With a new orchestral concert project coming soon (stay tuned for details!), I thought I’d share some excerpts from my earlier guzheng concerto, Identity: Zhongshan Zhuang.

For the uninitiated, a concerto is a piece that alternates focus between the orchestra and a soloist, who is usually positioned at stage front. The soloist is often an instrument like a violin or piano, but in the case of Identity it’s a guzheng – a Chinese folk instrument that sounds a little bit like a cross between a guitar and a harp.

In this excerpt from the third movement, guzheng virtuoso Su Chang enters a little past the one minute mark. If you’d like to hear the full piece, our album (recorded at Warner Brothers) is available via Apple Music/iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, and the other usual suspects.

I’m going deep into the archives for this one, back to when I was a film scoring student at the University of Southern California. I wrote this finale for an adorable thesis film called Big Bucks for Buddha, pitched as “a love triangle between a boy, a girl, and a dog”. You can probably figure out the tone of the film from that of the music.

Budding composers were treated very well by USC in those days, with access to a pro-grade recording studio and some the best student musicians and filmmakers in the country. Digital instruments being primitive at the time, we were “forced” to work with real orchestral players. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise: my sampler-based music from that era is unlistenable, but I find that live-recorded cues like this have aged rather well.

The film Genie and the Shark pits a clever genie against an opponent who can match her trickery: a film and TV agent. This was an especially fun project in that I got to write both underscore and opening theme song.

This week’s music is a medley from two moments in the film: mid tug-of-war negotiations, and the happy resolution. I gave the traditional orchestral sound a light dusting of mideastern folk music to reflect the flavor of the story.

In the movie Siren, the protagonist’s band (for whom we’re all rooting) competes in a giant battle of the bands, only to come in second place. They sulk in the green room, to the strains of this week’s music selection. Fortunately, the movie isn’t over at this point. Guitar props go to Tom Strahle, here channeling a little B.B. King.

This week’s music is an atmospheric main title for a supernatural thriller called Vermilion. In the film, a painter is slowly haunted by his works, which take on a life of their own… literally. I gave chromatic harmonies to piano, cello, bass clarinets, and muted strings in order to create a disquieting mood.

Having had a lovely time at the Edinburgh Fringe (no I didn’t eat haggis this year), I’m back stateside and will happily resume sharing excerpts from my work.

This cue from the game Empire Earth II introduces the Korean faction. As with most of the music in this game, I used an orchestral interpretation of national folk music, supplemented with ethnic instrumentation. (In this case the wooden flute.)