Welcome! Get $10 off when you spend $35 with code "greta10" for a limited time!
About Us
Rick M. Tagawa
Music Composer
My mother taught me everything I know about music. She was a composer and I have early memories of her writing music late at night with a Roget’s Thesaurus by her side.
My mother sang professionally in Japan before World War II. Four sides of her 78s exist:
In 1959 I started studying percussion with Robert Sonner at USC Music Prep Department. This was music education with a total immersion philosophy. I soon found myself mixing martinis in Palm Springs and playing the bass drum in Carmina Burana at the Laguna Pageant of the Arts.
In 1964 I wrote “Inspirations Diabolique, for percussion solo” which was published by Bob Yaegar, Professional Drum Shop in Hollywood. Winifred Fall used Hindemith’s Craft of Musical Composition to teach harmony at LA High School (class of 1965.)
Berio, in a class at Juilliard, announced that he wrote his best music while seated in an airplane. These conditions can be met simply enough with just a kitchen table, chair, manuscript paper, mechanical pencil and an eraser. Imagine yourself immobilized with no way of checking your music and you will find great compositional vistas suddenly open. It turns out music composition can be generated from the laws of harmony as set by composers such as Hindemith.
1971 saw me enter the Ethnomusicology Department at UCLA and sadly, in 1972 Mantle Hood’s tenure came to a close. At his home in Topanga we all gathered and toasted: “the phoenix will rise again”.
Well today is that promise day.
Ode to Greta
available here!
Ode to Greta is the complete 220 page musical score to Ode to Greta including an Introduction and Performance Notes.
