– Charlie’s Blog –
by Modern Songbook Records | Mar 3, 2018 | Charlie's Blog, News
19: The Musical, a carnival ride of a project about the passage of the 19th Amendment, is still taking shape. Last weekend, singers Millie Scarlett, Katie Ganem, and Maria Ciarrochi performed three new songs from the show at The Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monumentin Washington DC in honor of Women’s History Month. Lyricist Jennifer Schwed and writer Doug Bradshaw have been the visionaries behind this project, which we hope to keep building and workshopping over the course of the next year. At our Saturday matinee shows, we were blessed with enthusiastic and curious audiences, including one extremely lively bachelorette party all in purple (the color of the suffragists). Could attending historical feminist musical theater offerings be a new bridal trend? For the sake of this show, I sincerely hope so.
by Modern Songbook Records | Feb 22, 2018 | Charlie's Blog, News
I’m happy to announce that on March 18, the Capitol City Symphony will be premiering a jaunty and nostalgic 12-minute piece of mine called My Own Personal Rocketship. Maestra Victoria Gau will conduct. There’s a second piece of mine on the program: one movement of my symphony, The Blue Chevrolet. It’s a family concert complete with pre-show instrument petting zoo, so if you’ve got kiddos in DC to entertain that day, I hope you’ll zoom by. It’s at the Atlas Performing Arts Center, with shows at 4 and 6 pm.
by Modern Songbook Records | Feb 3, 2018 | Charlie's Blog, News
This sounds like the start of an accordion joke: My accordion seemed to be out of tune. But seriously, it did. So I searched the internet for help and came up with Busso’s Accordion Shop in Alexandria, Virginia. Now, I must admit that my accordion playing is limited. I play it like a piano with my right hand, and have never really mastered all the buttons on the lefthand side—or at least not so far. So I was somewhat nervous going into the bellows of the beast, but it turned out that the shop’s proprietor, Frank Busso, is a non-judgmental champ of a guy. He confirmed that my accordion was, indeed, out of tune and needed fixing. While I was at the shop, I got the chance to play a really good instrument: a top-of-the-line Titano. I also added a destination to my travel bucket list: Castelfidardo, Italy, the international capital of accordion builders. I hope that when I finally get there, they will welcome me as a brother.
by Modern Songbook Records | Jan 2, 2018 | Charlie's Blog, News
A while back, I was commissioned to write a piece that would introduce kids to the sections of the orchestra, and in December, I had the pleasure of seeing it premiered by Maestra Victoria Gau and the National Philharmonic Orchestra. Over the course of a week, Give Me the Orchestra was played for nearly 10,000 second-graders from Montgomery County, Maryland. The piece involves some call-and-response between the students and the orchestra, and what a response it was! I don’t think I have ever had a piece of music get such an enthusiastic reception. I’d love to see this one played more broadly.
by Modern Songbook Records | Jan 1, 2018 | Charlie's Blog, News
A few days ago, I started my work day on a long Skype call with a friend in Paris who is working on bringing my jazz band, Chaise Lounge, to France for a tour. As soon as that call ended, I was added to a Zoom.us video conference with a filmmaker and a corporate client. From our three different cities, we shared film edit files and made comments and adjustments as we listened. In real time! Just a few years ago, that would have taken days of travel and a mind-numbing amount of back-and-forth revisions. After the conference call was over, I made my final adjustments to the score in ProTools and sent the stereo .wav files to the filmmaker via a large file transfer site called Hightail. I marveled at the technology that keeps collapsing the time it takes to do this work, and the distance among those of us who do it. I then took out my pen and wrote several thank-you notes, put them in envelopes, and left them for the postman. For some things, slower is better. I hope your new year is starting off well, at whatever speed you are starting it.
by Modern Songbook Records | Dec 25, 2017 | Charlie's Blog, News
This year, a song from Chaise Lounge’s Christmas album was included in the Hallmark Channel film Switched for Christmas. The song, “December 25,” was used under a key montage near the end of the film. I’m grateful to director Lee Friedlander for noticing this song.
