Category: Random Thoughts

Holy Manna (solo piano)

You may have noticed an acoustic piano in the background of my recordings. A couple years ago I bought what’s called a “studio upright” from the Clearwater Steinway Gallery. It’s a Boston, which is made in Asia but designed by Steinway, and a model with no plastic parts. The entire action is wood. I’m very happy with it.

I mention this because people may wonder why I don’t use that for my videos. Aside from not being a good enough pianist to record flawless videos head to tail without needing to splice together different video takes (keyboard recording permits occasional error correction…more on that in a moment), recording an acoustic piano is to my ear one of the hardest things to do well, especially for a classical sound.

The best of that I’ve ever experience was the audio engineer, John Stephan, when I recorded some of my pieces at his studio, Springs Theatre Arts & Recording, before he retired. I’ve worked in a lot of studios across the US, none compared to his technique, microphone placement, and audio environment. There’s no way I could duplicate that sound at home. I’ve got a few things I’m snobish about: authentic key lime pie, New York style cheesecake, fried fish, banana pudding, grits, and recorded piano sound.

As I mentioned above, recording tracks from a keyboard allows for a certain amount of editing without having to edit the video itself. If you look at about 00:42 from the beginning of the track, you’ll see my right hand momentarily “panic!” I had a momentary lapse of concentration. I mention this because non-musicians (unfortunately some musicians LOL) don’t know what’s going on in a performer’s head when performing.

When a musician (singers especially, but also brass instruments, pianists, conductor, everyone actually) plays/sings a note s/he must literally, mentally hear–in advance of actually playing the note–the note they’re going to play a moment later.

And if it’s a polyphonic instrumentalist like a pianist or organist or conductor all the notes being player together at that moment must be “pre-heard.” This is true even for solo instrumentalists in an orchestra. My favorite trumpet player, Don Own, talked to me once about playing in an orchestra, how an orchestra player hears their part as if they were in the audience, not from just their chair.

As you might imagine. That’s all quite a task. More than anything as I’ve aged, it’s the momentary lapses of concentration that get to me as a performer. I do silent meditation a lot. The focus required for performing music is like that. It’s why being a musician is so addictive. Few things match the rush.

My sister’s new course!

At different times in life, we tend to look around and say, “Is this all there is?” or “Now what?”

“Manage Your Messy Midlife” is a new course by my sister, Dr. Lucy Jones, that will help you learn how to successfully survive the challenges of those periods of transition with a minimum of mayhem.

Lucy has lived through those messy years and survived to help others. In her fifty years of work in the field of psychology, she has been able to help hundreds of women and men to survive those dreaded transitions.

Her course will examine various solutions through exercises, homework, and more. Check her website https://lavalily.com/learn-with-lucy/ for more information.

Storms Now Past (solo piano)

A new solo piano piece at the Easy Intermediate level. The sheet music is available at https://www.sheetmusicplus.com/title/storms-now-past-solo-piano-digital-sheet-music/22518157 or https://www.sheetmusicdirect.com/en-US/se/ID_No/1336096/Product.aspx.

Let go of what has passed.
Let go of what may come.
Let go of what is happening now.
Don’t try to figure anything out.
Don’t try to make anything happen.
Relax, right now, and rest.

Tilopa

There are times when this saying is all that gets me through.

Creative priority

It’s taken me 78 ½ years to figure this out, but I’ve finally discovered and now totally believe in my priority when it comes to music. It’s clarified my time management and also helped me to recognize what’s of lesser importance, what’s essential, relative importance.

That’s it, completely! The “main thing” is getting my sheet music out there! That’s the “main thing” as in the slogan: “Keep the Main Thing the Main Thing!”

It’s worth remembering that in the English language, “Priority” cannot be plural. There can be only one priority. It’s become common in informal language to speak of “priorities” but that’s not the original meaning. Realizing Priority is singular really sharpens the mind (as in when lost in a jungle Getting the Hell Out of There is the priority…nothing else matters).

Everything else in the graphic at the top of this post is in support of getting sheet music available, all supporting tasks/products having their own order of importance.

It used to be that I would get lost in all those possible products thinking maybe the videos where what I should be doing, or maybe the audio, or maybe orchestral pieces. Nope, committing to this priority is making a difference in my compositional life.

