Many in Ashland know Daniel Sperry as the “man with the cello,” who for the past 13 seasons has performed in Lithia Park. Seated in the shade near the lower duck pond, passersby often pause to listen—some stay for a while, while others simply stroll by. What exactly is Daniel playing as he sits there each day? If you listen closely, you’ll realize you’ve never heard this song before. That’s because Daniel is playing a Musical Portrait—a commissioned masterpiece, composed uniquely for loved ones both near and far.
His music connects deeply with listeners, transforming those who hear it. Daniel delves into the essence of the person he’s composing for, telling a story that is beyond epic and never the same twice. In this interview, I spoke with Daniel about his life’s work, his vision for Musical Portraits, and how you can commission your own personal composition.
Hi Daniel, welcome to LocalsGuide and thanks for doing this interview with us here today.
Thanks, Shields! I’m very excited to be here today and to share my work of creating Musical Portraits for people in our community.
Daniel, please tell us a little bit about yourself and your background as a musician and composer.
My mother was a cellist. She surrounded my brother and sisters and I with beautiful, mostly classical, music from the time we were very young. I asked for a cello when I was four. By the time I was about seven I was playing consistently enough so that she took me to take lessons from her teacher, the cello professor at University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida. My mother also taught me the building blocks of chords and harmony on the piano, from the time I was about six. Later in my teens, I would check out musical scores of symphonies that I could look at while I listened to the orchestra playing that piece on our record player.
I read biographies of composers. I wanted to be a composer! But in Florida in the sixties, there weren’t a bunch of composers I could study with, so I took a different path, listening to music and picking out what I heard on the piano to develop my ear, learning to improvise with other musicians whose music appealed to me.
In my teens, my development as a young cellist was fueled by my study with the amazing cellist, Nelson Cooke, a tall Australian, who had played on the Beatles records and was taking a sabbatical in Florida from his job as the Principal Cellist with the London Philharmonic. He came to teach at the University of South Florida in about 1970. By the time I was 17, Mr. Cooke took me to my first professional orchestra audition with the conductor of the Florida Gulf Coast Symphony. That was my first professional orchestra position. In my nineteenth year, I made my way to Nashville, Tennessee where I joined the cello section of the Nashville Symphony. There in Nashville, I met a man who would become a musical mentor, the celebrated singer/songwriter and session guitar player, Mac Gayden. Mac had written the hit song “Everlasting Love” and played on records with Bob Dylan, JJ Cale, Simon and Garfunkel, Linda Ronstadt and many others. I joined his R&B style band and learned to jam and play horn parts on my cello. That experience in improvisation was the thing that gave me the most confidence to start composing and arranging on my own.
What were some of the most transformative moments for you as a young musician that helped to change and shape your life for who you are today?
The first big one was when my family traveled to Jacksonville, Florida to see the London Symphony conducted by Andre Previn. I was about ten at the time. They played the Sixth Symphony of Tchaikovsky.
Its opening bars and first big sweeping melody in the string section made me fall in love with that sound and the thought of being part of an orchestra like that.
Later, the experience of studying with my great teacher, Nelson Cooke, would transform my whole approach to music. He had a big, very physical approach to the cello, a gorgeous, penetrating sound and every time I was with him, it inspired me to strive for something more beautiful than I had yet imagined.
The third one would be later in 1980 in New Delhi, India where I performed at an assembly led by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the person who introduced Transcendental Meditation to the West. By this time I was 25 and playing music with my first wife, Renie. There was something about the profound attention that this man had that brought out the deepest possible appreciation for the sounds I could make on my cello, as if my bow was moving in slow motion and picking up every vibration drawn from my instrument. That one experience really changed how I thought about the purpose of my playing.
Musical Portraits is an original idea that you created. Please tell us about its origin and inspiration.
