Jay's other stuff

Jay's other stuff

Here are selections from Jay's miscellaneous music.
More tracks can be found on his YouTube channel and on streaming services.

I taught animation classes at HCC. To help focus the students and give them pacing, I created soundtracks for their projects. Each soundtrack was based on a different topic, and students were free to interpret them however they wanted.

Bushwhacked	Moodment	Caught in a Tornado
Gimme a Break	Bringing Home the Bacon	The Light Dawns
Once Bitten	Lightning Strikes Twice	Breakthrough
All Together Now	The Big Picture	Third Time's a Charm
The Harder They Fall	Taking Sides	Tossing and Turning

My longtime colleague Justin West created a video for one of his sabbaticals, an exploration of light. He asked me to create a soundtrack for it and specifically asked that it not be melodic (which was quite a challenge for me). He also asked that I play a theremin on the third track, and from that experience I realized how difficult it is to play a theremin. At least I didn't have to worry about being melodic.

Main Title

Five Dimensions

Thesis

Physics

Finale

A former student of mine had begun a documentary about the Hampshire and Hampden canal system and asked if I could create a soundtrack for it. Since the footage hadn't been completed, I created tracks that could reflect different moods during the production, which he could then edit as he saw fit. He also asked for a sort of folk song that he could use in a montage sequence; that's the first track.

Hampshire and Hampden Canal Song

Traveling on the Canal

Heartbreak on the Canal

Tension on the Canal

Hampshire and Hampden Canal Instrumental

In 1978, I was working on a musical based loosely on Edith Sitwell's Facade. I never finished it (thank goodness). The songs were generally terrible. In 1980, I received a letter from Columbine Records asking for song ideas. If I would send them $395 and a poem, they would produce it as a song on a vinyl record. The abandoned pieces from Facade were about as close to pop songs as I ever wrote, so I sent Columbine one of those pieces: Lily's Song. It was a depressing and overwraught piece. I had performed it in a style resembling desperate constipation. The song was sent off almost as a joke; I figured there was no way they would accept it.

To my suprise, I received a prompt response praising the work and telling me it had a lot of potential. So I forked over the money and waited. Several months later, the recording arrived packaged as The Now Sounds of Today. It contained over a dozen other terrible pieces that had been meticulously produced and arranged. Naturally, I went straight for my own tune, which was performed by John Muir (the same guy who sang the theme song to the old TV series The Love Boat).

I was shocked! They had taken my miserable tune and turned it into ... a slickly produced miserable tune. It was still basically my song, but the arranger had taken bits and pieces of the original and constructed a hook, verse and refrain. It was now an actual song instead of a dirge. That was the best $395 that I had spent, a valuable lesson in songwriting.

Decades later, I recounted the incident for an article that Dots founder Craig Kurtz wrote (under the pseudonym Barry Stoller) for the online journal Perfect Sound Forever.

Craig wrote another article for Perfect Sound Forever about Terry Knight, the songwriter and producer in the 1960s. He asked me to do a cover of one of Knight's songs. I chose Lonely Life.

In 1996, I was hired by my friend Dave Anderson to create an animated logo with a soundtrack that could be used as a splash screen for products from Dave's new company, InterACT.

Back around the turn of the millennium, there used to be a terrific PC program for notation and sequencing, Midisoft Studio. As an experiment, I composed a piece with it and intercut clips from the old album The Great White North featuring Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as Bob & Doug McKenzie. The result was Donuts.

In 2016, I was asked by another Dave to write new intro music for a locally produced show called Chess Chat. He also asked me to create a video intro to go along with it. You can view the episodes here.

In 2003, our twin daughters were in their last year of high school. The Westfield High School band held an annual pops concert and that year would mark the 50th anniversary concert. The band director, Pat Kennedy, wanted to do something special to commemorate the occasion, and I suggested that I could write a march for the concert. To my surprise, he took me up on that offer. The result was the Pops Anniversary March. The performers were current band members along with alumni. It was a large ensemble. Our daughter Heather conducted the piece. Our other daughter Liz played the bells.

It was the first time I'd ever heard one of my orchestral pieces performed, and it was a great learning experience. At that time, I had a rudimentary scoring program with middling playback capabilities that gave a completely false sense of how it would sound in concert. I had yet to learn how the different wind instruments sonically competed with one another. So the melody line that I had written for clarinet and bass clarinet (!?) were drowned out by the brass section. Heather made a valiant attempt to have it all work. I wish I had sat in on the rehearsals. I probably could have made a lot of significant changes early on. But the audience seemed to enjoy it.

Ironically, one of the alumnus horn players approached me after the concert and said he really loved the piece. He asked if he could perform it with his band back in Indiana. I was flattered and said that was fine. I asked if he could send me a recording after they performed it. "Absolutely not," was his reply. So this recording is the only live one I have.

I needed mellow music to accompany a slide show I created of the Three County Fair, so I whipped together Fair Thee Well using some Brian Daly piano loops plus some instrumental noodling.

I shot some slo-motion footage of ducks at a nearby pond. I realized that the footage actually told a short story, so I composed a soundtrack for it.

I acquired a cheap iPhone glitter case that looked mezmerizing in sunlight. I never used it and decided to shoot close-up footage of it. Then of course I had to set it to music.

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