A Two-year old who loves Music

I had just turned two years old when my Aunt Dorothy gave me this book and a child's book about Beethoven for my birthday. I cherished these them both. I loved music and even as a two-year-old child, I listened to the radio and played Mom and Dad's record player constantly.

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Dr. Brico

When I was three, Mom took me to Dr. Antonia Brico, the famous woman conductor who had moved to Denver, and she accepted me as her student. Mom took this photo of me and Dr. Brico for Dr. Brico to take to Finland. She told Mom I would be a great composer someday, and that she wanted to give my photo to her friend Jean Sibelius, the great Finnish composer.

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Dr. Brico Goes to Helsinki to Conduct

In the Summer of 1946, Dr. Brico went overseas to conduct orchestras in England and in Finland.

Dr. Brico returns, but Dad says "Stop"

I loved Dr. Brico. This is the little hat that she brought back from Finland for me. Dad, however, thought the prospect of my becoming a child prodigy was a dangerous one, and so he forbid my seeing Dr. Brico again. I had only my record player and radio now. They were my music teachers. Listening to great music did something for me that nothing else could come close to doing. Until I was about eight years old, I composed orchestral and operatic music in my head, and then by making various sounds using my voice, I could mimic the sounds of the orchestra that I was hearing.

I Tried to Learn on My Own

All I could do was continue on my own, trying to learn how to write music without training.

My Favorite Pastime is Music

Mom used to take me to concerts of the Denver Symphony Orchestra. I loved watching the orchestra play live. I took this photo in the famous Red Rocks Amphitheater in 1949. I was seven.

I Begin Composing in Ernest

Dad and Mom gave up on me when after graduating from South Denver High School with a D-minus grade level, I showed no interest in becoming something "useful" by going to college, so Dad drove me to the Navy recruiter and I signed up. However, in the Navy, I soon woke up and I began a transformation from a messed up kid to a musician. Life in the Navy was a complete shock to me, spoiled as I was by growing up in a comfortable life replete with maids. I started writing music again in 1961 and had a revelation that year that I was both a writer and a composer. Now, with no training at all, I had to learn on my own. I wrote my "Prelude," featured on my Keys album, during this period.

The Long Beach Symphony Takes Me On

My childhood dream of composing music for orchestra had been laying fallow for years until it sprung up again in 1962. Actually, it didn't really spring up, it was like "Old Faithful" going off, a resurrection. I was serving aboard the good ship "USS Valley Forge" that was home-ported in Long Beach, California. I joined in with a couple of sailor friends and rented an apartment in Long Beach where I set up a record player. Every few days, I checked out a massive number of music books and records from the Long Beach Public Library and over a period of a year, taught myself music composition, counterpoint, history and orchestration. However, I was unable to correctly voice harmonies because I could not play them using my guitar. It was at this point that I decided I would finally have to start learning to play the piano. I wrote my first orchestra piece, called "Moments Avant de Partir," in 1963 and the Long Beach Symphony Orchestra (God Bless Them!) played it for me in one of their rehearsals.

Julliard School of Music

After my discharge from the U.S. Navy in June, 1964, I started a formal, albeit completely unconventional, study of music, beginning with the University of Colorado in Boulder, and ending four years later at the Julliard School of music New York City. I wrote, improvised and recorded experimental music using my Roberts reel-to-reel tape recorder, my rented piano, my Fender guitar, and various sound effects. Meanwhile, I studied tabla with Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, while performing as a studio musician using North Indian instruments and guitar on national television commercials and recordings.

Studies with Morton Feldman

Julliard's program did not include the kind of music that I was interested in at that time, and so I began a weekly study with Morton Feldman instead. I was his Saturday-morning private student for two years. Morty really helped me focus, and he taught me a lot about sound. During the first year, I perfected my disharmonic focus and developed a style that was completely rooted in discord. I had gone farther than Morty, but he approved. "You are in the next generation after John Cage and I." My second year with Morty was occupied with writing my "Last Piece".

