Have you ever had a picture in your head created by the music you are listening to? What about smell?   Have you ever listened to a piece of oriental music and could swear you smell cherry blossoms or incense? What about texture? Do you remember listening to a piece of music that reminded you of someone scraping their fingernails across a chalkboard? Or heard music that made your skin crawl? Have you had a piece of music that made you taste the cotton candy at a carnival or taste the ocean on your tongue?

Music can do all that. It can transport the listener to places that they have never been and are not likely to ever go. Music can trigger the nerve ending of your skin, or your taste buds or bring you visual imagery.   Music is so much more than notes on a page. A good composer can even trick the ears of the listener by playing a theme and then slip into a variation that drops some of the notes in the theme but the listener never knows that they are gone. The listener hears them because they expect to hear them which allow the composer to expand his/her use of those voices and expand on the variation.

Well written music can take the listener to a different time and a different place. It can fill the listeners head with sights, sounds, actions, tastes and yes, feelings. It can even transcend space and time and take the listener into as ethereal space that is beyond what they recognize as reality. Music can bend time and shape space to give new meaning to the familiar. It can take the listener home or to somewhere far away. It can make the unreal a reality. It can take the listener to the depths of sadness or the heights of ecstasy.

Think about music that you are most familiar with (1812 Overture, William Tell Overture, Beethoven’s 5^th symphony, Claire de Lune, Penny Lane, Knights in White Satin, Bolero, Theme from Harry Potter or Star Wars, etc.) The list goes on and on. What makes this music memorable is that it takes the listener to someplace or time other than where they are.   It paints a picture complete with sights, sounds, texture and smells. It allows the listener to escape and embrace.

I want my music to do that. I am constantly working towards accomplishing that.   I want to take the listener places, show them things they have never seen and allow them to experience what they may never experience otherwise. Maybe that is unrealistic, but it is, never-the-less, my dream.