This week’s selection is some piano-driven acoustic blues from a film comedy project of yore.

I’m occasionally asked why I don’t perform piano on my own recordings. I usually say, not untruthfully, that I prefer to monitor the overall sound from the control booth. But an even less untruthful answer is that my playing never sounds as good as this.

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	Big City Lights

I’ve had to write a number of pieces of music with the name “Final Victory” and will probably write more in the future. It’s kind of an occupational hazard when scoring film, and certainly video games. This particular final victory, from the game Empire Earth 2, is a dramatic sort – more of a “phew, we made it” mood than “hip hip hooray”.

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	Final Victory

This cue, from the political thriller The F-Zone, is a good example of how composers are lazy and like to recycle. The music opens with a suspenseful harp passage, which is really just the movie’s main theme re-purposed as an accompaniment. I then shamelessly recycle an earlier plot-development theme from this cue, now played by the celli and violas. The oboe player then begins the film’s love theme, which by this point the attentive audience member has heard half a dozen times.

Quite a lot of mileage with barely any new music written! (If pressed, composers will refer to this process as “motivic development”.)

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	A Consultation

This week’s selection intermixes lots of drums with cimbalom, mandolin, and recorder. (An alternate name for this piece might be “massacre at the Renaissance fair”.)

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	The Lowlanders

This week’s selection is a bit of mid-tempo electronica-plus-acoustic-guitar-plus-vibraphone (yes, that old cliche) written for Culture, an XBox Live game.

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	Sudden Blooms