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Interview with Greg Maroney 11/05
I was first introduced to Greg Maroney and his music several years ago when he sent me his third CD, “The Sentinel,” to review. I loved the album and wanted to know more about him. I went to his website, there was a photo of him playing the piano shoeless. From that, I knew we had a lot in common - or at least we both enjoy playing without shoes! Since then, I have reviewed all five of Greg’s CDs and have been proofreading his sheet music. My more advanced students have been loving working on “The Chicken Chase,” “The Reluctant Ballerina,” and now “Elementals,” so I felt it was time to do an interview with the composer. Greg’s story is a little different from the other composers that I’ve interviewed in that he is a trauma nurse and lives in an old farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania. How does all of that tie into his music? Read on!
KP: Where did you grow up?
GM: I was born in Berkeley, CA and grew up in Walnut Creek and Orinda. We often went to Pinole, and my brother lived in Crockett for awhile, so I’m familiar with where you live. Right out of high school, in 1968, I moved to Santa Cruz, and lived there until we moved to Pennsylvania in ‘95. I went to UC Santa Cruz for awhile and studied piano and geology.
KP: That’s an interesting combination. You could be a rock musician! <both laughing> Oh, don’t tell me you never heard that before!
GM: No, I never really put the two together. Although it was interesting, I decided that geology really wasn’t my thing, so I became a paramedic. I worked in emergency medical services in Santa Cruz for nineteen years until we moved here. We wanted an old house to fix up and some property, and we couldn’t do that in California because it’s soooooo expensive! To backtrack a little, we bought a 7’ Yamaha grand piano, and the house we had in Santa Cruz was only 600 square feet - I’m talking tiny! The piano took up 3/4 of the living room, and my wife just couldn’t get away from it. She loved the music, but enough was enough. Since we couldn’t afford a bigger house in California, we expanded our search and ended up here in Pennsylvania on seven acres in a 100-year-old farmhouse. We’re almost done fixing it up, and we’re living happily ever after here in our countryside home. We grow our own vegetables and have chickens and lots of land to take care of. It’s pretty neat!
KP: Do you grow most of your own food then?
GM: Yes. We grow a lot of vegetables. We put up salsa, and freeze peppers and tomatoes like crazy. We use those throughout the winter. We also make jams, jellies, and pickles. It’s the heart of our eating. When I go to work at the hospital, I’ll put some salsa on a burrito, and it sustains me. With all the turmoil, death and destruction, my salsa is kind of a refuge - like being out in the garden.
KP: After you finish with the house, are you going to stay there and enjoy it?
GM: Yes. We’ve worked for ten years to get the house to where it is now. The house that we had in the Santa Cruz mountains was old and rundown when we bought it, and I rebuilt one quarter of it at a time. We lived in the other three quarters of the house. It took about six years. We sold that for a good profit, which enabled us to buy this place. I’m getting kind of tired of smashing my fingers, and would like to do something else. I’ve been writing my songs out, and I’m in the middle of making a sixth CD. We’ve sold out of some of the older CDs, so I want to remaster them. More and more time is going to the music.
KP: That’s a good thing!
GM: I wish I could devote all of my time to it.
KP: When did you start playing the piano?
GM: I started when I was five years old, and took music lessons through high school. I didn’t study much classical music - mostly the old standards. I Iearned about chord structure and what to do with the left hand when using fake books. After high school, I stopped formal lessons and branched out into other musical genres. I was more footloose and fancy free then, and didn’t have a piano, so I played guitar and some Middle Eastern instruments such as the saz, which is a long-necked stringed instrument. I played for some belly dancers for a while - that was fun! I studied the music of India and voice. Then I went through some catastrophic, life-altering events and basically lost everything. I realized that after everything was stripped away, I would always have music and my love of nature. Those things were mine, and nothing could take them away. That’s when I decided to focus more seriously on piano, 15-20 years ago, after I met and married my wife, Linda. She encouraged me, so this is all partly her doing, and she’s very supportive of the whole process. My first album, “Songs of the Water Rose,” was released in 1997, and it’s been moving ever since.
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