Big reveal! There have been a few surprises since I last wrote, the most fun of which was seeing the cover art for my new album, just below. The album won’t be released until early 2025, though. The tree in the photo is “The Major Oak of Sherwood Forest,” which is the subtitle of the fourth movement of my new 3rd symphony. My record company found a great photo of the actual, iconic, historical “Major Oak,” the biggest tree in England, which is around a thousand years old.

I could not be happier with this album cover! Now, when you visit England, you will have to make a point to go a couple of hours’ drive north of London to see this famous, stunning tree, not to mention all the Robin Hood merch in the real Sherwood forest. My friend Chris has a house there and sent me these photos he took. He and his jazz trio played at the record release party for my last album, as he lives here part of the year.

The base of the trunk you see on the cover above is 33 feet wide! If a person were standing in front of it, they would look tiny. My artist for Parma Recordings, Ryan Harrison, is the same fellow who designed the covers for my last two albums, The Sea Knows and Symphony No. 2: Tales from the Realm of Faerie. Bravo once again to Ryan.

Another surprise was a change in our recording dates. We had booked September 7 and 8 with the orchestra in the Bulgarian National Radio Studio 1 in Sofia. A few days ago I learned that the studio was due for a big upgrade of their recording equipment and wiring, and the materials to do so were running late in arriving there. So, we are now set for Sept. 22nd and (my birthday) the 23rd. The advantage of this delay is that the audio quality will be better with the new equipment, and we will have a couple of weeks more to prepare – especially for the conductor to study the score. No problem, in the larger scheme of things. Postproduction (editing, mixing, and mastering) in the U.S. will now be moved to Oct. 1 & 2. I will be picking the best takes from the sessions for them to edit together seamlessly and will weigh in on all of it in the role of producer.

On the home front, Crystal has had two auditions this weekend for two different shows at two different theaters. We’ll see if she gets callbacks and offers and, in turn, whether she will be able to go to Bulgaria with me. Also, her munchkins (students) will finally be back tomorrow for her to begin another year of full-time music and theater teaching and choir and play directing.

Once the last bit of copying of the parts is done (just a little remains), I will be officially done with post-composing work on my third symphony. Some people are already asking if I plan to launch right into work on a Symphony no. 4, or on something else. However, it feels to me like a nice lengthy time of non-composing would be great for a rest and a break. As soon as I say that to anyone, though, Crystal tells the person I’m talking to not to believe me, because she knows I cannot help but write down music when it comes into my head and that I will surely be back at it soon. I just cannot see that, for now. We’ll see who is right. She usually is.

This new symphony is not, technically, another “fairy symphony,” like my last one. Yet, it does all feel like a fairy tale to me, I mean, to compose anything. In the lovely words of Lucy Maude Montgomery (who wrote Anne of Green Gables), “There is such a place as fairyland – but only children can find their way to it. And they do not know that it was fairyland until they have grown so old that they have forgotten the way back there. . . . Only a few, who remain children at heart, can ever find that lost path again; and blessed are they above mortals. They, and only they, can bring us tidings from that dear country where we once sojourned and from which we must evermore be exiles. The world calls them its singers and poets and artists and story-tellers; but they are just people who have never forgotten the way to fairyland.”

I’d like to hope that last sentence describes me, at least part of the time. But I hasten to add that the people she lists in that sentence are not meant to be above the rest of us but rather should be servants, whose mission it is to bring back the joys of fairyland and the blessings of the divine to the rest of us. Yet, the act of composing is still honestly a mystery to me. It would at least seem obvious that you have to have craft, but isn’t craft only a learned skill set that you apply to a musical idea (the real fairy part) after you have thought of it? Yet, after many years the line between craft and fairyland becomes blurred, and each is an inseparable component of the other. You are not so conscious of the craft any more; you have internalized it and just do it automatically.

And where did the fairy part come from? A visit to fairyland? What really is that? I think fairyland is somewhere in the semiconscious creative zone you were in when the idea came to you. In my case, in that place I wrote it down almost without knowing it, and when I come out of it thinking twenty minutes have passed, I see on the clock that one or three hours have passed. Then I see it on the page and ask myself “Did I write that? Really? Who did?” So, as a poetic metaphor for that zone, I don’t know that “fairyland” will entirely do, but it is a lovely idea.

For me, that zone is simply the indescribable interior life, which must remain a mystery and which I want to remain a mystery, like the fairies. I only know that by focusing on musical tones and completely forgetting myself I can go there, even if I cannot really explain when I get back what happened there. The moments I remember myself (whether often or after a good while), the spell is broken, and I have been snatched back. But hopefully by the end of the day there is somehow music on the page, which I don’t honestly feel I wrote by myself or can take much credit for.