ARTIST’S STATEMENT
This is a website by Bruce Frostick. I’m a musician. Over the years, new melodies and musical patterns continually come to me as I sit at the keyboard. Random memories of past years life arise at the same time. I suspect this would eventually happen to anyone if they just continued to work at an instrument for years, and didn’t give up in boredom. The unusual nature of my musical study is this: I rarely play any one else’s compositions. Instead, I work with smaller elements of the music I have heard throughout my life. I liken it to the way our body breaks down the proteins in our food into their constituent amino acids, and then reconstitutes them into our own proteins.
My profession before I retired was creating computer software, beginning with APL. I am married to a writer who is an expert on Walt Whitman. The physics of overlapping but mostly independent multi-level worlds is something that I contemplate quite often. Should I mention that I see qualia everywhere and at all times when there is any awareness at all?
I have been improvising music for more than sixty years, mostly on piano but more recently on accordion, and now mostly back to piano. The older music found on this website ranges through different genres and moods: New Age, spa, folksy, jazzy, classical, pensive to merry, to dreamy to lively.
Every so often I write an interesting composition. Perhaps some of these will be available on this website soon. Most recently, I am attempting to compose some delightful and intricate piano pieces while I still can. (Time waits for no one, and hopefully the soul rises as the body sinks.) Hopefully these will appear on this website when they are ready, either as recordings or as scores. You will be among the first to know.
Pianos
I play a Schubert studio grand, and various Synthogy Ivory II virtual pianos via a Roland A88-MKII MIDI controller.
AccordionS
My first good accordion was an IORIO Symphonic Grand with H+M+L treble reeds and five sets of bass reeds. Originally, it contained an electronic interface and an extra register stop on both sides, to turn off the acoustic sounds from that side. By modifying the now useless 4th bass stop, and also the 3rd, I was able to modify the bass machine to produce four new reed combinations in addition to the original three. The reed combination selected by the 3rd or 4th stop now depends on which other stop was pressed immediately before it, so sometimes it is necessary to press two stops in sequence to get the desired bass sound.
Now I use a similar but more flexible (more register combinations) Philharmonic accordion. Inspired by my success in modifying the bass register stops of the IORIO accordion, I figured out a set of (reversible) modifications to the Philharmonic which allows me to select the bass note register set and chord register set separately, via two successive register switch presses.