Her first symphony, ‘The Seeker,’ was honored and then recorded in L.A.

Kate Moody knows the score.

That’s because she wrote it.

And “The Seeker,” the island composer’s first symphony, walked off with the award for Best Instrumental Album at the Just Plain Folks Music Awards in Los Angeles, Calif., this past fall.

Moody flew to Los Angeles to attend the ceremony.

“It was much better than I’d imagined it would be,” said Moody, who recently returned to Bainbridge Island after six years away. “Some complete stranger says to me, ‘we like your thing – and, by the way, we want to name it the best.’”

Moody didn’t even know she had entered a contest; her work had been submitted by the staff from a web site for independent musicians, where several of her works were posted.

The road to success has had more than a few twists and turns.

When Berkeley, Calif., native Moody was 11 and already playing Beethoven sonatas, her piano teacher moved and her parents separated.

Moody was sent off to boarding school. While she stopped studying piano, she composed her first music pieces for guitar.

She didn’t play piano again until she turned 16 and was able to drive herself to where her piano teacher lived. Although she hadn’t played seriously for years, Moody applied to California College of the Arts and was accepted.

But her father – by this time remarried and a senior partner in a San Francisco law firm – was unwilling to pay for her education, and her mother was pursuing a doctorate in England.

“That’s when I left home,” Moody said, “because I was so hurt.”

Moody wandered, had relationships.

And drank.

“But it was like the music just kept speaking to me,” she said, “so I finally decided, when I was 24, OK, I’m going to go to college.”

She enrolled at Sonoma State University and received a piano scholarship. But the discipline of piano didn’t mix well with alcohol, Moody found.

“I tried to make limits on my drinking so I could practice, and I couldn’t” she said.

After taking a semester off to get sober, Moody found she still had her scholarship and place in the department when she returned.

“God bless the faculty at Sonoma State,” she said.

But she was too intimidated by the classical piano repertoire she was now immersed in to compose.

It took a false medical alarm to get Moody – faced with what she thought was her mortality – writing again. She penned part of an opera and saw it performed.

Moody became hooked on composition, a healthier addiction.

“I wrote music and this woman sang it,” she said. “It was so thrilling to hear it realized.”

Encouraged by the Sonoma faculty to go East, Moody spent one unhappy year as a graduate student at the New England Conservatory of Music coping with the chilliness of Bostonians before moving in 1985 to Puget Sound.

That was the year Moody’s cherished dog Shana died, inspiring her to write a piano sonata.

Then came The Seeker. Like her other works, this one began not with a tune but with “a feeling of rising energy.” Moody established a melodic line and then scored the instrumental parts.

“I went through and I established the structure,” she said, “and then I arranged.”

When it came to getting the work recorded, Moody contacted a union contractor whose job it was to hire the musicians.

“This guy was, like, the top contractor in Hollywood,” Moody said, “and I was getting his A-list of musicians for the session.”

She flew to Hollywood; she recalls walking down a hallway to meet the 30 musicians who had convened in the Capitol Records orchestral recording room.

“The hallway is lined of photographs of people who’ve recorded there, like Frank Sinatra, the Beatles, Judy Garland,” she said. “So I’m walking down this hallway with chills.”

Moody passed out the parts she’d had printed up for the musicians and spoke with the conductor.

“He turned out to be a really open-hearted conductor,” Moody said. “He loved the music, he loved the experience.

“It was so much fun, I cannot tell you.”

Recording took three nights. Moody’s mother, who had helped underwrite the project, flew in for the final night’s recording session.

“I guess she finally saw that I actually did something,” Moody said. “It was very significant. That there was some acknowledgement.”

Having moved to Portland, Ore., in 1994, Moody returned to the outskirts of Winslow this year, and has resumed giving private lessons and composing.

Winning the prize has given her enough validation so that she doesn’t feel compelled to push her career at the expense of composing, but she acknowledges the difficulties of her chosen field.

“I would love to write more orchestral music,” Moody said. “But it’s very difficult to get it performed.”

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Seek, find, listen

Kate Moody’s “The Seeker” is available online at www.cdbaby.com.