The “Muse Room” is the room in my house where I make music and my wife makes visual art. Published the first Friday of the month, each issue of Letters from the Muse Room includes news and updates about my music, as well as something that has inspired me creatively over the past month.
Dear friends,
This past week we’ve felt the first stirrings of spring in Kansas City — temperatures in the 50s and 60s instead of the 20s and 30s. It’s been glorious. I hope you’re enjoying the same where you are!
On the news front, I am so. very. close. to being done with the piano trio! I’m incorporating feedback from some musician friends and working on extracting the parts*. Then it’s on to the next project — more on that next month!
*While the piano music will have the violin and cello parts in it, the violin music will only have the violin part, and the cello music will only have the cello part. The process of creating those is called “extracting the parts,” since you’re “extracting” them out of the full score.
The title of the trio is Always Be Clipping. The hardest concerts for an audio engineer to record and mix are ones with sudden loud sounds or ones with both very loud and very soft sounds, because the audio is always running the risk of clipping (overloading the recording equipment and distorting the sound). I wrote Always Be Clipping to be a fun piece that presents this challenge on purpose.
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I have two pieces of inspiration for you this month.
The first is a quick one. I learned this past week about Emmanuel Chabrier (1841-1894), a French Romantic composer. Like many other composers before him, he was pressured by his father to go into law. He dutifully attended law school and then worked for the French government for 19 years, continuing to compose on the side. Then, at age 39, he left his job to compose full time.
As I’m a composer in his mid-30s who wants to compose full time, but for now works a day job, this was very encouraging to me.
The other thing that inspired me this past month was a band called Ida Mae. I wrote back in December that I took my wife to see a Rodrigo y Gabriela concert, and Ida Mae was the band that opened for them. I bought their CD at the show, and finally got around to listening to it this last month.
They’re a husband-and-wife duo from the UK who play and sing music inspired by American blues, and they were one of the best opening acts I’ve ever seen at a pop music show.
The blues-guitar and slide-guitar playing is spectacular (check out My Girl is a Heartbreak), the singing is gritty in a bluesy way (Reaching), the vocal harmonies are great (Chasing Lights, probably my favorite track of theirs) and the music is a lot of fun.
I say in my artist statement that pop music, for me, is a dynamic medium of energy and movement. Ida Mae’s music — just like Rod and Gab’s — makes me want to move. And I want to write music that moves people in the same way.
Check out Ida Mae and support them if you like their stuff, as they’re musicians who are living the dream (and putting in the hard work!) of making music full time. Chasing Lights, their debut album, was released last year. Their website is https://www.idamaemusic.com, and you can find them on YouTube, Spotify, Amazon Music and wherever fine music is streamed or sold.
I hope you like the music, and I hope these two stories inspire you, as they’ve inspired me, to keep showing up and keep putting in the work to chase after your dreams.
Peace,
AJ Harbison