I am a new age improvisational pianist and a film score composer living in Belfast, Maine on a small and beautiful homestead. I recently graduated from homeschooling through high school during which time I was able to intensely pursue my artistic interests in 3D animation, film, theater, photography and most of all, music. Now I am looking into music colleges to major in composition or film scoring. When I am not playing music (which is rare) I tend to find myself in the tree tops of the forest surrounding our land, playing Ultimate Frisbee, contradancing, or consuming as many of the best fantasy novels I can find.
In 2011 I spent the year fundraising $12,000 dollars for a high school semester in Ecuador which turned out to be one of the most incredible and life changing experiences. I learned so much not only from the semester itself but from trying to figure out how to raise such a large sum of money, learning about marketing, organizing events and other valuable skills that I'm sure will aid me in my quest for a musical career. You can read about it and see pictures from the trip at: http://claytonecuadortrip.blogspot.com/
I have been playing piano since I was 8 years old. I started out with classical lessons with Barbara O'Brien, a demanding and very good teacher, for a couple years but was more interested in my own stuff than playing other peoples music. Actually, I hated it at the time and remember being afraid to go near the basement where our piano was kept lest my mother remember that I had to practice piano that day. At age 10 I took a break from lessons for a couple years and taught myself how to improvise and compose which I believe to be a very good decision as I continued to improvise and, if anything, played even more than when I had dreaded lessons looming over me.
For the past three years I have been taking piano lessons with Mary Anne Driscolle who is a amazing teacher. She has been training me classically but with the goal of fueling my own creative process and style. When I started taking lessons again I was able to appreciate the value of studying works of other composers and to this day am still amazed at how I can see my playing improve each week as I incorporate other composers' styles and techniques into my playing.
As far as style, my playing fits pretty nicely into the "new age" category. While it might not inspire people to get up and dance, it has been taken up by a number of massage and chiropractic clinics in my area which is really cool. My typical improvisational style may be more relaxing but I have also done quite a bit of Cape Breton fiddle tune accompaniment and this year began playing piano for contradances which is a fun, upbeat contrast to my usual playing.
I have played background music for numerous events from art openings, farmer's markets, and church services to silent auctions and cocktail parties. My album has played on WERU and I have played live on the radio and done a couple interviews with Scott Cannon. I have also played a number of performances such as for the Emerging Artist Series and have produced an album called Barefoot in the Snow of my original piano improvisations and compositions (I stick the word "compositions" in there because some of the pieces are borderline).
Oh, and I do play the fiddle if you are wondering about the above picture. I took fiddle lessons for two years when I was 13 then stopped playing for a while and picked it up this past year, hoping to keep up the practicing and get better at it.
Film Scoring
I have been inspired by film scores since a surprisingly early age. My improvisations have always been very emotional and "epic" (as I liked to think of them at that age) and it wasn't long before I was not only inspired by film music but wanted to compose it my self.
Although I didn't know how to put it into words then, I have realized that my goal with every art with which I spent time was to create emotions. The stories I started were very cinematic with dark, poetic visuals, painted with dramatic plots and adventurous characters. The reason I got so into vfx (video effects) and 3D animation was because I wanted to bring those imaginings to life through film. Even in my music I have always tried to play emotion into the melodies, my improvisations often accompanying a scene playing itself out in my imagination.
So far in my "film scoring career" I have scored a few of my own short films, am in the process of scoring a Film Noir genre short made by a film maker I met at a teen meditation retreat, and am taking an incredibly awesome online film composition course from Berklee.
<Warning: Technical stuff! You don't have to read it. I just have fun writing about it!>
I got interested in composing on the computer at about age 13 when my dad (a computer wiz) showed me some free, Ubuntu Linux based programs on our grey, hunky desktop computers we kept in the basement. I played around with Lilypond, Zynth, Audacity intensively over the next few years before sucking up my "support open source" pride and moved over to a Windows operating system to use MixCraft. This past year I upgraded to Cubase with Native Instruments Komplete virtual instrument library and am loving it (though I kind of wish I had bought East West libraries instead).
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