Michael Ford
10th Annual Contemporary Classical Album Nominee
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Record Label: n/a
www.michaelford.cc
Home Base: Falls Village, CT and Malvern, PA
Genre: To answer this question I must first say that this is an album of music written and performed on the piano. I was classically trained as a pianist but always felt a deep desire to write and perform my own music for it. I have music keyboards and synths, and I write songs and create orchestral scores on them, but there is nothing like a piano. I love what you can do with it. The stories you can tell, the pictures you can paint, the places you can go.
As for the style of music on this album, I like to think in terms of small classical forms, like Preludes. Many times I liked to let improvisation create the piece’s form, although whenever I wanted it to be more episodic, I tended to mold it into the form of the scherzo which is a simple ABA form .
The harmonic language I choose is not very complicated to hear, although I like to use many notes to create textures. While I like to create a rhythmic drive and intensity, I love to write long lines of melody as well.
Category Entered: Contemporary Classical Album
Work Submitted: Dream of the Wind
Label: Zozo Records
URLs:
www.michaelford.cc
http://www.myspace.com/michaelfordpiano
Influences: Listening to this album I would say compositionally, John Adams, Johannes Brahms, Frederic Chopin, Aaron Copland, Phillip Glass, Sergei Prokofiev, Maurice Ravel, Enrique Granados, Steve Reich, Alexander Scriabin, Jean Sibelius ; The influences of pianists. Glenn Gould, Brad Mehldau, Chic Corea, Arturo Michelangaeli, George Winston, Keith Jarrett, Lyle Mays, Vladimir Horowitz
Describe your nominated work: A lot of these pieces have stories connected to them, but I do hope the music succeeds on its own. Even titling a piece can be an imposition to the listener. However, as much as I honor how music can describe the indescribable (as someone said), I also like how it can describe something that is somewhat describable in words, but in that way that only music can. Here are my own personal descriptions of the first three pieces of my nominated work:
“Night Piece” begins with a tense but soft rhythmic pulse as though someone had just whispered “Shhh! Did you hear that?” and everyone is listening attentively through the silence. This suspended tension becomes the backdrop to a melody that is presented almost like an incantation of a clairvoyant foretelling the future.
“Sad Waltz” – I had an uncle who loved his 8mm movie camera and he always filmed our families all together at my grandmother’s house every Christmas Eve. Many years later, I wanted to transfer those reels onto VHS (at the time) and I wanted to create a soundtrack to it. It was an arduous task because the film was so brittle and it would break or get caught in the projector. At the same time I was so captivated by how what I was seeing I barely remembered but here I could see that it really happened. Watching myself being 3 or 4 and my young Mom and Dad, my grandparents, how simple life seemed. This was all that was left of this part of my life and it looked so jittery and fragile projected on the screen, able to be so easily gone forever. This piece started out as the soundtrack to one of those precious silent films, feeling life’s fleetingness and the inevitability of my past disappearing as I watched.
“Don’t Look Back” is a bit like an adventure where someone is physically running from something and intermittently the listener hears his internalized “running away” from something. The middle part reveals a larger picture of these internal feelings that conveys a sense of “looking back”. When the running music returns, it is now ablaze with a new confidence and resolve. The beginning motif comes from an earlier piece from my progressive rock days when I was in a group called Vacuum Pact. It was called “In a Frenzy” which was a vehicle for some fast improvisation over a handful of chords.
Why did you choose to submit this work to The 10th IMAs? The category The IMAs offered (Contemporary Classical) was appealing to me. I don’t see it very often as a general category and I thought it described my music better than most.
Did you use any unusual effects or instruments in this recording? Not really. I wanted to record an intimate piano sound using all of the “effects” that the piano itself can create. Like soft pedaling, partial sustain pedaling and hopefully a world of colors and dynamics that a piano has.
Were there any happy accidents while in the studio, or did everything go as planned? I gave a concert in my studio where I prepared a lot of these pieces and I was able to record them very soon after in the same setting on the same piano.
Did fans help you fund this project? No. I did this myself and I am blessed to have access to a studio that houses my piano so the cost was low.
Who’s sitting in your audience? People young and old who love to dream and believe.
What makes your fans unique? They want music to transport them to a place that evokes their emotions and puts them in touch with their deeper feelings.
Are there any songs you wish you wrote? No, not really. Music I love inspires me and makes me feel there is so much more to write.
What artists are you listening to that would surprise your fans? Most of these artists do not surprise my kids. Animal Collective, Ryan Adams, Joanna Newsom, Ariel Pink, Morton Feldman, Glenn Branca, Gunnar Idenstam, Nils Frahm.
Should music be free? No, only if the artist wants to give it away.
How has digital affected your career? It has made it wonderfully easy to create and offer music to the world.
Are digital singles vs. full albums the future of music? I guess the near future, but I hope it evolves back toward albums as conceptual “suites”.
Finish this sentence: The music industry is… being reinvented by those not a part of it or by those who survived because they had an artistic sensibility toward what is truly valuable.