July 5, 2020
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Tell us a little bit about yourself. Your music background and anything else you’d like to share. |
![]() I was also into drawing and painting, with several of my efforts being hung on the wall of the grade school I attended. This took off around 1973, around the same time I began to seriously study music. This had ebbed by around the year 2000 (the music however continued), only to be replaced by photography. In the 80s, a number of my pen & ink drawings were used as newsletter covers. In 2016, a couple of larger drawings were on display in Annapolis at an Exhibit, “Mental Health Awareness,” that was hosted by Maryland’s First Lady, Yumi Hogan. One of these was used in Mental Health America’s awareness campaign. – https://georgespicka.weebly.com/art-work.html |
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Can you name something you did in a piece of music of which you are particularly happy with the result? Can be a small section of a piece up to a whole piece. |
![]() Personally what I think what he was referring to was the integrity of music’s rhythmic pulse, whether it be actual swing, or Latin, or rock, or whatever may come in the future. My 2003 piece “Cybernation” is an example of this. It is a 16-bar ballad, at 92 bpm. There are no sections, i.e. [A][A][B][A]. Instead the piece continually evolves harmonically through those 16-bars. Improvised solos are then performed over the harmonic content of those 16-bars. The time signatures involved are 3/4, 4/4, 5/4, and 6/4. 2) As for chamber music, it’s mixing jazz influences with modern composition. As I found out when I joined the American Music Center (Now New Music USA) years ago, there’s no restrictions to what you as a composer can use in your creative processes. I generally don’t have a specific plan, but let the piece develop as ideas come to my head. One thing I do like are contrasts: passages that are tranquil to those that are agitated – sections that are relatively rhythmically free, to those that are highly controlled, etc. In general, I attempt to tell a story about things I’ve experienced or learned about. The themes are often scientific or political in nature. I’m Curator of Paleontology for the Natural History Society of Maryland, and I wasn’t awarded the position just because I have a pretty face 😉 Besides taking four years of honors geology courses, I was an educator at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History’s “Naturalist Center” for three. I’ve collected from over 50 localities in the region, and have given talks about the region’s incredible wealth of fossils. Writing those pieces is a way for me to share what many people here don’t know about concerning the fascinating history under our feet, something like “Upon Acquiring a Sauropod” (2014) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNFWKti5GuA How many know that we have dinosaurs in Maryland, or that the Maryland State Dinosaur (Astrodon johnstoni) is a sauropod (the “veggiesaurus” in Jurassic Park), or that it was found in 1853 near Laurel in an iron mine (in colonial times, Maryland was the leading iron producer for the 13 Colonies), or that in Laurel we have “Dinosaur Park,” where two weekends a month, people can dig for dinosaur bones? Politically, my influences are mainly George Orwell, Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich, and Eric Hoffer, all who have written about the psychology of political extremism. It doesn’t matter whether it be Fascism, Totalitarianism, religious or Nationalistic – the underlying psychology is the same. The warning is that we all harbor those seeds of destruction, and that it takes a conscious, moral effort to be truly rid of their influence. The piece here would be my 2012 solo piano composition, “Tolerance,” performed by Ruth Rose – https://georgefspicka-composer.weebly.com/tolerance.html |
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Are you published anywhere? How could someone who is interested purchase your music? |
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If you could put 3 pieces of your music on the Voyager spacecraft for dissemination to the stars, what would they be? Also, please give a brief description of each piece and a link. |
![]() For improvised piano, there’s “The Two Minutes Hate.” – https://georgefspicka-composer.weebly.com/the-two-minutes-hate.html And for a jazz tune, I’ll pick S.E.T.I., in fact, a live performance thereof. It honors the SETI “Institute Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence”. It’s what I call “New Jazz.” Each line of the melody consists of four measures with the following meters: 5/4 – 4/4 – 3/4 and 2/4. Solos are in 6/4. – https://georgefspicka-composer.weebly.com/seti.html |