It has been a quiet week in the Dark Horse office as other commitments have kept me away from the business of composing, but that is not to say I have not been sketching out some ideas. Composing can be like cooking spaghetti, you have to throw a lot at the wall before any sticks, but when it does it is such a rewarding thing to do. I am also delighted to have made the first sales of Core Skills Brass.

I have also been working on a few new covers to play at a friend’s leaving party next month using the loop station. I don’t mind playing covers, but I am always astonished at the fact the general public only seem to want entertainers in pubs, clubs and at parties to play, often inferior, renditions of their favourite and much cherished music when they could just as easily hear the originals on the phone in their pocket! Don’t misunderstand me, I greatly admire musicians who reproduce covers well, but there is so much new and exciting music out there which people are not prepared to champion anymore. The great American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882 in his great essay Nature said, “Our age is retrospective. It builds on the sepulchres of the fathers.” In another essay called Self-Reliance he wrote, “… man postpones and remembers; he does not live in the present … heedless of the riches around him …” This criticism can also be levelled at a large part of the classical concert going public too, who are quite reasonably happy to hear Beethoven and Brahms, but less keen to hear more modern work by living or even recently deceased composers.