I have been composing music since I was in high school (unless you count, "How Would You Like To Go To Kandor?" which I wrote in 3rd grade) ("Kandor" was a city on the planet Krypton). The music courses I took in junior college under George Champion didn't deter me from a love of music. (I'm just kidding George—and please email me!!!)

In 1996-1997, I realized a life-long dream and recorded a full CD, The Man Who Isn't There. Half the songs were originals; half were covers, and I did all the voices and played all the instruments (via computer) except for tenor sax on one number (which one of my nephews performed at a remote recording studio!).

For the 2002 theatre season, I arranged and recorded the accompaniment for a professional revue performed by two local singers.

With the dawn of Artificial Intelligence, a new tool has become available to the savvy composer/musician. Sure, it allows people who don't know a thing about music to nevertheless create something they, themselves will enjoy, even if no one else does. The same can be said of the kazoo, the bagpipes, and, dare I say it, the accordian? If a purist wants to create music without tools—another word for "instrument"—they are limited to singing, whistling, beatboxing, or armpit farts. The rest of us choose to use instruments, whether it's a rock, a banjo, a synthesizer, or an A.I. music generator.

And if one does know what one is doing, especially in the realm of lyrics (it can be hard to convince an A.I. that "rain" doesn't rhyme with "again"), this is a tool that can save all the messy, manual labor so we can get right to the music!

Still, when I was the only vocalist, I had no problem crediting myself, by name, as the artist. But as a singer-songwriter making use of AI tools along with more conventional ones to make music, and especially with the (admittedly a little creepy) use of "vocalist" as just another musical instrument, as easily exchanged as a trumpet for a cornet, I feel more like a constructor of music than a performer.Hence, from now on, I'll be releasing new music under the artist name "The Paul S Cilwa Project".

Xylophone Concerto

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 9/11/2026		Page Views: 4
Hashtags: #Music #Classical #Xylophone #Concerto
Three works for xylophone and orchestra, presented with rather more ceremony than the instrument is accustomed to.

Of all the instruments admitted to the modern orchestra, none has been so persistently underestimated as the xylophone. Confined for the better part of two centuries to the depiction of skeletons, comic mishap, and the occasional startled bird, it has waited with great patience for a composer prepared to take it at its word. In Paul S Cilwa it has found one.

Variations on 'Whippoorwill'

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 8/23/2026		Page Views: 287
Hashtags: #Music #Whippoorwill
One tune, sixteen eras. A whippoorwill's call is handed from a baroque court to a pop diva, each generation learning it from the last.

One tune, sixteen times. This album takes Whippoorwill—the song from Music Only Dogs Can Hear—and walks it forward through three hundred years of popular music, from a baroque court in the 1700s to a pop diva in the 2020s.