Portrait of Peace

About The Composition

Portrait of Peace was composed for my loving wife and for the hope she inspires in me for a peaceful world. My wife’s name is Irini which actually means “Peace” in Greek.

Originally written on Electric bass, this composition uses the natural harmonics that occur on a the bass. Only in 2025 did I realize this composition would also work on bowed upright bass. I wrote this song late at night and almost called it ‘Evening Song’, but in the end when with Portrait of Peace as I first heard harmonics used for a bass melody on Jaco Pastorius’ Portrait of Tracy. There is something about Bass harmonics just inspires visions of beauty.

On a side note, and I’ll write a longer blog post about this topic some day, I believe that odd time signatures like 7 are inherently more peaceful than common time and force you to tune into your environment rather than tune out.

How many soldiers and marched to 4/4 or 2/4 to commit atrocities? To the best of my knowledge, 7/4 has never been used in a field of battle because it would suck to march to!. You would have to do like a little skip every measure which does not look intimidating at all. Like I said, I’ll write a longer blog post about this soon and link it here.

This composition was originally performed for the group Dalgazul which unfortunately disbanded in 2019.