CD Program Notes: 2002 ASCAP Winner! Ever since I can remember I've felt the ancient pull of the ocean. I long to return there to contemplate it's restless enormity and to explore the full range of mankind's longings. Nothing's more vast, unpredictable, calm, ferocious, nurturing and distructive. The tides own rise and fall has given rise to many musical accounts throughout history. As a composer I long to capture, through music, the depths of it's mysery. In his book The Dehumanization of Art, the Spanish philosopher, Ortega Y Gassett once proposed that all of the precious gems of original musical concepts had been completely minded out of the rock quarry of all possible ideas by the late 1940's. The only tiny musical remnents remaining were small pebbles of insignificant melodies already discarded by the great composeres of the past... Gassett wondered why a contemporary composer would waste time composing in this barren wasteland of used up concepts. By contrast, the great Russian composer/pianist Sergei Prokofiev was so plagued by the notion of musical ideas running out that he calculated that civilization was far from reaching the end of fresh material. In fact, Prokofiev calculated that the number of possibilities was still in the millions! I also agree that there is yet to be discovered, not only by the composer, but also by the writer or artist, a vast un- explored territory rich in precious, creative gems. I have made it my mission to explore old classical and romantic forms, and infuse them with fresh, new melodic and harmonic structures with a logic and purpose of their own. I can only hope that in my compositions I have succeded to that end.... Nathan Bello