I fell in love with Classical Music when I was about four years old. It happened while I was attending Mass at Blessed Sacrament Cathedral in Hollywood, California. As usual, I was doing everything I could to avoid participating in the service, which, at the time, was in a long-dead language that I didn't understand and had no desire to learn. I had just been scolded for crawling
under the pew and was now lying with my head in my mother's lap, watching a visiting pigeon bob and weave along the ledge the bordered the ornately carved vaulted ceiling. It was then that I first heard what I thought must be an angel's voice, singing a heavenly melody. My dad told me later that this was actress, Anne Blyth, who many, including my dad, thought of as an angel, singing Schubert's Ave Maria. From that moment on, I was hooked.
I loved the music for the same reason then that I love it now, because of the way it makes me feel.
By the time I was 16, I had already started to amass an impressive collection of mostly Classical recordings. I had a part-time job and all or most of my weekly paycheck went to the local record store. Two years later, that was still the case, though the tab had almost doubled. The owner of the store suggested that I apply at the new store that would soon be opening down the street - so I could buy wholesale. I followed his advice
and, within a year or so, was managing the Studio City branch of Discount Record Center. I continued to manage record stores, both in California and Hawaii, for the next twenty years and chose to leave that business shortly after the release of the film Saturday Night Fever, in 1979, which I mark as "the day the music died". I regard it as such, because the release of this film celebrates the discovery of the simple formula that transformed the Record Business into the commercial Industry that it is today.
In 1979, Gabriel Lee and I founded Plumeria Productions Hawaii. We specialized in what was then an entirely new kind of music that is still inappropriately referred to as New Age Music. Due to a house fire in 1983, Plumeria only bloomed for four short years, during which time we released 15 albums. Fortunately, two-weeks before, I had sent copies of our master tapes to Narada and re-mastered versions of a number of the
Plumeria titles, including two popular titles, Oriental Sunrise and Satori, are still available today.
My interest in New Age Music led me along one of its many tributaries to what might best be called Applied Music. Applied Music refers both to a particular kind of music and a new paradigm or way of looking at music. Traditionally, music is regarded as an art form and judged mainly from the standpoint
of how it is constructed and performed. This new paradigm regards music from the perspective of what it does -- how it affects the listener or contributes to an activity or process, such as healing or learning. According to this new vantage, music is no longer viewed merely as diversion or entertainment, but as an applied science.
