I am rerecording some of the large heap of things I wrote many years ago.

At the Stopbank

Song of Aragorn

Hey Ted, those are quite ambitious finger busters you have there! The Aragorn descending run on the Eb alt chord is pretty hard to do.

Again my ignorance is revealed; I do not know what an Eb alt chord is. In general though, I have never sought to cultivate physical difficulty for its own sake in either my pieces or my improvising. I know very many composers and players do but I have never seen the point of it. I never write or improvise anything I cannot play at once. Also, and perhaps more importantly, difficulty and musical effect, difficulty and beauty, it seems to me are seldom correlated beyond a certain point anyway.

Excellent, I like both of them.

Thanks Joe. There are an awful lot more lying around the house. Now I have the time and expedient means (Zoom H2) I shall make recordings and disperse them on forums and CDs. Playing creations from the distant past and hearing improvisations of decades ago is like looking through old photographs of the soul. And yet so many fine players never seem to feel the slightest need to invent their own sounds. I have never been able to understand that.