LIFE COMPOSITION
Musical Medicine for Life
Life Compositions are personal songs written and recorded to accompany you through the major events and daily rituals of your life. Your custom Life Composition serves as musical medicine, sonic self-portrait, supportive reminder, emotional archive, connection portal, and life-long soundtrack. Each multi-layered and orchestrated piece is completely unique and is imbued with your personality, intentions, dreams, and aesthetics. Life Compositions are ideal for individuals, couples, organizations, work teams, families, and friends.
The Impact of Your Life Composition
You may not have considered that you could have, and be a part of, a song that is just for you. Compare this to something that may be more familiar, like a custom-made gown or suit, or a painted portrait of you. Unlike a custom garment or portrait, which provide value when worn to an event or looked at on the wall, the Life Composition works its magic throughout time and space. A custom song travels with you on your phone, in your head, sung to you by a loved one – wherever you are, whenever you are in need, the song arises to meet you and support you. Life Composition will maintain its healing essence for the rest of your life. It is a part of you. Your circumstances or ideas may change in the future, but the song will always reflect your inner self back to you.
My Life Composition clients have consistently reported transformative experiences with their songs. Emotional growth; deep healing; endurance through trauma; deeper connections with others; access to joy; spiritual empowerment; vivid memories; sense of hope; and ease in getting through the day have all emerged as results from this process. Like a movie, your quality of daily life and resilience in moving through important life transitions can be improved with a soundtrack.
How It Works: The Composition Process
You and I meet for one hour to explore what sounds, words, and images are important guides on your musical journey. With a set of questions and prompts, we investigate the purpose of this composition in your life, how you want it to make you feel, and what you most need to hear at this moment. My role in this information-gathering session is to listen to you deeply, focus on and follow relevant threads of inquiry, feel out your aesthetic and energy, and make sure you feel seen and understood. Following the session, I meditate on the ideas generated in the meeting. To translate our discussion into a distilled poetic expression, I review and analyze my notes, organizing the main themes, teasing out and expanding the imagery and metaphors, and grouping together language with similar sounds and syllabic structures. From these annotated notes, I compose lyrics synthesizing the most potent and poetic elements into song sections.
To begin the musical composing, I gently ask the lyrical language how it wants to sound, and pick the key that is most suited to the song’s mood and to your voice range, so you can easily sing along. As I improvise vocally, the melody starts to emerge and form a unique fingerprint of your specific lyrics. For each of the song sections, I sing the melodies over keyboard improvisations until I find the perfect musical structure to support, intensify, and balance the words. I then develop instrumental textures, feel out tempo and rhythmic diversity, and add transitions between the song sections so that the whole piece flows together as one. With all of this information in place, I assign particular sounds to each part, playing with keyboard, piano, harp, and percussion. Where I need to highlight or convey a particular effect with certain sections, I compose harmonic lines to decorate the vocal melody.
The next stage of the process is recording and post-production. At my studio, I record each layer of instrumentation for all of the song sections, before recording the vocal melodies and elaborating with vocal harmonies. Then I edit together the dozens of layers of recordings, mix each track with appropriate digital effects, and adjust the volume for each track so there is an even balance. The recording is finished when I’ve achieved a clean, cohesive sound and I feel satisfied that the song meets your Life Composition intention. The entire process typically takes one month.
Once the recording is ready, we meet again to listen to the song and discuss any questions or thoughts you may have. The final product will be delivered to you as an artful package of tactile objects for you to carry through your life: a handwritten lyric sheet and the recording of your Life Composition on a wooden USB necklace. In addition, electronic versions will be sent via email.
To schedule a free phone consultation with me, please fill out the below form.