It should be noted that this is my compositional priority. Others will have their own. This priority is important to me, possibly for reasons I don’t even understand. So it will be for the priority others will have. I’m only sharing how having a priority for my music and committing to it has improved my music making.

And yes, that key word “committing” probably deserves another post someday. It’s not always easy to “commit.” As first articulated in the book, Do It! Let’s Get Off Our Buts (1991) by Peter McWilliams, you can do anything you want, just not everything you want.

A Summing Up

There’s a book a friend of mine, Robert Help, read when he was about my age, called The Summing Up, by Somerset Maugham. I’ve not yet read it (it’s on my list with several thousand others), but just the title strikes a responsive chord with me. It’s what I seem to be doing right now: summing up all I’ve written and recorded (audio and/or video), and where the scores and recordings might be found, listed all in into one spot: https://hiltonkeanjones.com/compositions/.

It’s a monumental effort. In addition to what’s already on that page, I have 46 more original compositions to get on there and 34 arrangements of public domain tunes. That’s not counting all the links that need to be added to existing listings on the page and any new pieces I might manage to write and record.

Why?

As a former composition student, now himself a teacher and a friend, once answered when I asked myself why I continued to write: “Because that’s what you do.” It’s probably the best answer I’ve ever heard. (I assume that answer also applies to organizing what one has written.) Although, I am well aware and fully admit “vanity of vanities! All things are vanity” is even more true.

The most recent addition to the composition page is an updated version of The World of Starlit Butterflies.

The World of Starlit Butterflies, 2022, 1 movement, solo piano
VIDEO – AUDIO
https://www.sheetmusicplus.com/title/the-world-of-starlit-butterflies-digital-sheet-music/22378788
https://www.sheetmusicdirect.com/en-US/se/ID_No/1225362/Product.aspx

The World of Starlit Butterflies, 2022, 1 movement, keyboard ensemble (piano & electronic keyboard)
VIDEO – AUDIO
https://www.sheetmusicplus.com/title/the-world-of-starlit-butterflies-digital-sheet-music/22377404
https://www.sheetmusicdirect.com/en-US/se/ID_No/1224408/Product.aspx

The piano part is completely rewritten so it’s shorter and hopefully more interesting but still fun to play and listen to. The 2 keyboard version and the solo piano version have exactly the same piano part. In other words, the strings are optional. Using the second keyboard gives pianists the chance to experience ensemble playing, a skill they’ll need in order to earn a living later in life. The fundamental piece is the solo piano version, the video that leads this article.

I seem to have found “my place,” writing pieces and arrangements for piano that fit the “easy intermediate” difficulty level. I’m quite happy to have found “my place.” It’s my happy place! Those pieces are selling!

Music for Mother’s Day

My mother, Jane Jones, with 4 year old me in Biloxi, Mississippi.

In my job as music director at Lakewood UCC (my favorite church job of all time, without exaggeration!) the piano pieces I’ll be doing Sunday, Mother’s Day, were all favorites of my mom’s. Here’s the list, with YouTube links. Only the first link is me; the rest are my favorite YouTube versions of the pieces.

PRELUDE: Let the Lower Lights Be Burning — Bliss https://youtu.be/4XiF3nUf56A
OFFERTORY: Humoresque — Dvorak https://youtu.be/JZnzjzjYkK0
POSTLUDE: still can’t decide…it’ll either be…
Kitten on the Keys — Confrey https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uW9mmFOlPwQ
or maybe Nola — Arndt https://youtu.be/6uziP45NCpQ
(If I can still play it, sigh…although Kitten isn’t that easy either!)

WASHBOARD TALES

This sequel to Shadowy Tales will be available in time to give as a Christmas gift to friends who enjoy mysteries- or as a gift to yourself. There …

WASHBOARD TALES

The second book in a mystery series by my sister. If you like southern gothic mysteries she’s great at it. Give her a try!

Gettin’ my act together

I’ve written a lot of music in almost 77 years. And arranged a lot. Played and improvised a ton more. When it comes to marketing, though, I’ve been a dismal failure. My usual approach is to write a piece and then put it in a drawer and forget it.

Beginning with the pandemic–I guess because we were stuck at home and insomnia demanded something to do in the wee hours–I began to record some of my stuff and to dig through my files to find stuff I’d written in the past.

The pandemic was a resurrection of sorts for me, creatively.

