(UPDATE: This piece is now included on my album A World With No Tears)

In Greek mythology there were nine muses–the goddesses of the Arts–and Euterpe (”you-TER-pay”) was the muse of Music.

I’ve written an awful lot of music and worked hard at my craft for a long time–the music on this site is only the tip of the iceberg of the total amount of music I’ve written. Nevertheless, there are so many times in the process of writing music that it almost has a mind of its own—ideas come that seem too good for me to have thought of. I ascribe those moments to Euterpe, and then my years of experience can take those embryonic ideas and nurture them into something.

My last ‘new music’ was a piece for piano, so I had planned on this one being something for armonica. But apparently Euterpe had different ideas!

This piece came about from a recent experience with a dear friend. One of the archetypal stories in mythology is of the ‘hero’–an otherwise ordinary person who is one day dragged kicking and screaming down to Hades, and they manage to crawl and fight their way back to the ordinary world. Not everyone makes it out of Hades, but those that do emerge from the Subterranean Realm transformed, with gifts for their fellow humanity that they couldn’t have acquired any other way. (Joseph Campbell has a great book on this: The Hero with a Thousand Faces–a favorite of mine.)

Many people have had this experience in their lives, where they go through some personal Hell, refuse to be defeated by it, and do the incredible Inner Work required to recover. And they succeed! But there are always scars. And sometimes they just ache, and all that can really be offered is a Hug. Perhaps a Musical Hug. Such as this piece…

• Here’s the complete MP3 of A World With No Tears (6:06)
• Here’s the first 20 seconds
• Here’s the score to A World With No Tears for you pianist types.

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As always, MP3s are on the ‘honor system’–if my music does something for you, do a little monetary something for me and

Obviously I’m making a switch from doing nothing but the glass armonica to including the piano also. I should say something about that.

A constant challenge for me and the glass armonica is that folks have no basis of comparison for knowing whether I’m any good at what I’m doing or not. How many other glass armonica players do folks know? (Um, zero?)  Now I don’t care about that personally, but it is definitely a problem in terms of marketing myself. For example, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people come up after a performance and say: “That looks easy. Let me try.” Sometimes I let them try (…”oh, it’s a lot harder than it looks!”) but that is a dangerous path: it’s too easy for things to degenerate into what I call the ‘glass armonica petting zoo’ where everyone wants to try it and things too easily can get out of hand–with my $20,000 instrument made of glass. It’s just a bad idea.

So I’ve decided to incorporate the piano. EVERYONE can recognize a capable pianist in about 10 seconds. Maybe even start concerts with piano–”ah, this guy really IS a musician.” THEN, having established my musicianship, I can do things on the armonica as well.

To paraphrase the immortal words of Bill Clinton, “It’s the music, stupid.” Ultimately the whole point is to get past the novelty, and even “me William”, to get to a musical experience that moves people. Which is the whole point in doing all of this. Getting stuck on issues like “that’s novel” or “anyone could do that”–those are impediments to The Music. When it’s easy to dispose of those issues, why not?

Plus, I’m a capable pianist. No reason not to share that too!

I just finished a new piece for organ solo, composed for the First United Methodist Church of Redlands, CA. (They have a very fine Beckerath pipe organ.)

The Methodist church was founded by John Wesley (1703-1791). In 1735 Wesley had sailed from England to Savannah, Georgia. During that voyage a storm came up and broke the mast off the ship. While the English aboard all panicked, the Moravians calmly sang hymns and prayed, all of which had a profound impact on Wesley. His ministry in Georgia was a failure, and in 1738 he returned to England depressed and beaten. Still impressed by the Moravians, he attended one of their meetings. About that meeting he later penned the now famous lines “my heart was strangely warmed”. It was the turning point in his career.

• Here’s the mp3 (approx. 6 minutes long).
• Here are the first 20 seconds
• Here’s the the score

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As always, MP3s are on the ‘honor system’–if my music does something for you, do a little monetary something for me and