific song but in general I think there are some performance notes that apply to the Alphasongs catalog in general. And now that I am doing work on musical theatre projects, I think there are some general performing concepts to introduce across the catalog.

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A key element of good contemporary a cappella is incorporating rhythm in the vocal parts. This is done through having some voices provide an "instrumental" foundation using syllable vocalizations, vocal percussion, and body percussion. Percussion is a definite enhancement to the rhythmic vitality of these works. I do write clapping parts on most of the songs but these are generally intended to work as a starting point for more improvisational beatboxing, which is preferred if the performers have the experience and ability.

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On top of that "instrumental" foundation comes the lyrical elements of the song sung in melodies and harmonies. In some songs, there can be a definite lead or solo part that is most involved with singing or even sometimes rapping the lyrics of the song.  In general, the more prominent the lead part there is in the song, the less likely the song will work for larger ensembles. But there are many songs in the catalog that have less prominent lead parts and might work well for larger vocal groups.

 

In the current catalog, I would suggest these songs for larger ensembles:

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At the Central Square
Come My Way
Dreams Shine Like the Sun
Driving Around and Round Again
Interurban Fanfare
Itsy Bitsy
Joscelyne Strong
Move Forward
My America (with Solo Tenor)
Seeds Of Change
Sing It Forward
Somewhere Under the Rainbow