After getting into recording my stuff, now finally, I’m getting CDs made and digital albums online. Along with selling the CDs on Amazon and CD Baby, my stuff will also be on BandCamp, Spotify and iTunes.

All this is self-publishing, of course, but these days, indie publishing no longer suffers from the curse of being called “vanity” publishing. Technology has made that old point of view irrelevant. Indie publishing is self expression and countless, truly countless examples exist on the internet, every second, of the world’s interest in the self-expression of others. For sure, not everyone’s expression finds an immense audience, but that doesn’t matter. Expression is its own reward.

I encourage you to check out https://hiltonkeanjones.com/look-listen/.

Here’s the BandCamp links from that page…

Purpose

Igor Stravinsky, by George Grantham Bain Collection – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID ggbain.32392. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/

This blog primarily serves as an electronic “business card” for myself as a composer/performer. At first, I talked about what I knew…teaching composition. But, then the damn pandemic hit (I called it the “damndemic”). As dreadful as this has been–and continues to be–my worklife as a musician was changed from life performance to studio only in order to provide the music my job required. I loved working in the wee hours in my studio and releasing the results as needed for my job (music director at Lakewood UCC). I posted those music videos here.

Then, thanks to the vaccine, I was able to return to live performance of a limited sort (socially distanced, fully masked, fully vaccinated participants). Then, suddenly, my need to provide studio music no longer existed. So now what? What intrinsic PURPOSE does my music have now that there’s no extrinsic need requiring it?

The picture at the top is of Igor Stravinsky. I was very, very lucky to attend, for my last two years of undergraduate study, the University of the Pacific Conservatory of Music in Stockton, California. My composition teacher was Standworth Beckler. If I was lucky to be at UoP I was even luckier to be Mr. Beckler’s student. Once a semester he offered to both grad and undergrad students a class based entirely on his own research. One such course was a his analyses of every piece Igor Stravinsky wrote! Every piece!

I took away a lot from his courses, and one thing I took away from his Stravinsky course was that Stravinsky seemed to be teaching himself how to compose throughout his life. That was the only explanation I could find that accounted for the wide, wide, wide range of styles he wrote in throughout his life. Stravinsky, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, and the Beatles all had that continual stylistic exploration in common! Perhaps it’s no coincidence I am as fond as I am of these composers.

It’s dawned on me, as I look back at my own life, including the present, that–although I’m not claiming to be a Stravinsky–when there is no external circumstance demanding a “product,” the underlying purpose of my music–why I compose–is to learn how to compose. The “product” is my learning. What people hear is just the “byproduct.” The real product is what happens within me and the growth of my skills.

It is freeing whenever I remember this. It doesn’t matter what others think. If they happen to like something, that’s nice, but their liking it doesn’t provide the purpose for me doing it in the first place. It’s what I learn how to do that’s important.

It’s not even vague things like “crafting a work of art” or something. With each piece my subconscious has things it (me) wants to learn how to do. In making the piece I discover (that’s a key word I think…I don’t “figure out,” I “discover,” it’s very much a non-verbal how-to) how to do that. The piece is just a result.

Curious how this lines up with what I spent my life doing as a profession: teaching others to compose. For me, it’s about learning, discovering. Down deep, that’s the intrinsic motivation for me. Extrinsic opportunity to show-and-tell is nice, but when I want to do something that “matters,” for me it’s learning how to compose.

Just Music

If you want to just listen to some background music, I continue to accumulated tracks that I’d done for my church job at https://soundcloud.com/hilton-kean-jones/sets/music-at-lakewood. Easter Sunday I’m going to do my first in-person since more than a year ago. There’ll be good ventilation, I’ll be double masked plus a face shield and very distanced physically. Not sure if they will continue with in person services, however. They are only accommodating distancing by having two services and achieving adequate fresh air by opening an entire wall of sliding doors. It will soon be too hot to do that, keeping up two services isn’t sustainable, and it’s still way too soon to give up on distancing since such a small percentage of the population is vaccinated. So, they may go back to cyber until it’s either safe to have in-person services continuously or it’s cool enough outside to make the sanctuary open-air. That’s not up to me. I know I’m not willing to eat indoor restaurants yet…don’t know how I feel about playing indoor services. It’s causing me a lot of anxiety but I’m trying to stay calm. LOL