Happy Father's Day… to me.
I’m so lucky to be a father to three smart, beautiful daughters.
Three Completely Workable Perpetual-Motion Devices
2014 – 3 Movements – Duration: 17 minutes
Description: For this piece, I was inspired by the work of Vivaldi. He has such a gift for forward motion in his writing. Everything pushes and leans into the next note, the next phrase, even the next movement.
Instrumentation: Strings
Three Completely Workable Perpetual-Motion Devices – Device #1
Three Completely Workable Perpetual-Motion Devices – Device #2
Three Completely Workable Perpetual-Motion Devices – Device #3
View short videos of The Takoma Ensemble playing this piece: Device #1 | Device #2 | Device #3
Download scores: Device #1 (PDF) | Device #2 (PDF) | Device #3 (PDF)
Download audio: Device #1 (MP3) | Device #2 (MP3) | Device #3 (MP3)
My plague piece + film students = a zombie movie!
A few years ago, I wrote a seventeen-minute-long orchestra piece named 1348 after the worst year of the bubonic plague that wiped out nearly one-third of Europe’s population and nearly one-half of England’s. In many ways, I could see parallels between that time and ours.
Unsurprisingly, this rather dark piece has had a difficult time finding a performance. But Dr. Patrick Miles and Dr. Leslie DeBauche at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point stepped up to remedy this. This spring, Dr. DeBauche’s film class made a zombie movie to go along with the seven movements of 1348. A zombie movie! I was thrilled. The final performance, which took place on April 23, 2014, was a screening of the film with the university orchestra, conducted by Maestro Miles, playing 1348 as a live soundtrack.
Old Friends
At the taping of Carl Kassell’s final Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me episode a couple of days ago, I ran into my old friend Amy Dickinson, a writer and frequent panelist on the show. And seeing Amy reminded me of the radio piece that sparked our friendship: her terrific July 2002 All Things Considered report on a nostalgic summer symphony of mine called The Blue Chevrolet.
You can hear the radio segment, which my mom basically stole out from under me, here: Blue Chevrolet NPR Story. If you’d like to listen to the third movement of the Blue Chevrolet symphony, you can stream it here: The Blue Chevrolet – Movement III: The Detour, The Argument, and Finally, The Map.
A heartfelt documentary
I recently started scoring a difficult, meaningful, and beautiful film called Leprosy: A Love Story. Leprosy is a biblical disease, but it still destroys millions of lives. Now, the drug manufacturer Novartis is giving the cure away for free, to eradicate this scourge. Producers David Hanrahan and Joe Fab have been documenting this effort; I’m honored to help.