Networks

Introduction

Hi! It's great to have a meetup group like this. As an introduction, my life is all on my website: iangeller.com (except for the good stuff to which I will never confess).

What genre of music do you compose?

I have earned my keep primarily as a classical baritone, Jewish cantor, and voice teacher, but my heart is in writing music, of which I do much too little due to intrinsic laziness. I love Brahms, my major influence, also Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Hindemith, Schoenberg, Bartok, Carter, and a few others. I dislike most of the "in" modern folks (no names) and detest minimalism. The folks I like are maximalists. My harmonic style uses polychords, chords in seconds, sevenths, fourth, and fifths, as well as occasional thirds and sixths. I like harmonies that move around and melodic phrases that are not repetitious (similar to Brahms and Schoenberg). For professional reasons I have written music for the Jewish service. Some of this, written in my style, has gone over like a pay toilet in a diarrhea ward. I have also written in the traditional Eastern European and classical Reform styles as well as "contemporary" pseudo-Israeli folk rock, which, of course, is much much more successful.

How long have you been composing?

For as long as I can remember, since early childhood, I constantly heard music in my mind, which would be either music of others or my own music. I never wrote anything down until I was a teen-ager and started to study composition.

What would you most like to get out of this Meetup group?

I enjoy meeting like-minded composers and musicians interested in new music. In addition, I am always looking for interesting new music to perform, and for venues and concert series on which to perform interesting new music. These, regrettably, are losing budgets and disappearing. P.S. I am also looking for a college teaching job, which I have been told by informed sources I will never get because I am too old!

What Ian Geller is saying about this Meetup Group

Very nice, friendly, interesting people, but would be better if everyone came.