In about 2008, not long after I moved to Ashland, I had come into Lithia Park almost by chance with my cello and began to play, which led to the discovery that people would throw tips in my case when I played. I had no idea what “busking” was and had no intention of doing that, but when I discovered this beautiful way of connecting with people directly through music, I began to play there regularly. Although I played some Bach and some opera arias, I didn’t have a lot of repertoire at that time and I spent quite a bit of time improvising. My first inkling of what would eventually become the form I now call a “musical portrait” came when I would notice that if there was one person on the bench in front of me, I was playing the music I made up just for them. It was as if I was reading what they needed and playing that in music. I experimented with this with friends until I began to create a process for learning enough about a person to be able to compose music for them that would be like a touchstone, or like medicine for them. By the time I started touring the country doing house concerts in 2010, I had composed several of these musical portraits, which I was including in the programs I played in people’s homes.
I would tell stories of how these pieces came to be and everywhere I went, people wanted to commission a piece, sometimes for themselves, or their mother or father, a husband or wife or friend or someone they wanted to honor who had passed.
By this time I have composed more than sixty of these pieces.
As you began the process of creating Musical Portraits, what did you start to notice and how did it change you?
This composing process has been one of the most transformative kinds of work I have ever done. First of all, the prompt is another person. It’s not me. It doesn’t really matter what I want to write. I’m trying to find some deep place inside the person, and speak to that in music. That can be a very challenging thing to do. Some people are not very forthcoming when they speak of themselves, so I have to come at it in a roundabout way. I ask a lot of questions. If it is a surprise for the recipient, I may do a number of interviews with friends and family to learn about them. I have to find a kind of doorway into the piece, which might be cobbled together from any number of random thoughts that this person or their family or friends have shared with me.
It has changed me because I have had this very fortunate window into human nature, witnessing how people make their way through life. It is a very loving process, involving seeing, listening, reflecting and attempting to serve someone at a very deep level.
Daniel, you had an experience with Mac Gayden in Nashville that totally changed your life. Can you tell us about that?
The very first time I had the opportunity to play with my friend Mac Gayden, in whose band “Skyboat” I later played, was at a picnic at his farm in Bon Aqua, Tennessee. This would have been 1974. I was 19 at the time. There was a large gathering of folks I later found out were all experienced in the practice of Transcendental Meditation. So they knew Mac and they were very receptive. Mac took out a big acoustic guitar, sat on the grass and began to play. When I started to play with him it was something like entering an ancient realm. Everyone was mesmerized. There was something about the way we listened to each other, played off each other, that allowed us to keep spinning the music out into the summer evening air.
We played for what seemed like forever – maybe it was an hour – completely spontaneously – sweet soul chords with beautiful rhythm and a cello sailing over the top of that. It was like entering the timeless slipstream of ancient music and the beginning of a musical collaboration I still cherish. I think this taught me something about listening and staying with the flow of the creative process and how there is something like an infinite reservoir of ideas as I find my way into that state.
For the past 13 years now you have been playing in Lithia Park. Please tell us about it.
Every year, from around April through part of October I play, starting whenever the weather warms up to about sixty degrees and playing until I can’t find a sixty degree day any more. This year it has been a five day schedule, about two hours each day. I put the schedule up on my website. I’ve experimented with different places in the park, but the area past the duck pond, where you enter the park, has several features that make it ideal. I set up in front of the benches there, a little stand of trees behind me and the creek within hearing distance. Behind the benches, a meadow shaded by trees provides a wonderful, natural place for people to spread a blanket and listen.
This ritual has been without question one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. I come into the park on an electric bike I call Zeus. Taking each piece off my bike, a rug I use to create a little performance space, my cello stool, the various pieces I need to put in my case to let people know where to find my music: all of these steps are the preparation for the ritual. I almost always start with a piece inspired by a poem of Pablo Neruda called “Kisses and Volcanoes.” It is dark and slow and passionate. Just the right way to warm up the cello.
