J. Joe Townley

Eagle Rock High School

Class of 1969

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J. Joe Townley - Class of 1969 - Eagle Rock High School

First Name	J. Joe
Last Name	Townley
Graduation Year	Class of 1969
Gender	Male
Current Location	Los Angeles
Hometown	Eagle Rock
Relationship Status	Married
About Me	I wrote two piano concertos in 2011 and 2013 to fulfill a promise I made to myself as a young piano student that I would write a piano concerto and then premiere it much in the same way Rachmaninoff did with his 2nd, my intention being to launch a career as a composer, pianist, & conductor. Well, fate had other plans---a severe finger injury grounded me as a pianist at 19 and I never wrote that concerto. Instead, I entered the business world. The dream eventually faded, though it apparently had been lying dormant somewhere underneath my psyche in the intervening decades. In the meantime, to keep my music skills alive and because I enjoyed it immensely I read orchestral scores as leisure reading--analyzing how great composers achieved the sounds they were after; the different combinations of instruments they used. Then one day a few years ago an innocuous tune just popped into my mind. The old dream bubbling beneath my consciousness suddenly surfaced and I finally committed myself to writing that piano concerto, which became the No.1 in F# Minor Opus 1 (also here on YouTube), not having any formal training in orchestration except what I had gleaned from reading orchestral scores in the intervening years. Later, on reflection, I came to realize that the Concerto No. 1 wasn't the concerto I had always wanted to write. A second one followed in 2013, Opus 2, which is that concerto and which c...(read more)