First, I hope you enjoy hearing my newest music, after the next paragraph! This Hilltop Diary entry is a special one for me. I’ve been writing this blog every two weeks for close to six years and have really enjoyed sharing my life and my music with you. However, after almost five hundred entries, I feel that its season and its life as a regular blog has simply been nearing its natural fulfillment of purpose and its natural life span. With this entry, it’s finally time to call it quits. Don’t worry, there is no medical issue or other cause for alarm; it is only that I think I’ve said all that I need to say in this format and have decided that I now want to spend this time on other projects, which I’ll mention below.

Before the Hilltop Diary makes its graceful (I hope) final bow and timely exit from the world, I do want to post the audio mockup of the completed third, “Phoenix”, movement of my in-progress Symphony No. 4: Scenes from an Enchanted Lake. Just below is the completed movement, ten minutes long. It is a semi-programmatic piece, meaning it has a loose story: Just before dawn, there is turbulence in the center of the Enchanted Lake, and with the bursting sunrise a mythical Phoenix emerges from the lake and soars joyfully around and above the lake. As time passes, it grows tired and slows down, in the C section of its Rondo Form (ABACA, framed by an introduction and coda), but in the last A section it finds a final burst of energy to fly up into the sun and, as phoenixes are known to do, burn up. But never fear, it will be reborn and repeat this same ritual the next morning.

My main purpose in writing this “Diary” has been to share a more holistic picture of a typical living classical composer’s life, a subject many people may not know much about unless they happen to know one of us living classical composers or can commune with any dead ones. One rarely finds out anything about their non-musical hobbies or day-to-day activities. For example, did Mozart help out Costanze with doing the dishes or take out the trash? Did Respighi have to mow the lawn? My hope has been to demystify composers and the way that classical music is created. Music may be magical, but the craft of writing it is less so.

One of my frequent topics here has been cooking and sharing recipes I’ve made. To me, this is important for people to know, because it really does relate to composing. Both are creative and fun. Both are preparing something with love that you hope others will enjoy.

Another topic has been gardening, which also reflects my desire to cultivate beauty in the world, generally, whether it is in the form of flowers, herbs, tomatoes, or invisible sound waves of music. I just took a snapshot of these delicate little pink primroses in front of the house, which just appeared. Like ephemeral music, perhaps they symbolize the fragility of beauty in this world.

These and other topics celebrate my belief that art comes out of a full life and that a true composer cannot just write music. I have always loved American composer Charles Ives’ statement in his book Essays Before a Sonata that “It is better for a composer to spend a single day in a Kansas wheat field than three years on a prize in Rome.”

I plan to keep my Facebook page but only use it for announcements of activities. I will be able to get Facebook messages and will try to respond to them. But before I become something closer to a hermit, let me leave you with a few upcoming things to watch for that are more or less in my current creative pipeline:

My non-fiction prose chapter called “What in the World Happened to Classical Music in the Twentieth Century?” will be part of a forthcoming book by Ignatius Press, tentatively to be titled The Brush and the Lyre: The Inner Lives of Christian Artists. There will be other chapters by painters, sculptors, musicians, and authors. I’m really looking forward to reading the other artists’ chapters but am not sure of the release date yet – probably in 2026 – please watch for it at the Ignatius Press web site and catalogs, https://ignatius.com/ .

I do like to write words and did even write a whole fiction novel a few years ago, which I shelved after rejections from four or five publishers, mostly because they said the topic did not fit with their genre of books – I was too busy with music deadlines to further pursue submitting it to more of them. But many more publishers than that first rejected some best selling books like Harry Potter (rejected by a dozen publishers) and The Godfather (rejected by eight)! So I think I’ll dust that off and give it another shot.

In the pipeline for the not too distant future, I hope, will be a CD/album of music from my ballet, Raffaella, A Fairytale Ballet, and my new Symphony No. 4: Scenes from An Enchanted Lake. And, as they say here  in the South, “Lord willin’ and if the crick don’t rise,” I will then work on symphonies no. 5, 6, 7 etc. until I finally drop dead from it.

I also have in mind maybe creating some kind of (very future) blog, “pairing” famous classical compositions with compatible recipes, one composer’s composition and one recipe in each blog or class, both from the same country – for example, the orchestral tone poem Finlandia by Jean Sibelius (who was Finnish) and Karjalanpiirakka, an easy and very popular Finnish pastry.

I have really appreciated all the readers who have identified themselves to me and all who subscribed or have moved the counter button on this page forward, sometimes well over a hundred views for a single diary entry. In these days of “going viral” with millions of “hits,” these numbers may sound incredibly modest, but they have felt abundant and have truly been a blessing and an encouragement to me. Thanks!