Today marks the tenth anniversary of the first of these weekly ‘e-pistles’ which you kindly permit me to send to you. My daughter coined a term for these weekly messages: “mpFrees.”

Ten years ago today I made bold to send the first “mpFree” to about fifty friends whom I knew enjoyed my music and whom I thought would like to receive a message featuring a story or a guide to ‘what-to-listen-for’ pertaining to a piece of mine with links to a recording.

Some asked me to also include a PDF of the score so that they can follow along and see what the musicians are asked to perform..

The number of recipients of these ‘mpFrees’ has slowly grown, attracting folks from all over the U.S. and from several other countries as well.

The project is a delight for me and, I’m told, a source of sweetness and light for y’all, the friends and fans who have agreed to be recipients. It also demonstrates an important truth about being an artist, something we don’t know when we are young. WE have to build an audience for our art. WE, the artists. No one else will build it for us.

They don’t tell you this in school. Or if “they” did, then I wasn’t listening.

Fifty years ago I thought that if I simply wrote the best music I could, sooner or later it would be noticed, performed, broadcast, recorded and enjoyed.

It would start with what I termed “the Golden Phone Call.”

I’d be pulling weeds in the garden and Jo would come out on the back porch and shout, “There’s a phone call for you. It’s Yo-Yo Ma. He wants to play your cello music!”

“Tell him I’m busy,” I’d shout back. (Yeah, right.)

“Oh, and that Mr. Bernstein called again.”

“Which one? Elmer or Leonard?”

“He didn’t say.”

The Golden Phone Call would open all sorts of doors. It never came.

Long ago, someone -- I’ve forgotten who it was -- gave me good advice. “Your friends will play your music and listen to it and enjoy it … so make friends.”

Slowly, one by one, I made friends with musicians and listeners (and other folks, too, of course). I wrote music for the specifically for the musicians. They played it and recorded it. I shared recordings with other friends who listened to what I wrote. The circle slowly grew.

In the past year and a half I have written a great deal of music, more than during any other period of my life. Ninety-eight new pieces! Some of them multi-movement works! (And this, after writing almost nothing for the previous ten years.) All of these pieces were written for friends.

About three weeks ago I wrote a piece I titled “Romance.” I wrote it specifically for a young flutist and oboist, a couple of CCM students. In love, married, they attend my church and sometimes perform during the services there.

I wanted to write something they could perform together with the undersigned playing the piano. This would lighten the load of the organist who would ordinarily accompany them but who already performs quite a lot of music in our services … and it would give me a rare chance to perform my own music. And with people fifty years younger than I am!

Knowing I would have to play the piano, I made the part very simple … so as to make it sufficiently un-challenging for ME to play.

(Even so, I have to confess that, when we rehearsed, I had to simplify the piano part further yet. Even then, I never once played it correctly all the way through. I’m a good piano player, but a lousy pianist, if you see what I mean.)

As befits a “Romance” it is, yes, romantic. I tried to write “a love theme” such as you might hear in the score of a well-made film. The piece is cast in the lush, deep purple key of A flat major, rendering it more romantic, to my way of thinking.

We premiered the piece in the service at our church two weeks ago and recorded it immediately afterwards. The couple -- Julie Morris and Yo Shionoya -- played beautifully. As for me, well … Yo recorded it on a little hand-held recorder and, yes, this new “Romance” is the music I want to share with you today.