Cue of the Week: Egon's Decision

This is another cue from last week's featured score, The Penguin Who Wouldn't Swim. This piece takes the same thematic material and recasts it in a more mournful form. The chief technique here is re-orchestration. Note that the cello section lines from The Berg Breaks have been given to high-register piano, and the melody has been shifted from uber-dramatic violins to the more plaintive oboe. (The change from a string section to a soloist also gives the melody a more intimate and personal feeling.)

Egon's Decision

Hope everyone has a happy new year!

Cue of the Week: The Iceberg Breaks

The Iceberg Breaks

First of all, my apologies to my readers/listeners for the radio silence of the last two weeks. Sometimes a composer's work schedule prohibits his self-promotional instincts, even when they're as well-honed as mine.

Onto this week's cue. Much like captain Kirk, I was once on a five year mission. In my case, I worked as audio manager slash live-in-composer for a software company called Zoesis, whose purpose was to create character-driven interactive stories. One of my most ambitious undertakings there was to write an interactive live orchestral score for a project called The Penguin Who Wouldn't Swim. That is, to take a traditional symphonic score and organize its components and transitions so it could respond in realtime to the onscreen action. For example, when a giant killer whale attacks your sympathetic penguins, you want the music's tenor to elegantly change from "foreboding" to "yeeeeow!", if you will pardon the technical terminology. This is easy to do with computer-generated music, but more problematic when you're working with live orchestral recordings.

So the musicians were a bit confused that in addition to recording what sounded like regular pieces of action/adventure score, we recorded a number of five to ten-second transitions. On their own, they didn't make much sense. But once integrated into our system, they allowed us to segue elegantly from cue to cue, almost as if there were a tiny orchestra in the computer adapting their playing in real-time. (I hear the Union is actually working on a pay scale for this.)

This cue follows the adventures of the eponymous penguins as they're whisked out to sea on a renegade iceberg. As the title implies, the usual penguinic recourse of swimming home wasn't an option.

In case you've scrolled down forever reading this preamble, here's the link again:

The Iceberg Breaks

p.s. The concept art above was created by the talented Steve Curcuru.

Cue of the Week: Llamas And The Federal Reserve

The filmmakers of The F-Zone had a challenge on their hands: how to make a long discussion about the abuses of the federal reserve system - something perhaps most idiomatic for a novel - into a watchable scene in a feature film? Their ingenious solution was setting the scene on a llama farm, where closeups of the endearing critters could provide a little humorous buoyancy without unduly distracting the audience from the dialogue.



In scoring the scene, I took my cue from the visuals, and wrote a piece with a South American folk-ethnic flavor. The featured wind instrument is bass recorder, played by the talented multinstrumentalist Jon Clarke. (Jon's also behind the all the oboe and english horn performances elsewhere in the score.) To get a primitive drum sound, we simply stuffed a standard orchestral gran cassa with some blankets. And voila: fake but authentic-sounding indigenous instrumentation!

Llamas And The Federal Reserve