Wanted Dead or Alive!

At first I was fairly certain the classical music community held
deeply seated prejudices against jazz and pop musicians
and composers, I was wrong!!!!!

I found out there was a general
but subtle allergic reaction to living composers. Its just considered uncouth
for composers to do anything that resembles selling, pushing
hawking their music, which by the way is what they must do in order to earn a living.

I sense that musician's secretly wish we would all just sit quietly
like books on a shelf and wait to be opened.

They just don't want to be forced to interact. Everyone is so accustomed
over so many years to dealing with dead composers whose feelings and
reactions don't have to be considered yet who's written word/ music, curiously is godlike.

So when a living composer shows up its always a bit awkward and something of a let down; nothing god like here, no just a mere human. Imagine how we have idolized dead composers for
hundreds of years, and then to suddenly meet a living composer, a regular person, a demystified human being.
It's hard to conceive that music from this living, shitting, breathing being could be great, could ever be lifted into the exulted realm of the early gods of music.
Well I've got a surprise for you, it can happen, its you exalters who have a problem with de-mystification.
And yet I'll admit, we composers have contributed to the peculiar situation by writing
music that for the most part audience's don't want to hear or music
that is just plain bad; We have also written music that In a uniquely musician to music way may be challenging and interesting but is really more fun to play than to listen to.

Reduced to creeping around at art's conventions with mandates from the organizers
to remain unobtrusive, avoiding the semblance of music hawking, composers have not done
themselves any favors because until recently they have been presenting
to concert going audiences unpalatable compositions, they have created
a built in fear to hearing new music.

New music makes up approximately 20% of current concert repertoire (that's being generous) and 90% of that is truly unbearable. The unbearable stuff usually gets the most
critical acclaim. thereby perpetuating an insulting inference that
the audience is not smart enough to understand the music they've just heard.

Michael Colina PR Story

Michael Colina entered the Classical music world eight years ago from another planet, following none of the traditional paths, neither an academic or strictly a performer he comes with no intellectual pretension’s, his music is unselfconscious & emotional; after 25 years producing and writing for some of contemporary Jazz’s greats He decided it was time to focus on the
music he’d always dreamed of writing.

He comes from the dirt tracks of drag racing and the tobacco fields of North Carolina, his early years blanketed in the heat of racial unrest and a personal struggle against old family hatreds and prejudice's.
Michael Colina grew up a shy outsider and a quite rebel. Colina thinks of himself as half cultured poet/ musician and half redneck hick.

Traveling between the tropical paradise of his father’s Cuban home, Casilda and the beaches of South Carolina; between the magic of Santeria Drumming, and the R & B of Aretha Franklin, Colina's childhood environment was a swirling caldron of powerful influences. His musical world spanned the gamut of AfroCuban rhythms, the gyrations of James Brown, and the gospel ecstasy of southern Geechie culture.
Colina was exposed to Hill-billy flat pick'n & the strings of Montavani, from Gershwin to Prokofiev, Stavinsky to Pendereki. It was an unusual mix of sensory input, cultural fractalization, intellectual and artistic counter currents.

His Father was the only Cuban in Charlotte, NC in 1941, affectionately dubbed “Spic” by his friends. To the utter horror of most, Gilberto managed to convince Charlotte’s most beautiful woman to marry him. Marguerite Colina was Miss Charlotte, and Miss North Carolina in the Miss America Pageant of 1939.

When Michael Colina graduated from the North Carolina School of the Arts the country boy moved to the sophisticated world of NY City. Struggling for his existence, he found work as a composer of off off Broadway Theater, Modern Dance, Documentary Films, commercials and TV themes; eventually he found himself in the company of some of the most talented Jazz and Classical musicians of his time. Falling as well into the culture of drug abuse, Colina suffered through an addiction to crack cocaine for a number of years. Eventually overcoming his demon’s left him with a clearer sense of purpose and a decidedly passionate grasp of life.
Still vulnerable, after all these years to substance abuse, Colina walks along a dangerous creative tightrope. From ecstasy to depression,
Colina feels that the act of composition must include the sharing and communication with the listener; a completion of the circle of creation.
Colina speaks of writing the music he Love’s, the music he wants to hear.

Colina brought his career in Jazz to a natural conclusion around 2001, when the effects of downloading and the concept that music should be free had made meaningless the idea of earning a living by selling a tangible product, Colina decided if he wasn’t going to earn a substantial living creating Jazz, he might as well write the music he’d been waiting his whole life to, it was time!!!