The "Dawn" Album

After discovering that the music that I was writing was based on a root discord that I called the duochord, I discontinued studying with Feldman and moved to San Francisco where I recorded my Dawn Album.

I Dream up a New Music

The real gift of the sixties can never be understood by anyone who was not a part of it, and it was real. Beginning in 1965, I underwent a really big spiritual transformation that brought me in 1974 to Wichita, Kansas where my ex-wife and I were ministers for the Golden Dawn Christian Community. It was here that I had a powerful dream that I was going to create a new music, and I heard myself playing this music in the dream. A friend had moved a piano into the storefront (above) where we lived, and I began improvising the new music that I had heard for the first time in my dream.

Resurrection

In 1979, I created my first synthesizer recording studio in the bedroom of our home at 122 Steiner Court in Santa Rosa, California. Finally, a way to create the orchestral music I have always heard inside! My first synth album was Resurrection.

Starmusic

In 1980, I bought on of the first Synclavier computer musical instruments. It was a marvel! I created one of the first albums of digital classical music ever: Starmusic, followed by Spring. Starmusic was a favorite of my friends Stephen Hill and Anna Turner of the "Hearts of Space" radio show, and Starmusic became a new age music classic.

Kopavi

In July, 1984, I moved my family back to my home state of Colorado. We bought a house at 709 Scenic Drive in Fort Collins. I created a studio there for the synclavier and my other instruments and created my Celestial Voyager, Anthem, and Castles in the Sun. My kids Rhonda, Heather and Marianne grew up here. Suzie, my ex wife, ran our DBR Music business, selling my music mostly on cassette tapes. We released the Spring album on LP and Castles in the Sun on CD. Product was flowing out of the house on a daily basis in large packing boxes to a dozen distributors. My music was sold exclusively as a part of the new age music genre, which I I had originally helped create, but by 1989, it had become - like the other genres - polluted by greed and big business, and so I dropped out of it completely, turning instead to writing music for orchestra and acoustic instruments. I decided to write 1) an orchestral work, 2) a string quartet and, 3) a large choral work. I started work on the orchestral piece in 1991, and spent two years writing it. It is called "Kopavi: Ballet for Orchestra and Chorus."

Alpine Symphony and the String Quartet

My divorce with Suzie came in 1995 and the family homestead was sold. I moved to Richmond, Virginia because I wanted to live in the South... to explore the music there. I signed a contract with the Commonwealth of Virginia and became a contract programmer at the Department of Motor Vehicles in Richmond. Mary Ellen Bickford set up house in Richmond and a studio with all new equipment. I wrote my string quartet's first three moments in Richmond and recorded my "Alpine Symphony" and "Keys" albums in the new studio.

More Albums!

Mary Ellen and I were married in May, 1999, and then we moved to the Atlanta, Georgia area. I set up my studio and recorded my "Yoki," "Inroads," "Poème," and "Aum" albums. I finished my string quartet in Georgia also. My day job was being chief technical officer of an Atlanta computer company and this was a very demanding job. I found I had little spare time and so, In 2002, Mary Ellen and I pulled the plug on the job. It was time to do only what I came here to do ---- music! We were writing the "Songwriting for Dummies" book, and I was analyzing pop songs for the book, and writing chapters. During this period, I wrote several song melodies, and composed a wrote the words for three choral songs.

Swan Songs and a Mass

We moved to Nashville in November, 2003. I had had no musical life in the Atlanta area. Atlanta just hadn't felt like music to me. It was becoming a center for hip-hop, which I had no interest in at all. But Nashville was a different story. Nashville was alive with music, and finally, as I met more and more people, I found myself again among my musical peers! The first year, I spent investigating songwriting and working on an album of songs that I really wanted to create. A blessing walked into my life, Beth Eames. I met her in a songwriting seminar at Vanderbilt University. She could listen to the melodies that I had written, feel the music, and write words that were perfect. My cousin Ashe Owen would fly in from Denver and we wrote two songs together, one along with Mary Ellen. In 2008, we released "Songs of Love and Joy." In Nashville I also wrote "Thrushes in the Moonlight," "Sequence," and my "Jubilation Mass."