Yelena Music

From Yelena's Journal:

"There were moments when I just improvised something to give myself a rest from hard work. I sat down and made up light tunes that would reflect my current mood. I called those improvisations 'my musical toys', because I did not give them too much credit in comparison with my 'serious' music projects. At times I penciled them down on paper, at other times I happened to record what I spontaneously played.

My 'toy pile' grew slowly, but surely until at certain point it occurred to me that these musical 'toys' somehow reflected my family life in the most part of the 90's, during the time when my husband and I tried to establish ourselves in America and our kids were fairly small. I felt almost nostalgic desire to assemble these pieces together in form of a scrapbook, or a family diary. I wanted to do that just for myself, my husband and our children. For the fun of it I even 'illustrated' my Musical Diary with our pictures and sound excerpts from the family videos.

As it often happens, the project was getting bigger with every step, and unexpectedly it grew out of a merely personal business. On the one hand it was still very personal, yet on the other hand I could not help but notice that the life I managed to portrait looked so much alike with the life of a typical, young - to middle aged American family. As I realized that, I started to think about sharing my 'toys' with others, who might associate somehow their past or present family life experiences with mine. Because in the end who else are we, humans, if not brothers and sisters, children of the same and only Creator - from the beginning of times?.. In our multiple differences, let's face it, we all are yet so much alike. And the most precious 'possession' we develop in the course of our lives, I think, is our family experiences."