Since 2002 Colina has written many works for various chamber ensemble as well as three concertos. One for Violin & Orchestra,
A second for Guitar and Orchestra and another for Flute and Orchestra: these works were recorded in Jan. 2010 with the London Symphony Orchestra under the Direction of Ira Levin along with 2 more orchestral works. The recording of the Flute concerto was under the direction of renown Flutist and conductor Ransom Wilson to whom the work was dedicated.

Three Cabinets of Wonder/ Violin Concerto

Three Cabinets of Wonder/ Violin Concerto

The Collaboration between Michael Colina and Anastasia Khitruk

Conspiratorial or complacent?
It is really quite daunting to disentangle the threads of inspiration.
A creator’s succubus or muse can either play a conscious role in this duet or be completely blind; Conspiratorial or complacent.

Peter Pears had to put up with the heartbreak of Britten's little choir boys and their "sleepovers". On these occasion’s Mr. Pears temporarily relinquished his role as muse to Britten; it eventually sliced his heart too thin.

Don’t you wonder what Beethoven was really thinking/feeling
about the Countess Giulietta Guicciardi when he was writing his 14th piano sonata.
Was he idealizing her? Was he even capable of comprehending who she really was?
Was the music designed for his beloved to be performed as a metaphor? By comparing the subtleties of a phrase on the keyboard could he communicate the nature of his touch on her body?
Music historians will scoff at this idea, knowing that Ludwig’s manners and sensibilities as far as the female of the species was concerned ran south of a brute and north of comprehension.

Collaboration, not anything new is it? Being inspired by someone else’s Talent, brains, or beauty is a time-honored tradition, yes? So what is different about the Collaboration between Michael Colina and Anastasia Khitruk?
He’s a brilliant 60 year old composer, awaiting a level of recognition that borders on utter fantasy. She’s a 35 year Russian violinist of great talent & virtuosity as well as terrible beauty; Still not so remarkable, no? However, In this case, when the word terrible is used, an enslaving energy is unleashed, a mixture of narcissism, domination, victimization and submission along with a whiff of gamesmanship. Still, Who cares?? Really!!!!!
30 years ago during a physic reading, Colina was told that he was re-incarnated from Felix Mendelssohn; Colina who was not fond of Mendelssohn at the time shrugged it off.
After meeting Ms. Khitruk Colina suddenly found himself compelled to write a violin concerto. The 1st movement is based on a fragment of an idea found in one of Fanny Hensel’s, Felix’s sister’s, compositional sketchbooks.
Maybe Colina wasn’t so fond of Mendelssohn but he sure seemed interested in Fanny.
The suggestion by a few biographers and historians that Felix and his sister were not only close artistically but physically as well, true or untrue, leaves a leering suggestion lingering in the atmosphere. Felix died at the age of 38 six months after his sisters premature death.
So is Colina, by proxy, paying tribute to his beloved sister; Writing as if he were Mendelssohn, alive today; using his “sisters” musical DNA?

Inside the Cabinets of wonder willingly or imprisoned?
The appealing dichotomy inside the Cabinets of Wonder
is a world of curiosity, awe and deception

dreaming of Cuba

My last trip to Cuba was in 1959 as Fidel Castro took complete control of the island. But...the music, smoke,
laughter and dancing  is still a swirling dream that has not ended.  MICHAEL COLINA

         "I remember as a three year old an early example of
         my musical expressiveness: banging on pots n' pans
         on the kitchen floor, a true joy!  My mother grew tired 
         of the noise and yanked me off the floor by the arm,
         slinging me into the air and tossing me into the pantry
         closet.  My little soul was consumed with fear and total
         darkness.  Finally she let me out. I was shattered, thankful
         to be free, to see light, to be accepted. My eyes opened to
         an orange tropical sunrise, wondering what might happen
         to me in the future."

         "These memories blend into one eternal summer, after rising
         at four in the morning to go fishing till noon, with a swim off
         the boat to shore in the gorgeous Caribbean waters."

         "Growing up in Cuba, thinking about what used to be - the
         wonderful frijoles negros, platanos fritos, arroz con pollo and flan,
         bring back memories of my grandmother and grandfather, true
         conservative Cuban Spanish archetypes; Catholic, traditional
         and extremely proud."

         "We eventually moved to North Carolina, a place that echoed
         with all sorts of sounds, sights and a foreign language; coffee,
         cigars, rum and rumba.  I literally had dozens of cousins, aunts
         and uncles. Our family was large and after the afternoon thunderstorm
         the cooling evening would begin with music in a small local dance
         hall where they would all gather, lead by my dad, the rumba king.
         Everyone would dance until dawn.  Of course, I would fall asleep;
         eventually waking in bed, climb out, stumble outside listening to distant music,
         and smelling the cigar smoke, hearing laughter, part of a Cuban dream I
         still feel and see."