Greg Amov - History

Greg started on the piano at the age of five, the violin at the age of seven, and the viola at the ripe old age of fourteen. The usual round of music camps and week-end youth orchestras naturally led to his becoming a member of a progressive rock band in the late 1970s.

In 1980, while Greg was a viola performance major, he studied electronic music at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His time in their EM program consisted of only one class, but it gave him access to one of the original quadraphonic recording studios and resulted in a music-concrete piece which is currently languishing on reel-to-reeI tape, but may eventually show up on this website.

In the early 1980s Greg transferred to the viola performance degree program at Cal State University Northridge. There, Greg studied viola with Myron Sandler, who allowed Greg to expand his performance repertoire into modern classical compositions, including Aurelio De La Vega's "Soliloquio Para Viola Y Piano", and Frank Campo's guitar quintet work "Anima". These and other pieces Greg was privileged to perform led to a renewed interest in composition, but time constraints only allowed him to write a couple of small chamber works. These, too, will appear on this website when they are recorded.

Greg went on to teach violin and viola in the Los Angeles and San Diego areas. He stopped teaching in the early 1990s due to time constraints imposed by making a living as a programmer.

Greg has been involved in several different projects over the years. He has been in one rock-band or another with his best friend, Steven Davies-Morris, since they began collaborating in 1978. They wrote progressive, classically influenced rock for themselves, and pop music in hope of paying the bills. In 1979, they even did a commercial for San Diego based Budget Plumbing.

In the mid-1980's Greg branched out to compose and perform two different soundtracks. One was an educational massage video and the other an educational technology video for people in the video business.

Greg kept his rock and roll chops up playing in a garage band called MANEX, whose band members even wrote some good tunes together. Greg would love to resurrect some of the music of MANEX, but he has lost touch with his former band mates. If you know were to find Brad Lopp or Mike Katz, send Greg an email.

Around this time, Greg formed Incidental Music, a flute/violin and flute/viola duo, with his wife Diane E. Amov. Their most interesting gig was the wedding of Greg's then "real job" boss. Unbeknownst to the groom, the bride requested that Incidental Music play the groom's favorite song for the recessional. Undoubtedly this was the first and only time that Iron Butterfly's In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida was adapted and performed for flute and viola. The look on the groom's face was worth all the work it took to transcribe the piece.

After a few fallow years, Greg resumed his musical efforts in the late 1990s. He reunited with Steven-Davies Morris, and together they resurrected the band name they gave themselves in the 80s: Systems Theory. The band has released two demo disks, a first album "Soundtracks For Imaginary Movies", and a second album "Codetalkers" is due out this year.

Other projects continued to appear at regular intervals. Background music for a manufacturing industry sales video. The theme music for a graphic designer's web site. The introductory music for a movie-technology demo reel, later replaced with something less 'unusual'. And there will be more to come.