Storm Cloud Waltz and Forest Lullaby — and the Scores Are Yours

I have put two original compositions on Nextdoor over the last few days, set against photographs I took a few miles from my house. I did not expect much. Then somebody left this:

“The close-up of the animals’ faces give them expressions that we never see from a distance. I think my blood pressure just dropped 20 or 30 points just listening to the music and looking at the variety of creatures living so close to us.”

That is the entire thing I am trying to do, described better than I have ever managed to describe it myself.

And she may be more literally right than she intended.

In 1984 a researcher named Roger Ulrich published a study in Science comparing surgical patients whose windows faced a stand of trees with patients whose windows faced a brick wall. Same operation, same ward. The ones who could see trees went home sooner and asked for less pain medication. Nothing had been done to them; they had simply been looking at something green.

There is a similar body of work on slow music and blood pressure. The effects are real, though more modest and more variable than the headlines usually suggest, and nobody put a cuff on Rachel while she watched a raccoon. But what she described — a measurable physical settling, from nothing more than looking and listening — is a documented phenomenon and not a figure of speech.

Which is the argument for this whole enterprise, and I have written about it at more length elsewhere. Most people cannot get to a forest on a Tuesday afternoon. Three minutes of a cello and an animal looking directly at you is not the same as standing in the trees. But it is not nothing either, and it is free.

Both pieces are below. And if you play cello, flute, piano or strings, the scores are free to download — both of them, no conditions. That is at the bottom of this page and it is not a figure of speech.

Storm Cloud Waltz

An original composition for piano quintet — piano and string quartet — set against some of my favourite moments from Portland and from Neskowin on the Oregon coast.

A waltz seemed right for weather. Clouds do not travel in straight lines; they turn. And honestly the landscapes wrote most of it themselves — there is something about the Oregon coast that simply feels like a waltz, and I only had to notice it.

Somebody on Nextdoor called it “muscular music with our beautiful clouds,” which I liked, because storm light out here is not gentle and I did not want the music pretending otherwise. Someone else said the pictures were a contrast to how energetic the music is. Both of those are fair.

Somebody else asked, reasonably, whether the strings were computer generated. They are. What you are hearing is Sibelius playing my score — the notation software most working composers use to hear an arrangement before real players ever see it. The notes and the voicing are mine; the tone is software. I intend to record my own piano over it, and there is a solo piano version of this piece that was commissioned separately.

I would rather say that plainly than let anyone assume there was a string quartet in the room.

Forest Lullaby

An original composition for cello and flute, set against the faces of the animals at Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge. A 4K version is on YouTube if you would like to share it.

The cello carries the melody and the flute answers it. That is the whole architecture. I wanted something that moved at the speed the forest actually moves at, which is slower than almost anything else in a person’s day.

Watch the opening. A squirrel appears holding a branch of seeds at exactly the angle a flautist holds a flute. I did not pose him, and I did not know he had done it until I was going through the frames afterwards.

Somebody asked how close I had to get for the coyote in that film.

About fifty feet, up in the forested area, with a 400mm lens doing the work. But here is the part I like better. Later on that same walk, that coyote and another one crossed the trail about ten feet in front of me and did not so much as glance over.

People are surprised there are coyotes, raccoons, otters, mink and deer inside the city limits. They are surprised because these animals are very good at not being noticed. A long lens does not make them tame — it just lets you look at a face that is usually a shape disappearing into the brush.

If You Play, the Scores Are Yours

I offered this on Nextdoor and I will say it here too, permanently.

The scores to both pieces are free to download. Cello, flute, piano, strings — take them. No charge, no conditions, no form to fill in beyond telling me where to send it. Play it in a recital, play it with a student, play it in your living room on a Sunday afternoon.

[ download links for both scores go here ]

Sheet music nobody plays is just paper. A piece only really exists when somebody else picks it up, and I would rather hear these in a stranger’s hands than have them sit in a folder on my computer being technically mine.

I posted the score for the waltz on Nextdoor as well, mostly on impulse, and somebody wrote back:

“Closely following the score as I listened to the music was a mind boggling experience. I love music, and SEEING its complexity as it was played brought home the great gift that you and other composers share with those of us who are participants in the world of music because of you all.”

She read the score while it played. I had not anticipated that anyone would, and it is the best reason I have yet been given to keep handing them out.

So here is the score, playing

The notation moving with the sound, so you can watch the piece happen.

There is a second reason I made this, and it is a sign of the times. Every composer working now is one comment away from somebody asking whether a machine wrote it — and a piece of audio cannot answer that question. A score can.

What you are looking at is five staves of decisions. Which instrument carries the line and which one answers it. Where the piano sits under the strings and where it steps out in front. Every dynamic, every articulation, every bar where I changed my mind. Music generators produce finished audio; they do not produce an engraved score with voicing worked out across a quintet, because that is not what they are for.

I am not claiming that a scrolling score is unfalsifiable proof of anything. I am saying it is the most honest thing I can hand you, and that I would rather show the work than ask to be believed.

And if you play it, I would love to see it

This is not a condition of anything. The score is yours either way and you owe me nothing for it.

But if you do play one of these and somebody happens to be filming, I would genuinely love to see it. A phone propped on a music stand is completely fine. I am not after a production. I am after the sound of the piece in somebody else’s hands, in a room I have never been in.

I have only ever heard these the way I wrote them. A cellist with a different idea about the third phrase, a flautist who breathes somewhere I did not expect — that is the part I cannot produce on my own, and it is the whole reason for giving the score away rather than sitting on it.

If enough people send something, I will collect them on a page here so the performances live beside the score.

The small print, which is genuinely small

Download it, print it, photocopy it for your quartet, mark it up, play it anywhere you like. That is the whole point and none of it needs my permission.

I do keep the copyright and the performing rights, and both pieces are being registered with BMI. In practice that changes nothing for you — concert halls, churches, schools and broadcasters already hold blanket licences, so if you perform it in one of those places the system quietly does what it was built to do and I am credited. You do not have to arrange anything.

The one thing I would ask you to check with me first is a commercial recording or release. Everything else — recitals, students, weddings, living rooms, a video on your own channel — go ahead.

Why I Keep Making These

One person wrote that it “made my day.” Another said “I didn’t know this was just what I needed.”

Nature is healing, and I am trying to channel it through the music and the photographs. That is not a line for a website, it is genuinely the whole plan. Most people cannot get to the forest on a Tuesday. But three minutes of a cello and a raccoon looking directly at you is not nothing, and it costs the viewer nothing at all.

The compositions are mine, the photographs are mine, and so were the walks that produced them. That is unusual enough to be worth saying once, and then not saying again.

There is far more of this than you would expect. Original compositions and arrangements collects the music, and the wildlife films are scattered through the journal going back years. Prints and downloads of the animals are in the shop.