The Music of Daniel Robert Lahey
The Muse is a powerful force; you don’t want trifle with your spirit guide, The Muse. She will have her way no matter what you think you are trying to accomplish. The music will come out, the picture will be revealed, the chant will be intoned, your poem will be found on your beach. Unconditional synchronicity simply happens.
The composer Daniel Robert Lahey has a strong relationship with his creative side. I think that all musicians refuse to allow themselves to be categorized into a tidy genre, and Lahey has emerged from the 1960s versions of pop and Bach through the vast realm of his traditional classical studies. The term “classical” does not refer to a historical style period in music-in the sense that Baroque and Romantic do-but rather from his first guitar and earliest keyboarding leading eventually to all art music, and now to emerge with his hands in electronica, bringing together the past into his own current visions and shaped sound craftwork.
Rebekkah Hilgraves is a singer/songwriter, recording engineer, writer, whiskey drinker (and some other free-spirited things), and studio owner (RadHaus.Studio — https://radhaus.studio/). She has ventured into the realm of this music before me, so I am indebted to her for sharing her impressions, and to her friend Mike Metlay, who has curated so much of this work of Lahey for RadioSpiral broadcasting enjoyment. Here is what Rebekkah had to say about the music of Daniel Robert Lahey.
“Being so prolific means that his music is sometimes uneven, but when he’s on, he’s flippin’ genius, reminiscent of Samuel Barber, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, or Kodály, in the Neo-classical ambient drift. He is in some ways the prototypical tortured genius, and some of his most brilliant work comes out of his worst moments — but then, some of his worst music does, too. He’s a prolific composer, and his works are semi-improvised, and are either inspired by, or evoke, specific moods or ideas. Not all are programmatic, though, and capture the music in his head solely for the music’s sake.”
How do two sound travelers connect in this vast digital wasteland?
“He had been participating in a radio station chat community, and mentioned at one point that he was experimenting and would we like to hear it. It’s a very supportive community, and of course we (the chat group) said yes! We sure were glad we did. This was for Stillstream, the station from which our current station, RadioSpiral, spun off. I’m glad to say that he followed us over when we jumped.”
https://radiospiral.net/programs/meander/meander-the-music-of-tonalchemy/
Daniel is known as Tonalchemy there. Again I wondered, “In addition to his playful sense of song titles, he calls each individual track a ‘thing’ and has them numbered; for example he has one he calls ‘“The Zookeeper Escapes (thing_416).”’ I have never seen anything like that before.”
“Well, his reasoning is that they are all ‘studies’, but he told me that he considered ‘études’ to be too pretentious. So, ‘Things.’ Each one represents a mood or a thought, or sometimes no thought at all. It’s ambient Electronica, most of it, with the experience and training of a classical musician. So it’s electronic music with a distinctive modern classical/symphonic feel.”
Daniel has a sound that questions the tight definitions and categories of academic disciplines, which are only remnants of the past and not a distinct musical style, less a surface style and more of an attitude. His sound somehow incorporates elements of all styles of music irrespective of whether these are “classical” or not, drawing on an ever wider range of sources for inspiration and developing a wide variety of techniques.
The young Daniel Robert Lahey was born in Indianapolis into a family that loved music. His mother was an active keyboardist and both of his parents loved jazz, the family collection contained works by Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, etc. They also had a few symphonic albums; The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Peter and the Wolf (Disney), and some Tchaikovsky.
He was not allowed to touch his mom’s keyboards until he had reached an age where he could play without the typical child’s pounding. After that he soon started writing little ditties of notes and chords that sounded good to him. This led to many new things.
Growing up in La Jolla, California in the early ’70s, he was treated to a lot of fantastic music (and a lot of really expensive stuff) among a populace who is not embarrassed by their privilege.
Reflecting on moments of musical epiphany and life-realization, the first piece that “blew my mind” was Bach’s “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.” His church in La Jolla had a brilliant musical director and organist who was a fellow Bach addict. It stirred his desire to hear those tasty Bach pieces, and such virtuosity and melodic inventions are enough to inspire any good listener. And that music was written 400 years ago.
Although he took up the guitar around age 10, he says he didn’t do much with it until he was about 16 or so. It was the early ’70s when a lot of progressive rock was being made: Yes, Gentle Giant, King Crimson, Premiata Foreneria Marconi, etc. There were a few fellow git-pickers in La Jolla and they would get together for jam sessions, which was a great way to pick up licks on the guitar. Being an all-or-nothing person, he decided to get really serious so he began studying guitar; scales, arpeggio studies, slur studies, learning to read music in earnest, building a repertoire, et cetera. He got to the point where he started playing for money, and was actually able to survive on what he was making playing in restaurants and bars in Spokane, Washington.
When he moved to Seattle in 1983, he couldn’t find a place to play, and he couldn’t stand teaching, so he began to focus on keyboard (synthesizer) and doing what most musicians and actors do for a living: waiting tables and other restaurant work. Eventually, Daniel became a Software Engineer, working in that field for about 10 years, until some mental health challenges demanded a new direction.
One’s sense of humor is often a key survival strategy. Daniel’s musical life and love of music has overcome the slew of mental diagnoses. And, of course, The Muse, who puts tantalizing ideas into sound. Daniel says he was sitting in his little studio, contemplating The Muse. Within the acoustics of the room, he heard a woman’s voice say “Call me Maud.” Maud is an ancient Persian name meaning “Powerful Battler.”
Free from corporate life, he has been freed to pursue his true passion, which is, of course, music. He has created over 150 albums over the last 10 or so years. In that time, he has been shifting between classical and ambient music, and now gravitating back toward electronically-composed orchestral and symphonic music. You may notice the prominence of Horn (it’s not French, by the way), English Horn, and Strings in music.
This new direction follows, since the music that has moved Lahey the most is Bach, Mozart, Sibelius, Prokofiev, and Saint-Saëns. Playing Bach on the guitar was very difficult but very rewarding. At his peak, he was able to render a satisfactory performance of Bach’s Chaconne, Partita №2 for violin — a benchmark for violinists and guitarists alike and a 14-minute workout for either instrument, using his own transposition, not Segovia’s.
When asked about how he goes about composing, Daniel revealed that his process consists of first breathing mindfully for a minute (not always), then sitting down at the keyboard. Then he listens to his fingers. Much of what he does seems to happen more as a feeling in his fingers, like they know where to go and he tries to just follow them. This is from about 62 years of fiddling on keyboards and studying music theory. And don’t forget Maud.
Listening is an ability that is one of the most important and neglected qualities in a human. It first requires an ability to focus on what your ears are telling your brain. Listening is sustained attentiveness to what your ears are bringing you. One’s musical upbringing is to hear the tonal relationships of the sounds and compare them to passages you’ve heard before. This might be seen as more cultivated listening.
Daniel sees his task as a composer is to bring unusual and un-worn out harmonies and melodies and rhythms into the aural realm and bend the range of notes (sounds) here and there that intrigue the listener.
I am taking three approaches to presenting a sampling of Daniel’s canon of work, which is really just a taste of what you’ll find in his Bandcamp catalog.
Wings of Splendor: The Sleep Music Collection
Acoustic Awakenings: The Classical Crossover Collection
Capricious Dreams: The Ambient Electronic Collection
Originally published at https://ello.co.
