Miller music

Hi.  I’m Russell Miller.  This is one of the few places on the ‘net where I will use my real name.  Maybe someday I will post a pic.  Now is not that time.

Music has always been a passion of mine.  From a child, music has always been a very important part of my life.  I was raised on religious chorale music and classical pieces, though as I grew up my tastes expanded, and now I like most anything but hip-hop and rap.  Quite honestly, I barely consider it music, but I guess by a broad definition, it is.  I’m not a fan though.

I attended the University of Toledo as a piano performance major for a few years in the early 90s.  That… did not work out, to put it nicely.  I am guessing that my teachers and fellow students from then would be absolutely shocked to see this site, and that I’ve managed to produce anything of note at all.  Given that my time there was not something I think either party would be willing to brag about (I’d rather forget about it all, tbh), I’ll just let that lie.

However, I have recently been working with a teacher, Emiliano Ortiz, and he has been doing a pretty good job helping me fill in the blanks and making quality pieces.  So this one, I’ll brag about.

Because music has always been so important to me, sometimes it’s the best – or even only – way to express some things that need to be expressed.  So, I write music.  And when I’ve finished writing music, I’ll put it here for you to perform and enjoy, hopefully.  I don’t claim to be the world’s best composer.  But I am a composer, which is more than people that don’t compose can say.  To paraphrase Florence Foster Jenkins, people may say I couldn’t compose, but they can never say I didn’t compose.

I use finale.  It’s what I used in college thirty years ago (I feel old) and what I use now.  It’s got pretty much everything I need except for the community aspects of musescore.  So I’ll use musescore for that purpose, but I prefer finale.

Well, let’s modify that.  I used Finale.  Then they up and discontinued it, so now I use Dorico 5 Pro, with Noteperformer.  And I’ll say, it’s better in many ways, so, well, we’ll do that from now on.

In my time when I’m not composing, I’m a computer engineer by trade, but I also study Japanese (J-pop and anison are very interesting genres musically – some of the time), play piano (sometimes professionally), watch anime (don’t judge), and have many other interests as well.

Recently one of my pieces was named a finalist in the very fancily named, and thus prestigous, 2025 Euro-Elite International Music Competition.  I am quite proud of that, and I hope it is the first of many announcements I can make in that vein.