Visual Music.

Finding Oleh

I was deeply involved in designing and producing the new Coit Museum of Pharmacy & Health Sciences at the University of Arizona. It was an enormous project involving exhibit design, interactive media, video production, animation and project management. Because I needed specialized creative talent, I began experimenting with the relatively new ability to work with artists around the world through online services.

It fascinated me.

Suddenly geography didn’t matter very much. A talented animator, musician or designer could be thousands of miles away and still become part of a project.

One day, almost as an experiment, I decided to try the same thing with a piece of my music.

I had an instrumental composition and thought it needed a guitar voice that I simply couldn’t provide myself. I began looking through musicians online and found a guitarist in Ukraine named Oleh. His listing essentially promised that he could put a killer guitar part on a song.

That sounded good to me.

I sent him the music with very little direction and asked what he could do with it.

A few days later, the tracks came back.

I was stunned.

Oleh hadn’t simply played a guitar solo. He had listened to the music. He understood it. His playing added another personality to something that had previously existed only inside my own head.

The Sorcerer’s Audition

That first experiment led to another.

I sent him The Sorcerer’s Audition, one of the most ambitious pieces I had written. In my imagination, the music tells the story of a young sorcerer appearing before a king and attempting to demonstrate his powers. It begins simply, almost tentatively, and gradually grows until the young sorcerer has seemingly conjured the universe.

Instead of telling Oleh exactly what to play, I gave him the freedom to respond to the music as an artist.

That became the foundation of our relationship.

I would compose the pieces, create the arrangements, play most of the instruments, build the orchestration, engineer the recording and develop the musical world. Then I would send the piece halfway around the world to Ukraine.

Oleh would send something back that I hadn’t thought of.

Sometimes it was a soaring lead. Sometimes an acoustic texture. Sometimes just a musical flourish at exactly the right moment.

That was the magic.

I have always believed that one of the great pleasures of working with talented artists is not telling them too much. If I tell another artist exactly what to do, I get back what I already imagined. But if I give that artist room to contribute, occasionally I get something I never could have imagined.

Oleh continually gave me those moments.

If I tell another artist exactly what to do, I get back what I already imagined.

An album nobody planned

We worked on several pieces this way, and somewhere around the eighth or ninth composition I suddenly realized something.

I was making an album.

That had never been the plan.

The pieces were very different from one another: progressive rock, cinematic music, jazz influences, orchestral passages, quieter acoustic moments. But there was a common thread. Each piece suggested pictures to me. Each one felt like a little movie without the screen.

Eventually I understood what to call it:

Visual Music.

A friend in a country at war

Then the world changed.

Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and a musical collaboration that had begun as a wonderful creative experiment suddenly became something much more personal.

Oleh was no longer simply a guitarist somewhere on the other side of the world.

He was my friend in a country at war.

There were times when he and his family were sheltering in a basement. There were times when work was nearly impossible. There were times when I simply sent him money because what mattered wasn’t whether another guitar track got finished.

What mattered was my friend.

And somehow, through all of it, we continued making music.

I was often in Arizona working on the museum, nearly a thousand miles from my own home, while Oleh was thousands of miles farther away in Ukraine. Yet we could continue communicating, exchanging files and building these compositions together.

It became one of the strangest and most meaningful creative experiences of my life.

Ukraine, Peace and War

The final piece brought all of this together.

I had an older composition filled with tension, conflict and the sound of war. I asked Oleh to create a beautiful guitar passage that could appear before and after it. The resulting work became “Ukraine, Peace and War.”

The piece begins with Oleh.

Then peace gives way to explosions and conflict.

Eventually the violence recedes, and his guitar returns.

But I deliberately didn’t give the ending a triumphant resolution, because there wasn’t one. The war had not ended. There was nothing to celebrate.

The music simply searches for peace.

Finish it

When my work on the museum concluded in 2022, I returned home and spent roughly two months assembling, mixing, mastering and finishing the album.

And then I faced another question:

What was I supposed to do with it?

I was 72 years old.

Releasing a commercial album at 72 seemed almost ridiculous to me. I had already had a long career. I wasn’t trying to become a rock star. I wasn’t looking for a record deal. The sensible thing might have been to finish the music, put it on a shelf and move on to something else.

My wife, Jo, saw it differently.

She encouraged me to finish it.

More importantly, she encouraged me to put it out into the world.

So I did.

And that may have been one of the best pieces of advice she ever gave me.

Visual Music was released under the Augustwolf name, with Oleh Andrievsky recognized as my collaborator. What I thought might simply disappear into the vast sea of new music instead began finding listeners.

The album received wonderful reviews.

More surprising to me, it began selling.

Over time, in one form or another, approximately 12,000 copies have found their way into people’s hands and collections. It continues to sell, with much of its audience coming from audiophiles, collectors and people who simply enjoy sitting down and really listening to music.

I never expected that.

What it represents

In some ways, the numbers are almost beside the point.

What matters to me is what the album represents.

It represents two artists from different generations and different parts of the world discovering one another because technology suddenly made that possible.

It represents music passing back and forth across thousands of miles while one of those artists was living in a country at war.

It represents friendship.

It represents the extraordinary things that can happen when you trust another artist enough to let that person change what you’ve created.

And perhaps most personally, it reminds me that creativity does not have an expiration date.

Putting out a music album at 72 was about the last thing I expected to be doing.

Yet Visual Music became one of the projects I am most proud of.

Not because it happened according to some carefully constructed career plan.

Quite the opposite.

It happened because I remained curious.

Because I tried something.

Because I found another artist on the other side of the world and asked, “What can you do with this?”

Because he answered.

Because a friendship developed.

Because even a war couldn’t completely stop the exchange of ideas between two people who wanted to make music.

And because when I was ready to convince myself that I was simply too old to put an album out, Jo said, in effect:

Finish it.

So I did.

Sometimes the most important creative work of your life may be the work you never planned to make.