STEVE GELLER, MUSICIAN
About Me
A General Bio
I have a Ph.D. in Music Composition and Theory from the University of California-Davis. My undergraduate degree was a B.A. in American Studies from Brandeis University, whereupon I graduated Summa Cum Laude. My collegiate teaching work extends from traditional and contemporary music theory (including jazz theory) to various classes in jazz, rock and traditional musicology, to sight-singing and ear-training courses, and recently I taught community courses in Songwriting and in Choral Singing.
I produced 3 CD’s as the director of the Liquid Hotplates (a 12-to-16 member co-ed collegiate a cappella group affiliated with UCDavis) during my time in the group from its founding in 2000 to the end of 2006. Most of the arrangements on the CD’s were mine (I was the principal arranger of 47 songs for the group and collaborated on 6 additional arrangements). Some samples of our work can be heard on this site’s “Arrangements” page as well as this adjunct site. Previously, I had been a member of the professional jazz a cappella sextet “Drawn to Scale” and a founding member of Brandeis’ co-ed a cappella group "Spur of the Moment."
My performances, mostly as a singer and piano player for more than 2 decades, have taken me from Carnegie Hall (with the UCDavis Gospel Choir in 2001) to Disney's Epcot Center (as a tuba player with the Brockton High School Wind Ensemble in 1991) to Las Vegas to several performances in Western Europe in 1994. I have also played the piano and organ for two churches in the Sacramento, CA area (one of which also employed me to conduct the choir).
I like to spend a lot of my time on various creative endeavors, from writing the music and script to a musical called Murder on April 6th, based on an original idea, to writing a screenplay for a baseball movie comedy called “Gary and the Game Changer,” to inventing a resource-management board game called Level Six. I also root for all Boston-area sports teams, having grown up in Brockton, Massachusetts.
A Bit About My Dissertation and Senior Thesis
My dissertation, completed in 2003 from the University of California-Davis, focuses on a work by Elvis Costello in collaboration with the Brodsky String Quartet: a 1993 song cycle entitled The Juliet Letters. I chronicle Costello's career-long practice of "role-playing"--assuming musically and orchestrationally re-enforced personalities, usually down to fine details, for the purpose of more "authentically" conveying a message or a mindset, and I posit that The Juliet Letters represents his most ambitious of such role-playing exercises. The work is then analyzed harmonically, rhythmically, motivically, thematically, and in terms of its allusions to the Classical and popular music pantheons, and I use the piece as an example through which to theorize about the shifting parameters of genre crossover in general. The dissertation provides the first comprehensive analysis of this work.
My undergraduate thesis, completed in 1995 from Brandeis University, focuses on the music in Alfred Hitchcock's films, specifically the scores by Bernard Herrmann (Psycho, Vertigo), Dmitri Tiomkin (Shadow of a Doubt, Strangers on a Train), Franz Waxman (Rebecca, Rear Window) and largely forgotten British film composer Louis Levy (The Lady Vanishes, Secret Agent). The premise is that Hitchcock worked more organically with his scorers (particularly Herrmann) than did most other directors, and thus the impact of the music upon the final product is unusually potent. In Tiomkin's chapter, I discuss how the music shapes the films' roles of dualism, the transfer of guilt, and the nostalgia of the waltz; Waxman's chapter is about the music's role in implying subjectivity, romance, and aural identification; Levy's chapter concentrates on the juxtapositions between chaos and order (those in the music that mirror those in the plots of the films); Herrmann's chapter gives analysis to two of the iconic scores in music history--the endlessly-unresolved Wagnerian torment of Vertigo and the terrifying chilliness of the string dissonances in Psycho.
A Bit About My Performing
I have been playing the piano for 35 years, professionally for 24. I took several years of Classical and jazz lessons starting at ages 7 and 12, respectively, and returned briefly to each of these in my early 20's. Most of my playing, however, has been by ear and by intuition. I have also been singing (professionally and otherwise) for a number of years, performing in University Choruses and chamber choirs, a jazz sextet, a Gospel choir, and several student-run rock and a cappella groups. Often concurrent with my singing or playing in/on them, I have directed four vocal ensembles, conducted both vocal and instrumental ensembles, and produced several CD's. During my youth, I studied the clarinet, guitar and tuba.
