Martin Spitznagel Pianist. Composer. Writer. Filmmaker.

John “Fingers” Williams

I started writing ragtime when I was 13. My first piece of music was called the “Starlight March,” and no you cannot hear it. All the Internet needs to know about Martin Spitznagel the composer is that he was an amazing supergenius who never wrote a bad tune ever. Why don’t you preserve that, Wayback Machine.

Since that fateful afternoon at Mom’s house on the Baldwin spinet 14 years ago, plunking my way through “Starlight,” I’ve written mainly for the piano. Okay, only for the piano (with some tiny exceptions). This past December, however, I had the opportunity to do a full-on orchestral score for my company’s holiday card, which you can watch/listen to/mock incessantly here.

Now, I didn’t have a live orchestra to work with, so I used a combination of virtual instruments, Logic Pro 7, and a 49-key midi keyboard pulled from the action-less depths of Piano Hell in order to score the card. Not that I would have known what to do with a real orchestra, seeing as I only know how to play the piano – it’d be like asking a person with a driver’s license to fly a fleet of airplanes, i.e., I sort of get what they do and I know what not flying looks like, but I’m not sure you’d want me running the show – but despite all that, and the ridiculously compressed schedule I had to work with, I’m really pleased with the way it turned out.

“I daresay,” you might be pondering, “what business does a self-taught ragtime pianist have writing non-ragtime orchestral music?” Well, haughty British-sounding reader, I’ll tell you. My iTunes library, which consists of 3722 songs (10.2 solid days worth of music) is literally almost divisible by two: 50% ragtime, 50% film scores. This makes me A) one of the few people in the world who can legitimately claim to have over five days worth of ragtime in his iTunes (wow… just realized that for the first time myself… that’s… wow) and B) literally the worst person in the world to go on a car trip with, especially if I bring my iPod.

I went through a period in my teens where literally all I listened to was ragtime. It was my bread, my olive oil, and my parmesan. It was all I consumed, all I wanted to hear, and all that I cared about. After about five rag-obssessed years, however, I fell in love with film scores. They were my way of “branching out” into music that hadn’t, like ragtime, already fossilized and begun turning into oil. I love(d) film cues because they were immediate, emotional, epic, intoxicating, and dancing around the living room to them in my pajamas was inordinately edifying. I also liked the fact that, like ragtime, each piece was roughly 3 minutes, and that its job was to evoke images and feelings, not to be overly intellectual like some classical music. It was music designed to make you feel.

It was also a damn good time to like soundtracks: Gladiator, The Phantom Menace, Titanic, and a number of other noteworthy scores were all thundering in the theaters.

After high school and getting my film degree, I applied and was accepted into the Berklee College of Music’s film scoring program, an opportunity which I ultimately turned down (inexorably altering the course of my life forever). I had good reasons, and I think it was the right choice at the time, but the chance to do this holiday card and really have to rise to something again was a welcome opportunity, like a long drink of cool water after a day spent wandering in the sun. I spent over 25 hours on that little 2′30″ track. This dumb little card ate an entire weekend, and I fed it happily. I hadn’t been so excited to write music in a long time. It felt like a chance at… I dunno… redemption.

So, couple this chance at redemption with the fact that I look insatiably manly while holding a baton, and you have the makings of my newest direction: scoring for the stage and screen!

Now, I’m not sure where I go from here. I think I’m going to take some music theory classes here in DC. Honestly, I would rather get daily root-canal surgery, as I invariably turn into a bored, scattered child whenever I encounter anything having to do with music theory (“Oh look, a kitty!”), but what was quaint and sort of charming before – “Oh look how good he is, and he can’t even tell you what chords he is playing!” – is now just kind of a sad, gaping hold in my musical bag, so that needs to fixed right-quick before anything else. I’m pretty sure, as my friend Bill put it, that “there’s no way to do this other than just to do this,” so that’s what I’m going to do. I’m just going to… er… start doing it. Especially now that I’m trying to build towards my next step, I don’t feel like I have much to lose. And I’ll just apply whatever I learn to ragtime piano anyways, so it cannot be anything but a win.

I’ll post the results here. I need to get more of my music on this site anyways. Should be fun.

Stay warm!