Traveling 1

I went for a short vacation to see my family in the Buffalo area. The drive into the city, from the Southtowns where my parents live, was beautiful. Buffalo is much flatter than Pittsburgh, and has a beautiful sky. The drive up 219 is something I took for granted as a kid, but now I understand what people mean when they say it is scenic. Of course, Pennsylvania is also very scenic. The Pennsylvania part of 86 East, the road on which I based my piece "Southern Tier Suite", was a mess, with bumps every couple seconds where the road had cracked and been filled with patching asphalt.

I realized one day that I liked listening to old YES music as I drive, though I have to be careful not to let Bruford's propulsive drumming make me speed! A lot of the longer pieces, especially "Tales From Topographic Oceans", remind me of landscapes, that become more interesting as one becomes familiar with them, and all the detail within. This is what inspired me to write my first "geographical" music, the "Southern Tier Suite", and later things like "Niagara". The "Suite" refers to the three sections of the piece: "86 East", which represents the usually boring part from Erie to about Chautauqua lake- though a bit monotonous, it does have a "groove" to it; "Plateau" which represents all the places where the road feels as if it has reached some kind of summit, sometimes within view of either Chautauqua Lake or Lake Erie; and "The Senecas", which represents the Seneca Nation which lives around Salamanca. In this way, I never run out of inspiration- I can always just do a "musical landscape".