Martin Spitznagel Pianist. Composer. Writer. Filmmaker.

John “Fingers” Williams

My handwriting is not neat enough to compose like this

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.