Sparks from the Fire

Part 2 — As a producer:

It’s a busy time.  Spent the weekend in the studio working on two projects.  Will spend today, the day after Valentines Day, celebrating 14 year anniversary with the Missus.  I’ll actually take the day off.

The rest of the winter months and spring are loaded with music projects for Watchfire Music – so many that I must get better organized and get my arms around them all.  Here’s a list: (more…)

Part 1 – As a company:

Life is good.  One of my New Years resolutions was to rebalance my life and get back more to my creativity in the recording studio as a composer/producer.  Funny how things just happen when you simply put it out there.

I was feeling like I was getting stuck in the daily excitement of Watchfire Music as an executive with the company and along came more studio projects than I can handle.  All good.  These problems I can live with.  It’s what I live for.

When it rains; it pours.

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Irving Berlin - Playing the black keyes

Great songs have long been a deep and rich part of the American culture and consequently the world culture as well.  I can safely say that it would be any composer/lyricist’s dream to someday write a classic – a song that is so universal and so iconic that it becomes a part of the fabric of history and lives beyond its time.

This century’s, no make it this millennium’s Ira Award for Best Lyricist of classic songs goes to Irving Berlin.  Of course he was also the composer of these songs as well.

The story goes that Mr. Berlin, who had small hands wrote most of his songs in the key of F# because he preferred to play on the black keys of the piano where the stretch was not so large for his fingers.  Later in life, when he could afford it, he had Steinway make him a special upright piano with a large crank on the side that when turned, tightened the strings and thus changed the sounding key of his F# fingerings – sort of a guitar capo for the piano.

This man had his fingers not only on the piano but also on the pulse of America like no other lyricist since.  Among the many great classic songs he wrote were “Alexander’s Ragtime Band”, “Easter Parade”, “White Christmas”, “There’s No Business Like Show Business”, “God Bless America”, “A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody,” “Always”,  “Puttin’ on the Ritz”, and “What’ll I Do”.

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In days long before Watchfire Music was ever even a dream, I was a composer for the Broadway Theater.  While in my early 30s I had had some success as the guy people turned to when they wanted to add a score to their play, much like one might for a movie.

I had already been nominated for the Tony Award for my work in Joseph Papp’s production of Much Ado About Nothing and also had done the similar style scoring for productions like Lincoln Center’s Trelawney Of The Wells and James Lipton’s production of The Mighty Gents with Morgan Freeman on Broadway.

American Playwright Neil Simon

I was offered the opportunity to work with the legendary Neil Simon on his play about Anton Chekov called The Good Doctor. As a young man, I was very excited to work on this wonderful show with the cream of the crop on Broadway.

I also had the opportunity to collaborate with Mr. Simon who wrote his first lyrics for 4 or 5 songs that I composed for the show as well as over an hour’s worth of underscoring and a pre-show “band concert”.

The cast was led by five seasoned Broadway stars – René Auberjonois, Barnard Hughes, Marsha Mason, Frances Sternhagen, who won the Tony Award for her work in the play, and Christopher Plummer who played Anton Chekov.

Tony Walton,  set designer, and Tharon Musser, lighting designer, were two of Broadway’s legendary stars of the theater as creative artists.  Both were people who I was simply in awe of, both consummate professionals.  Neil Simon, Broadway’s most successful playwright, would work with the best.

I loved this show and the entire experience, but like any other show, it had its difficult moments.  When I think back on the experience, one night and a great life lesson jumps out at me.

We were out of town in New Haven at the Shubert Theater.  We were in rehearsal, and working on the set in the theater between previews.  We were having trouble with one of the songs that Neil and I had written for Christopher Plummer.

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I was in my early thirties on a great adventure and had worked very hard for close to 2 years with my dream study and early experiments with Fox’s Dream Method of astral projection. I had read literally hundreds of books on both subjects and spent countless hours contemplating the intricacies of both subjects.

Living as a composer for the theater, I was fortunate not to have a day job and have my mornings free to do this work and exploration. My schedule was my own.

