Thank you for visiting!
I enjoy meeting and talking to interesting, creative, original and adventurous people. I enjoy collaborating with other people on different creative projects. I also like nearly all dancers with a slight favoritism toward ballet. I like musicians that try to be themselves while creating actual art and the ones that keep traditions and heritage alive. I never ask people to buy my albums and I do not like being sales pitched to. I delete comments requesting people to buy peoples albums. I appreciate comments with personality! There are so many excellent artists and musicians on myspace and I enjoy each visit when I am near a wi-fi and I have a moment to listen, watch videos and view art.
I like languages that I do not understand - I own a few translation dictionaries and it is big fun to decipher the words...
Some days I receive too many messages to respond. I do try!
My ideas and I:
I was born in a little town named Aurora in northern Minnesota and most of my music has been written in little towns in little cafes where I have always been able to think while enjoying coffee and small town conversations. I've lived in a few lovely and not so lovely cities and found them to be useful for writing stories with the array of character studies encountered every few moments but I also enjoy the quiet I find in rural areas. I am always ready to travel if there is a piano where I'm going.
Recently one of my piano pieces “The Light and The Dark†was used for background music in a public television documentary about the pen and ink art of Dennis Karl Joern. That was nice.
A&E channel used another of my compositions “Birth of a New Day†for a thing about Anna Nicole Smith.
I hope one day something I write will be used for a documentary about ants. That would be lovely!
If you want to use my music for production, performance, film or tv just ask me and my licensing people will help you.
For booking information see "Concert and School Program Booking" Blog.
Prelude in E-minor, A Poet's Heart, Rain and Memories, The Light and The Dark, Bittersweet and Tale of the Minstrel are some of my piano compositions that I enjoy performing in concert.
Education:
When I was 19 I studied piano for three months under Hilpi Kantola from the Helsinki Conservatory of Music through a kind gift from my step Father. I was a terrible student and at a recital I had neglected to prepare the compositions she assigned me so instead I premiered three original Allen James Teague pieces in front of six-hundred people. It was near the end of the program and I can imagine she was horrified when the first few notes were struck. I did these crazy acrobatics flinging my hands in the air throughout and when the last notes crashed I turned to see my first full house standing ovation.
In my early twenties I studied music theory and notation under concert violinist Gerard Mathes. To save time I started bringing "Principles of Orchestration" and a couple highlighters out to coffee. In my formative late teenage years through my early twenties I mostly learned through trying to keep up with my imagination.
Projects:
Some days I enjoy notating and typing details for a music drama that I have been working on since early 1995. There are 12 sets and 172 characters at the moment. I think it can work with a troupe of 26 and 18 musicians. I have been notating for piccolo, flute, oboe, bassoon, drums and percussion, keyboard, violin, viola, cello, double bass and am debating with clarinet and a couple horns. If I were sane I would consider making the storyline shorter but is it so wrong to dream? I have been sketching and thinking about set and costume designs.
Presently working on story lines for piano and ballet.
Also presently sorting music ideas for a new Warren Carlson play to be staged in India.
I am working out details to begin filming for "Bear Trap"! Costumes are presently being designed and crafted by Dawn Teague. Lars Ole will be narrating film version in Norwegian during May of 2008. There will be English subtitles. Leidulf Hafsmo kindly translated script from English to Norwegian. I have decided on 9 characters (added six from spoken word recording of short story) and have completed re-writing storyline.
Am taking notes for a longer film version of "Goldfish" for later. "Goldfish" will be a bit of an undertaking and I have a few things to learn first. Am thinking about casting, design and locations. I may have this film in French with English subtitles. Literacy is important and many of my fellow countrymen need to improve in this area.
I plan to focus more thought and energy toward film in my future.
Since age 23 I have written a bit more than sixteen hours of music that I still remember for concert performance. I enjoy telling stories in concert and as I am getting older I have cut down on string breaking. I love audiences and I love entertaining them. I also respect old people quite a bit and I have always sought out and played at nursing homes in towns and cities all over the United States for free when ever I have had an hour or two to spare. Some people go all year without a visitor so we should do what we can.
Aside from music, writing and art I have always enjoyed adventures. I like epic adventures that begin a couple hours after flying over those huge ice cubes out there by Greenland. I like traveling into remote eastern European locations where no one understands a word I'm saying and I have no clue how to read signs and everything requires drawing a picture or non verbal semantics. I also like huge old graveyards and snapping photos in the dark.
In the future:
I may retire to a cottage with a guest house for recording and company maybe near Inverness, Scotland. I have traveled all over Scotland and have found the Inverness area to be suitable for most of my endeavors. I also love Prague but it is a bit too busy with tourists. Will not rule out southern France where I have not explored enough to qualify a definitive. I hope to learn more about Norway in May. I will be happy with walking distance to a pub where I can compose, write, breath and think into olde age. Some days I think about retiring to northern Minnesota to wander the forests and hills through the evening fog among the birch with my concertina or accordion. That would be lovely...
