Daniel V. Klein's Music

This is a very rough page right now...

I am actively involved in an a cappella group called In Acchord. I sing with them, and recently was executive producer of our latest CD, Departures.

Lately I have been playing with GarageBand on the Mac, composing music. Actually, I have composed music for all of my life, but it has been stuck in my head - I can't play keyboards (or anything else, save singing and whistling), and I can barely read music, let alone write it down, so complex music has been trapped in my head. But now I am able to lay down multiple MIDI tracks (often I first sing the part into a mic, record it, then I translate it into MIDI; and sometimes I just pencil in the notes directly into the piano-roll notation) - and all of this from a $50 package called iLife that Apple sells (GarageBand is just one of four components).

Truthfully, wonderful as Garageband is, I outgrew it in a month or so. It lets you choose one key signature, and I wrote a piece which required one measure of 5/4 time every now and again (the rest being 4/4 in heavy swing), and so I bought Logic Express - and that's a whole 'nother ball of wax. I need to grow into that...

• My first GarageBand piece grew out of a songwriting class. The lyrics will crawl out of my head "any day now", but the song itself is On the Edge of Everywhere, a song about limitless possibilities.

• I just recently finished a theme and variations for piano, and I am really starting to feel my reach. It is pretty elaborate - not to mention that some parts of the piece will be rather difficult for most amateurs to play, with a pair of counter-melodies and three counter rhythms in the eighth variation. It is vaguely Bach/Motzartean, with some Klezmer/Yiddish influences thrown in to the mix :-), so I called it Yiddishe Tango.

• My friend Karen has two little dogs. Maltese. They are sweet, but they tend to yip, yap, yarp... This is called TechnoDog, and was inspired by a riff I thought up while (yeah, I know, Too Much Information) sitting on the toilet listening to the yaps...

• This is a start of a song called Wake Up Eve, a song sung by the Serpent in a musical about the Biblical story of Creation, words by a friend of mine...

• And here are two different versions of a waltz of Cain and Abel (with Abel dying). One with piano and another with piano and strings.

• This is the start of a classical fugue, but I haven't figured out how to end it yet...

More as I write it!