I was experienced, but, looking back, not nearly as experienced as I thought I was. I was officially an astral body traveler, even though I had only gone but several steps from my physical body — once. I was a lot more confident and excited about the great adventures that lay before me that I should have been.

Fox warned over and over again in his writings to not go too fast, too far or too high — to take the first steps slowly. I instinctively knew he was right, but ah impetuous youth!  I was ready for some real astral adventures.

One very early morning before dawn I woke up and decided to snooze – perchance to dream.  And dream I did.

I was walking along the ridge of a great green and beautifully flowered valley. As I walked, I came upon an ancient stairway carved out of the side of the hill that led hundreds of yards down into the valley. I began to descend the stairs, but they were made of earth and rock and were very uneven and old.  Because of the roughness of the footing, I had to watch very carefully where I put my feet so that I would not fall.

I grew impatient with this mode of descent because I wanted to experience the beauty of the valley and get to the bottom quickly, but the descent was awkward and not going quickly enough. I began to trip on the stairs several times in my haste.

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So there I was, about a year and a half into my fascination and exploration of my dreams.  One day while reading one of my myriad books on the subject I came across the following:

“Among the early independent students in the field of astral projection was a self-taught pioneer worker by the name of Oliver Fox.  In the early 20s there appeared a book written by Mr. Fox called “Astral Projection”.  It is now long out of print and copies are hard to come by.  In this book Fox teaches a system of Astral Projection which he calls “The Dream Method”.   Fox says that he discovered the system himself and experimented with it himself for a period of 30 years prior to the date of the publication of the book.”

This, of course captured my attention as an interesting direction for my newly learned knowledge.  I wandered the used bookstores until I found Mr. Fox’s book and then read it with relish.

The basic idea of Fox’s dream method was that a person could, starting with a dream, learn how to “wake” in the midst of the dream and, from that point of awakening, start a train of inner events that could lead to a type of astral projection.

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When I was in my early 30s I became fascinated with the subject of dreams.  At the time I was totally caught up in just about anything that had to do with the paranormal. I was a product of my generation, the sixties, I was a seeker, I was studying the world’s religions; I was also partaking of the world’s fads and anything to do with the exploration of the inner mind.

For two years I read every book I could get my hands on about dreams. All in all it was one of the most beneficial subjects I dabbled in because I used many of the things I learned in my dream study for the rest of my life. I took a course in dream study, self organized, which has influenced me deeply for all these years.

I learned that, as I mentioned last night, we all have 4-5 dreams every night in the course of an eight hour sleep – one about every 90 minutes. I learned about rapid eye movements (REM) and how an observer could tell when the subject was dreaming by these sure signs. I learned that sleep moves like a roller coaster through the night, from sub-consciousness plunging down into unconsciousness (deep sleep) and then back up the hill again to sub-consciousness in that 90 minute span. Then the cycle is repeated.

I learned that soon after the roller coaster reaches the bottom of the hill and turns to start back up, we begin to dream and have these REM. Wake me up the minute I start these REM over and over again for a couple of weeks, in other words, refuse to let me dream and I’ll begin to go crazy in an all too short a time.

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I’ve heard people say, “I don’t dream” or “I had no dreams last night”.  The truth is, all of us dream every night; in fact if we sleep the usual 8 hours we always have one about every 90 minutes or about 5 dream periods per night.  Trouble is, we just don’t remember them or even remember that we had them.

I’ve learned to pay close attention to my dreams.  As stories of the sub-conscious mind, they, if interpreted correctly, are fascinating indications of human behavior and feelings.  Though no expert in the field of dreams, I would call myself a hobbyist of dream analysis.

One of the most famous dream analyzers or dream interpreters was, of course, Joseph, from the Bible who had a colorful coat.  He was pretty good at it and even got himself out of prison with his talent when he interpreted the Pharaoh’s dreams correctly.  How he ever came up with the answers that he came up with, I’ll never know, but his deduction of famine was a doozy.  Very impressive.

Dream interpretation is really pretty easy if you just follow a few basic rules.
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