Leon Lindon

I apol­o­gize for the brief silence. I have been work­ing on many com­mis­sioned pieces that I can’t share just yet so please stay tuned! There may be some new music arriv­ing based in a new project I am form­ing soon as well. And I have heaped upon myself a mas­sive under­tak­ing: my first sym­phony, which I hope to have fin­ished by the end of sum­mer. Any­way, no new music I’m proud enough of to show right now, but soon enough!

Hello every­one. Sadly, today I have no music to post, but I do have a well-deserved plug for a friend of mine. String is a self-designated Cre­ative Alchemist which means that she applies the prin­ci­ples of alchemy and cre­ativ­ity to the trans­for­ma­tion of life itself, hon­ing in on dynamic rela­tion­ships and unseen pos­si­bil­i­ties through art, intu­itive thought, and research. Although it is not easy to sum­ma­rize the plethora of activ­i­ties String is involved in, she is cur­rently oper­at­ing the new sunn cre­ative label rep­re­sent­ing the music of guitarist/singer/composer/arranger Tony Lowe and Tony Lowe Pro­duc­tions (this is where the post does tie in to music so please check out her web­site if you want to hear some), as well as act­ing as a busi­ness man­ager rep­re­sent­ing cre­ative indi­vid­u­als and orga­ni­za­tions. And, as always, she is writ­ing on her blog, Cre­ative Alchemy (which comes highly rec­om­mended by me for all those who want to read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing), about all of this and more. The hub for all of her many web­sites and projects is listed, as always, at the bot­tom of my site under the “Friends” sec­tion, but you can also visit it by click­ing here.

I had every intent on work­ing on other things tonight, but instead I wrote some­thing totally from spur-of-the-moment inspi­ra­tion. I call it Remem­brance, it is a piece for harp or gui­tar which derives its sound from many influ­ences. As I just described it to a friend of mine, it is “part Appalachian, part West­ern, part Medieval, part Romantic-era lul­laby”. I plan on expand­ing this into some­thing larger so for now I won’t put it on the Music page.

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Soon to come is some video-game-influenced music!

Hello all. Today I offer you the first move­ment of my piano sonata, which is in an alle­gretto tempo and in the key of E major. It is sup­posed to be in the style of the clas­si­cal era. I stud­ied the music of Beethoven while writ­ing it but I have been told it sounds more like Mozart. As for my opin­ion of what it sounds like, I’m indif­fer­ent; for me it was more of a learn­ing exer­cise. I usu­ally write more som­bre music but I was kind of stuck with a major key since this is my first sonata. I intend to write the rest of the sonata soon, but for now I’m offer­ing up the first move­ment, so please enjoy it!

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I wasn’t exag­ger­at­ing when I said I was going to be updat­ing this site reg­u­larly. For today I offer you in the early hours of the morn­ing (see time­stamp), a lit­tle exer­cise I wrote for piano, which I call Silence, Sweet Silence.

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This was writ­ten more or less to match the har­monic ten­den­cies of the Roman­tic era, and thus I used sev­eral tech­niques and chords which you would hear in that type of music.

Of course, it would be nice if it were longer, but like Satie, I have a pen­chant for writ­ing short pieces any­way, so I like it.

The rampantly-changing moods were achieved through a need to exper­i­ment in mod­u­la­tions but I actu­ally really like the effect of the tonal insta­bil­ity and I felt that the over­all impres­sion was akin to the insta­bil­ity of human emotion.

Well, after hear­ing my associate’s M-Audio AV30 stu­dio mon­i­tors the other night I had to go pick up a pair of my own today (not to men­tion I got an excel­lent deal on them). They aren’t exactly top-tier but for the size of the room I do my com­pos­ing in, they’re all I need.

Now I will have much bet­ter con­trol over my mixes when I am work­ing with dig­i­tal sounds. Luck­ily, Danc­ing with Dark­ness sounds great on them as-is. Get­ting new mon­i­tors is really like hear­ing your music in a totally new way, and I hope that it will improve the qual­ity of my own audio exports. Now I just have to decide what to do with my for­mer 5.1 enter­tain­ment speak­ers (though I am lean­ing toward using them as speak­ers des­ig­nated specif­i­cally for my MIDI controller).

I’ve had the web­site fin­ished in terms of design and con­tent for a while now, but for rea­sons I can­not fully under­stand, I have not started using it. Well, today, that all changes, with this first post.

For now, while I’m work­ing on new things, I’ll be post­ing one old thing per post (which, luck­ily, will be a new thing to you!) which I will be writ­ing a lit­tle blurb about. Every time I post a new song, it will go up on the Music page, which will act as a sort of cat­a­log, so don’t worry about hav­ing to sort through pages of posts to find the songs you want to hear.

Today what I’m post­ing is a piece I wrote for string quar­tet called Danc­ing with Dark­ness.

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The piece, writ­ten for vio­lin, viola, cello, and bass, is an arrange­ment of a melody that dates back sev­eral years. Before, I had the idea of arrang­ing it as a vocal piece (which I actu­ally did write words for) but I think it suits strings much bet­ter. I really want to find strings play­ers to record it with, but for now, I am sat­is­fied with this dig­i­tal ver­sion. The song was inspired by the idea of one danc­ing with the dark­ness inside one­self and styl­is­ti­cally is what I would call neo-classical, as it has ten­den­cies of the sounds of the clas­si­cal era but I treat some of the sen­si­tive tones in a more mod­ern way.