to produce music for her Grand Prix horse,
Caviar. She earned very good scores and
my freestyle business took off. Rebecca
and I still collaborate on music for her
horses and she has great musical instincts; her Fourth Level freestyle on Solei
earned a score of 75% in Los Angeles and
remains one of the most popular videos at
my Woodwind Studios website.
Can you tell me who some of your
clients have been?
What made you decide to start choreographing dressage?
Freestyle is such a natural synthesis of all my
areas of specialized training, from music to classical ballet, and of course dressage, that my
business fell into place very readily. Freestyle
design wasn’t so much a decision for me as an
inevitability.
While in graduate school, I liked to get away from
the music practice rooms by taking riding classes
through the school’s equestrian program. I fell in
love with dressage and began competing.
I recall watching a freestyle at the Stoneleigh-Burnham show in Greenfield, Massachusetts in the early 1980s and understood right
away how the performance could have been
improved. The advent of the digital age made it
truly possible to put my ideas into action. Some
of my first freestyles were executed on tape, but
analog editing can’t compare to the job you can
do in software.
I began by editing music for myself and then created freestyles for a few local riders. I organized
a musical freestyle forum for my GMO and it
helped solidify a lot of my ideas about combining
music with dressage.
During this period, I was a student of Arlene Rigdon and was hauling my horse to Kansas in the
summers to work with her. Arlene’s daughter Rebecca called me one day and asked for my help
Riders come to me from all around the
world and I’ve been privileged to work with
national champions in other countries as
well as U.S. team riders. I’ve done a lot of work in
the past few years with para-equestrian dressage
for both established and up-and-coming riders
and it’s safe to say that para riding has exploded
with interest and a lot of talent.
I tend to remember clients as much for unique
music choices as accomplishments. David Blake
at Arroyo del Mar chose very edgy, modern music
to take to Europe and compete at Grand Prix.
He debuted the freestyle in this country at the
San Juan Capistrano CDI in California to a great
score and accolades from broadcast commentator, Axel Steiner. Many styles of music can relate
to a horse’s movement, but I enjoyed producing a
freestyle I consider to be cutting-edge.
Felicitas von Neumann-Cosel made the bold
choice, at the suggestion of Tonico Do Top’s
owner Linda Denniston, to have me produce an
entirely vocal music freestyle. I’ll admit to chewing my nails a bit over the potential outcome, but
this Grand Prix freestyle earned big awards such
as the BLM championship and scored into the
mid-seventies.
I’ve produced several international freestyles for
Dr. Cesar Parra, each time making a leap forward
to less explored territory in freestyle music production. We produced music for his latest freestyle to Hollywood film studio production
standards.
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