Chris' Artist Spotlight

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"So I started composing in high school. High school music was when I first started writing music. It was just part of the classroom music curriculum. You'd write some music as an assignment a couple of times a year essentially and I think the first thing we had to do was write a piece of music in a Baroque style, from the way music was written back in the 1600s essentially.

And so I took a piece of music by Bach that we've been studying in class, and basically just sort of looked at the logic of what was happening, and then tried to just use my own notes in place of that.

It was kind of almost like a paint-by-numbers, and just like, copying. It ended up being a totally different piece but the first piece I wrote was very much just like a, "Well, he did this, so I'll do this version of that. And then he did this, and so I'll do this version of that."

And then it got a little bit more interesting after that. So that was in about grade 10 or grade 9, probably grade 10 I think it was. So fairly late into high school as well was when I actually got into this thing called composing. Yeah, it was quite a late development.

For whatever reason, I ended up taking up the trumpet as my instrument in high school and my early music sort of passion there was actually for jazz. I was quite obsessed with jazz trumpet player, Chet Baker.

I used to go home and just put on Chet Baker recordings and play along to them for quite a few years and later there were other trumpet players and stuff that I was quite interested in; James Morrison—Australian trumpet player—and what have you is an example.

I remember seeing him perform live in probably grade 10 or 11 and just being completely gobsmacked and blown away by that. And yeah, that was quite a powerful moment because seeing someone in person you know live doing these crazy, crazy things musically was very exciting and interesting.

And on the composing side of things there were probably a few pieces, ballad pieces of music early on that, you know, I heard recordings of, and I was just also again very blown away by the possibilities and what the composers have done and achieved in those pieces.

The couple that come to mind are Stravinsky's "The Firebird", the suite—I don't remember which version— but the firebird suite is a very, very, really cool piece. There was a meme going around on social media about this piece actually. It's in a concert hall, and the piece goes on for a while. It's about 40 minutes if I remember rightly, and it gets very, very soft.

And it stays off for a bit. And then suddenly, it's, 'bam'! And there's a video that went around on Youtube of someone. A lady had obviously sort of lulled off to sleep in the middle of the quiet bit, and then she startled and shrieked when the big bang happened.

Which is funny, because that also happened to my high school music teacher, because we had to do presentations on a piece of music that we chose, and I chose that one to do a presentation on and he got very startled by the bang, and nearly fell out of his chair, which was great. I remember that quite distinctly.

And there were several others. Stravinsky, the "Symphony of Psalms", which is another Stravinsky piece—I'm not sure why so much Stravinsky—oh, probably things like the Carl Orff "Carmina Burana", or just bits and pieces; Beethoven, various Beethoven pieces. I think I really like the 2nd movement of the 6th symphony, and just a random selection of things. Just kind of, I was like, 'Oh wow! These are really cool.' Got mildly obsessed with it at the time."

-Christopher Healey