A Bit About My Influences
My piano playing is probably most influenced by Elton John, though this is not particularly intentional. Throughout high school, my primary influence was Billy Joel, with occasional nods to Ray Charles, Jerry Lee Lewis and pieces by George Gershwin. Some of my piano influences today include John Legend, Tori Amos, Stevie Wonder, Leon Russell and the Beethoven piano sonatas (none of which I can play proficiently, but I constantly attempt to channel their elegance and power in my work). I never really absorbed much genuine jazz technique, although I have learned conceptually from Art Tatum, Bill Evans, Claude Bolling and Duke Ellington.
People tell me that my singing voice is relatively unrelated to that of most other artists. I am heavily influenced vocally by David Bowie, Billy Joel, Frank Sinatra, John Lennon, Eddie Vedder, Elvis Costello, and Steven Tyler, but I pay close attention to the vocal mannerisms of several other artists and try to learn and develop from them, including Freddie Mercury, Alanis Morrisette, Louis Armstrong, Stevie Wonder, Susanna Hoffs, James Brown, Eminem, Sting, Cyndi Lauper, Dave Matthews, Neil Diamond, Jewel, Randy Newman, the ladies from ABBA and James Hetfield of Metallica. Occasionally I will try to sound like Johnny Cash, Karen Carpenter, Tony Bennett, or other artists whose voices are indelible, hoping that I can offer at least a respectable attempt in this challenge.
My early compositions were influenced a lot by Gershwin, and also by half-remembered snippets of pieces that I heard during my childhood. Since then, some of my compositional influences include Brahms, Mussorgsky, Poulenc, Danny Elfman, Steve Reich and John Williams. Murder on April 6th draws significantly from Sondheim, Claude-Michel Schönberg and Andrew Lloyd Webber. My songwriting influences include David Bowie, Billy Joel, the Beatles, Elvis Costello, Queen, Sting, Randy Newman, Pink Floyd, John Melloncamp, George Michael, Bruce Springsteen, Chicago (the band), the Proclaimers, Huey Lewis and the News, and Sheryl Crow.
A Bit About My Artistic Style and Creative Process
I began composing art music in 1994, and my greatest period of prolificacy started in 1997, when I began to study with Pablo Ortiz and, two years later, with Ross Bauer. My compositions are usually eclectic, using jazz sonorities, expressionism, neo-Romantic themes or other ideas often within the same piece or the same section of a piece. Some of my works are linear, some motive-derived, some hierarchical, some occasionally serial, some loosely programmatic, and some are formlessly intuitive, often conceived specifically around the instrumental combination for which I am writing. I never use formal sketches for my work, but I do sometimes have a general mental picture of the structure I would like to fill. Occasionally my pieces follow traditional forms (“Solar Strings” and “Phive” are two early pieces in typical sonata form, and the second movement of “Silver Castle” is a caccia), but often they juxtapose disparate theme-based sections until the themes collide or unite at the climax of the work. Because I like to put new music to words for the first time, I often either compose my own texts, such as those in Murder on April 6th, or utilize the unpublished text of friends. An exception to this is my setting of a Han Dynasty Chinese poem in my work “A Splendid Feast.”
When I write a pop song, I don't have a single particular ritual (lyrics first, or music first, etc.) Conceptually, it is often "genre first," i.e., I decide that I would like to write a highbrow ballad, or a riff-based blues-rock piece, or a punkish wordy jaunt, and since these categories have both lyrical (speech patterns, rhyming schemes, subject matter) and musical (instrumentation, chord progressions, density of the melody line) tendencies already built into my interpretation of the genre, I hone both at the same time. Sometimes, the song flows naturally and almost instantly (I wrote the Radical Manacle song “Shut Up” in about 20 minutes, and the words to “’Til She Is Here” in about 45 minutes), and sometimes the song is painstaking hard work (“Cursive Letters” from A Rose of Angles and Lines took weeks to write, “Purple Doors” from Place Very Central consumed my brain for 5 very long days, and “Candle Light” from Place Very Central has been re-written 3 times over the course of 20 years). While, as mentioned, I don't necessarily start writing lyrics either first or subserviently to the melody, getting the lyrics to where I want them is usually what takes the extra time at the end.