The Past:
I did not speak until I was three and a half. Slightly to my parents dismay I have never stopped. As a child one rainy day I thought to play hooky from talking and reading my encyclopedias and began playing guitar. A couple years later when I was ten I found an organ in the spare room. I would have been drawn to keyboard instruments sooner but I spent summers at my grandmothers house on our 160 acre 1873 family homestead outside of Duluth, Minnesota complete with river, three waterfalls, 80 acres of fields connected to a childhood best friends family fields, thick cedar and hardwood and pine forests with lovely rocky outcroppings dropping off 400 feet at the south border with a spectacular view of the tree canopy below leading to Jay Cook State Park and I was too full of life to linger around indoors.
When I was 15 I decided that you can study for 60 years and still not be the person you are reciting. I stopped procrastinating and began performing all original material at art shows along with random pianos with my trusty tip cup in 1986 in the lovely town of Sandpoint, Idaho back when I was 16 and mildly competent.
I went without owning a piano most of my life and learned to write while playing in public places usually with small crowds gathering. One winter in Virginia, Minnesota I used a sharpie to draw a keyboard on my kitchen table and that helped to write during the middle of the night when all of the pianos through out the town were in locked rooms.
Some of the wonderful people in the town of Blanchard, Idaho gave me my first piano when I was 25. I was grateful to be able to write and practice several hours per day starting the exact moment that I came home surprised to see a piano the it arrived. I started performing solo piano concerts later that year. I presently own 3 pianos and each one is useful for writing in different styles along with different levels of practicing through varied passages and transitions.
I have enjoyed playing for somewhere over a thousand concerts, performances, festivals and/or gigs in different settings across the United States along with Scotland and Prague. I have enjoyed teaching music theory and advanced piano for some remarkable musical minds and I may do that again. I have been on grant writing committees and that was quite enjoyable. I have enjoyed writing newspaper articles and blurbs for my local art's center along with co-organizing a few festivals which were enjoyable events. I have received a few grants for my creative pursuits and I may do that again.
Further in the Past:
Some time before I was born I had a great aunt Ann Palkie, a prominent concert pianist out of Minneapolis. She enjoyed staying busy and to fill the idle moments she founded and directed 8 music conservatories throughout Minnesota continuing until her death at 37 years old.
My grandfather, Warren Teague enjoyed many years performing and as 2nd bass in the Minneapolis Apollo Club. At 19 years old he was the youngest member to be accepted into the 200 man choir. He also enjoyed staying busy and later in life organized most of the fairs, parades and festivals in the Duluth, Minnesota area.
"Unique and creative, Allen James Teague's music ranges from delicate to intense, passionate to empowering. It is music that can touch the lives of all ages." Joyce- (former Board Member of CREATE Center for the Arts, Newport, WA)
Thank you very much for your very high intellectual level, brightness, clearness of sound and brilliance in yours performance all the world! But for me the important in yours performance is the way you have the capacity to building the musical phrase with a particular consideration. The maturity of the thought and specially this unrivaled way that you know to base on the structure of the composition that your performance." Athanasia Tzanou (Paris, France).
"Enchanting" Leslee Smith- (The Symes, Hot Springs, MT).
"Hauntingly beautiful-A gifted pianist" Margaret Sweet- (Tower & Ely/Soudan Timberjay MN).
"Teague's music goes straight to the heart" Martin Dvorak- (Petrof, Prague, CZ).
"Powerful" Valleta O'Day- (Couer d'Alene Cultural Center, Cd'A, ID).
"No-one has ever put more into a Panida concert" Karen Bowers- (Panida Theater, Sandpoint, ID).
"Mr. Teague,
My son and I attended your performance at the Thomas center Wednesday night. We both thoroughly enjoyed the evening. We attended to meet a requirement of a music appreciation course we are taking together at Lake City community college (we have to write 3 papers on 3 live performances). I admit neither of us were looking forward to an evening of classical piano, little did we know what was ahead. My son Alex who has never had any interest in any musical forms other than hard punk rock, was enchanted, bought 5 of your cd's, and now wants to learn to play the piano. I believe you did more to broaden him musically in 2 hours than I have been able to do in his 16 years on this planet. I thank you greatly." -Sincerely, L.L.S. (Thomas Center, Spanish Court, Gainesville, FL. May 29th, 2002).
"North Idaho piano phenom Allen James Teague is an astonishing talent, a knock out of a performer" Aunties Bookstore- (Spokane, WA).
"Allen James Teague plays grandly pronounced notes separated by memories and depth" KD -(The Local Planet, Spokane, WA).
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