The Everyday Musician

I’m Mark Walsen (mark@everydaymusician.com), the guy who writes the Everyday Musician blog.  I qualify as an everyday musician, according to this web site’s definition, because I make music every day, or at least wish I could.  My “music making” is playing and improvising at the piano, and sometimes composing,

I’ve been playing the piano for almost 50 years, since I was 6.  Although I love playing the piano, I consider my first hobby to be composing, which I started doing when I was 11.  My height of fame as a composer was when I composed the alma mater tune for my high school.  The school has kept the tune but replaced the lame lyrics I wrote.  My dad wisely advised me to seek a career somewhere else than in music.

My occupation is developing software for everyday musicians and running Notation Software.  I’ve been developing software my entire career.  Prior to founding Notation Software in 1994, I was Microsoft’s first program manager of the Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) and of the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC), both of which are fundamental toolsets used by Windows programmers.

Music and software intersected for me once in my mid-20s when I was the director of the computer center at Wake Forest University (my undergrad alma mater) in Winston-Salem, N.C.  At that same time, I commuted across town to the North Carolina School of Arts for a couple of years to study music composition under the then chancellor, Dr. Robert Ward, a Pulitzer Prize winning operatic composer.  (I’ll write a blog sometime to describe some of the ways he coached students in composition.)

Music and software intersected a second time in 1988 when I got my first PC and decided that music notation would be an interesting project to practice programming for the first version of Windows.  I looked around town to see who else was developing music software and quickly found Raymond Bily, who had recently started Midisoft.  I became a third, minor principal of Midisoft, to develop the first notation for Midisoft Studio.  After a summer of doing that, I then started at Microsoft.   At a party for new employees, I had Bill Gates ear for 15 minutes, trying to interest him in the market of musicians.  Being a much smarter guy than me, it was immediately obvious to Bill that there was no sizeable market in music software– at least not big enough for Microsoft. 

I couldn’t get off my mind the fun of developing music software.  So that’s what I starting doing it full-time after I left Microsoft in 1994.

Developing music software and running the Notation Software business has proven to be so time-consuming that I have not composed nearly as much music as I did in previous years.  I do intend to get back to composing.  In the meantime, I have spent a lot of time improvising at the piano, which brings to me much of the same enjoyment that I have in composing.  Actually, almost all of my composing is done by doodling around on the piano, and using those ideas in the composition.

My ensemble experience is limited to 8-hand piano playing, which is a blast.  It has been many years since I’ve done this, but I used to get together with some pretty good sight-readers to play transcriptions of orchestral pieces for four pianists on two pianos.

My musical taste over the years has mostly been classical and neo-classical, but I do enjoy a fairly wide variety of styles.  I’d really like to play jazz piano well, but it doesn’t come as easy to me as I would hope.

What authority do I have in the area of Everyday Musicianship?  One source of that authority is simply that I’m also an everyday musician, not a professional musician. The most important source of my authority is that I talk with and think about everyday musicians every day, because they are the customers of Notation Software. 

Although everyday musicians are quite diverse in many ways, such as the instruments they play (or sing) and their musical styles, there is still a whole lot about the interests of everyday musicians that are shared in common.  I’m particularly interested in exploring with you our shared interests as everyday musicians.