From there, all kinds of magic happens. People always gather. It is unfailing. There are regulars, and I love every one of them. There are also beautiful strangers. There is almost without fail some interaction that stuns me. Most often, it will be an interaction between family members, husbands and wives, mothers and sons, fathers and daughters. They are each getting a much needed break, experiencing an unexpected delight. There may be an individual child who has come into the realm of the cello and can’t tear themselves away. The way that children respond is worth more than anything in the world. But the response can also be from a person of any age who with the fewest of words will tell me how or why the music has touched them. Sometimes I feel as if I am absolving myself and perhaps everyone else of all our past sins. As ridiculous or impossible as that sounds, it is a place and a practice where the ridiculous and impossible melt together in music. Pure delight.
Every song you play is a tribute of some type. Please say more about what it is like to live and stay in this experience with your music.
This is a fascinating question because the pieces that I play that are musical portraits pretty much always conjure up the person and the story of the person for whom it was created. In the park, sometimes those people are right there, listening to their song. But another part of it that I have come to understand is that I can – in some strange way! – feel as I play how others are participating in the inner world of all those people whose stories I have told through music. The soft, evocative feeling of “Butter Yellow Lullaby Dance for Carol” brings up those same soft, evocative feelings in the folks who are sitting on the meadow listening. The dramatic arc of the storyline of “Down Wisdom Road – for Tim” takes people on that same quest that I was attempting to evoke for him. And the jubilation of the new love of a couple who swam together in the Gulf of Mexico that I wanted to bring forward in “The Ocean of Art,” a piece commissioned posthumously for an impeccably dressed gentleman who used to come with the love of his life, June – that piece always brings up those exuberant feelings for everyone listening.
I love that this is being done in such a public space.
So true! At the beginning of the pandemic when everyone was staying inside, my honey, L, was coming out with me to the park and helping me to livestream on Facebook. A certain number of people would still come out to listen since you could easily keep an appropriate distance and it was a huge blessing to just carry on the ritual even in the midst of such general fear and consternation. I could tell it was helping everyone. Later, after the Alameda fire, even though it was still a bit smoky in the park, I witnessed and spoke to people who had lost their homes. The park is a respite anyway, just the creek rushing, leaves rustling, squirrels playing. With the music composed as medicine for people’s hearts, there is another level of retreat and respite.
We need this. There are so few common areas in our lives where we can be together and settle deep into ourselves among the rest of our human family.
In the creation of these portraits what have you discovered?
Three big lessons:
First, no one is ordinary, as ordinary as you may think you are. I find everyone as I discover them in the process of creating their music to be living a life that has its own drama and quiet heroism built into it. Everyone has an epic storyline, whether they realize it or not.
Second, I also find when I interview the friends and family of a person, that everyone knows you differently. You are known in many different ways by different people. I happen to favor celebrating in music those different dimensions. We are complicated, we are nuanced, we are deeper than many might think. Music is an especially good medium to express that we are not one dimensional.
And last, it’s not over until it’s over in the creative process. Until I find the combination of elements that really moves me I have to keep going with the composition because I want it to truly move you. That’s why I do what I do, and if it means starting over more than once, that’s just part of the process.
What have you witnessed happening for individuals when they are given a musical portrait?
There is often a dramatic reaction, sometimes tears. I’m not promising tears, I’m promising I’m going to work hard until I feel like I have created a real work of art for you. If it is a gift given to one’s self, it can be quite cathartic, almost like an ongoing and living meditation. I have heard from people that their piece “grows on them.” They find layers of meaning in it and sometimes they use it as an actual touchstone when they want to find ground in their lives. In the cases where it is a gift given as a surprise, the effect can be extremely powerful. I have performed these pieces for family occasions where the recipient had no idea it was coming. There are few better ways to say “I love you” or “we love you” than through a gift like this. It is also remarkable how the music can touch so many people in the circle of family and friends. I remember playing a piece that was commissioned in honor of a man who had been a great and beloved father and grandfather at a house concert. His wife commissioned the piece a few weeks after his passing. The piece had been presented to her already, but on this particular evening, it just happened to be a time when one of his grandsons was visiting. I think this young man had heard this piece in its recorded version but never performed live. He was overwhelmed with the emotion of it and shared that with me afterwards.
