Hello & What Is Up

Hello, I am RIchard/Blumen. I am a collaborative pianist/accompanist (just 'pianist' is fine), currently living the meme in Ohio. After a decade working at various universities across the South & Midwest US, I am no longer working full time for an academic school of music (long story from 2 years ago), and am in the process of scaling up a number of other avenues of workflow & income that I have acquired over the years. While I still do a fair amount of live gigs in the classical sphere as a collab pianist, generally that work is now more project-based and involves traveling and short amounts of intensive rehearsing & performing of wild and wonderful modern music. So when I am home practicing and preparing for said projects, my day-to-day involves numerous other peripheral music services as freelance work:

• Session piano writing, recording, mixing
• Transcription & arrangement
• Remote & live piano teaching
• Remote & live theory/aural skills tutoring
• Score preparation/music engraving services
• Video editing (I am always behind in my editing backlog)
• Personal composition
• Backing tracks/practice tracks for musical theater folks

I've worked for opera & musical theater companies, been staff pianist for niche conferences like NASA & ITEC (nasa is a saxophone org lol), recorded for bands in everything from lofi beats to death metal, released several of my own albums of mostly drums/bass/piano (niche mathrock fusion stuff with few marketable attributes and even fewer fans), and also am part of a more accessible & successful progressive metal band with some amazing albums and tours across the US and canada that I have been truly lucky to be a part of, especially coming from my background of little to no business savvy.

While the circumstances of me jumping back into the mostly-freelancing world weren't optimal, I am grateful that I had already been branching out from pure classical academia some 10-15 years ago, so in my current setup I can cast nets for work both far and wide. Also eternally grateful for my partner Allison, who is both a better musician than I and more intelligent as well (she pivoted to tech during covid and now works as a front end developer for a great organization in ohio).

Rather than have yet another social platform that I feel obligated to share my output on, I hope to use this space for some unpacking of different pockets of musical work & life. Frustrations, successes, analysis, reviews(?), who knows. At one point I had a gdoc of script ideas for if I ever got into making longer form videos, but let's be honest, I'd rather organize and type out thoughts than film them, so this might be the place.

🎹,😺,🌸
blumen