Releasing My New Music Catalog Website—A Five Year Project
www.russellsteinberg.com/composer
Today June 14, 2025 I released of music catalog of nearly 100 original compositions. This has been a five year project.
John Schneider recently interviewed me on KPFK Radio and he instantly got what I was up to, when he exclaimed, “Russ, you’ve hacked the system!” That pleased me. He perceived that I was not just throwing a list of works together for performers and listeners, but shaping my narrative to help people connect each piece to a larger whole.
That’s what’s missing in so much of our lives now—an awareness of interconnection. My mantra for our time is “we are world-wide and one inch deep.” We are globally aware more than ever, but we tend to hover just on the surface. Life scrolls by as an assembly of infinite tracks and posts, right? Doom scrolling, they call it. Just post to post, track to track, without any intentional connection. Entertaining for sure. But not an environment conducive to fine art, which demands deeper connections.
Records and CDs used to catalog and create a context for us. Think of how we understand the Beatles. We hold the Beatles music in our head as a chronology of albums from A Hard Day’s Night to Sergeant Peppers. Think of how we understand Beethoven’s music evolving in three periods from early period Classical, to middle period Romantic/Heroic, to late period Profundity and Prophecy. These divisions provide a framework to help us appreciate more deeply what we hear.
We contemporary composers don’t have that. Most of our works get one performance, often sprinkled among a bunch of other contemporary pieces. Listeners have little context for how they connect, either to each other, or to a particular composer’s body of work. That’s what inspired me to give preconcert talks for the LA Philharmonic. I found that most audiences have trouble following Beethoven’. How then, were they ever going to follow my music? I set out to discover ways to help people hear more deeply, to have the joy of discovering for themselves how the opening of a good piece of music sets up everything that follows.
That is essentially what I’m doing differently with this music catalog. Of course, I want performers and listeners to easily access my music. All of us composers want that. But just listing 100 works? I mean, where would you begin? Performers and listeners need context. I wanted to create a simple way to compare my early pieces with what I’m writing now. Instead of knowing just one of my quartets, I wanted a space where it was simple to become aware of all of them. I wanted to share how my musical style has evolved. I wanted a living document that is comfortable to visit for a minute, or to stay immersed for days exploring, if so inclined.
And here it is! Please give my new music catalog a whirl. Let me know how what you like. Let me know what I can improve. Let me know if a link isn’t working!
I made some videos to help give you that context I’m talking about……..