When you love someone you really can’t put it into words. It is all on the inside. Sometimes only music can express the magnitude of it. So these pieces live on in many different ways. Even if a piece is commissioned while you are alive, it will live on long after you’re gone and if I have done my job well it will be a reminder to everyone who knew you of the beautiful flavor that was your life.
Music lasts forever!
Yes! And it is especially gratifying and delightful to see all the different ways it can last forever. Some of these musical portraits have ended up as part of the soundtrack of a movie or have been chosen as theme music for a local PBS series. I have a Spotify channel now and I’m systematically putting up the new pieces on that channel. I’ve also created a score and parts for more than one of these pieces so that the sheet music will be available in future times if anyone wants to gather the musicians to play the piece. Each piece is a phenomenon all by itself, with its own life, which may be performed hundreds of times over the years.
Why is this such a powerful and transformative gift?
This is simply a way to transform love into sound, into a form that can be received completely, without any guardrails. There was one piece I was commissioned to create which was a gift from a husband, a very wealthy man, to his wife on her 50th birthday. This was a very accomplished couple with two very gifted children. Although they were both quite accomplished in their careers as a tech entrepreneur and a doctor, the husband was a very good violinist, his wife an accomplished pianist, their son, a cellist, their daughter, also a violinist. The man, Todd, wanted a piece composed for his wife, Amy, that the family could play together.
This was quite a project, one of the most challenging I’ve ever completed. I had to gather an ensemble to play the piece and videographers to film it so the family could hear how it was supposed to sound. And I had to provide them with a score and parts so they could learn to play it. When Amy’s birthday came, the gifts Todd gave to Amy were off most people’s charts: a beautifully restored turquoise 1958 Thunderbird, an art piece that was a purse, also featuring much turquoise – and this piece of music, the video, the score, the individual parts. I spoke to both of them about a week later. Amy said there was not even a close comparison between the gifts she had received. It was the music she loved the best. You can’t touch music. But music touches you, and nothing will change you like touch. And of course what you touch when you touch someone with music is the very deepest part of them, their heart, their soul, their whole sensibility about life.
Daniel, what is the approximate cost and timeline required to create a portrait?
My commissions begin at $2500 and move upwards of $5000 depending on complexity. Each musical portrait is a work of art and with all great art it takes time. Fall and Winter are my composing months, so I will be producing lots of music during that time. If you are interested, It’s best to get on the schedule with a deposit for your piece.
What goes into getting the initial start on the creation of a musical portrait?
The very first step is a face-to-face conversation or Zoom call. I need to find out about your idea for the commission. Is it a gift? Is there a plan for when it might be presented? What are the circumstances? We would discuss all the things that might go into it, if we might need to interview more than one person, and so on. We will talk about the form of the deliverable, whether a live performance is needed, whether this will be a written piece with score and parts or delivered digitally and available on Spotify as I have done in many cases in the past. At that meeting, we’d talk about the commission and the timeline and line things up so we can get started based on my current schedule.
Daniel, what is your current availability?
Currently, I have open spots for four musical portraits to be completed over the course of the winter season. By the time of this writing, one of those may be filled. This is the best time to book because I’ll be able to give the process my full attention.
How can we learn more about the work you are doing?
Please go to danielaustinsperry.bandcamp.com to listen to 8 of the 9 albums I’ve produced. Go to Spotify and look for Daniel Austin Sperry to hear the latest one. Go to YouTube.com/cellomansings to see the Beautiful Music In The Park YouTube channel, which chronicles many of the projects I’ve been involved in. Go to my website danielaustinsperry.com to see my schedule in the park. You can follow me on Instagram where I am @cellotroubadour. And finally, you can go to ParkMusicBeauty.com to see the work we are doing with music in Lithia Park.
What is the best way for someone to contact you to discuss the opportunity of commissioning a musical portrait?
Phone is 541-973-7415 – just call or text. Or send me an email at Cellomansings@gmail.com
