Yikes, it’s been nearly a month since the last Cue of the (so-called) Week. Sometimes the work of writing new music circumvents the sharing of old music.

Or in this case, not that old. This week’s cue is another selection from the soundtrack of the newly-released game Empires Apart. (Now available via Steam!)

Here we have another of the national faction themes, this one for ancient Arabia. I gave the central melody to the duduk, a mideastern woodwind with a distinctive, sinuous sound.

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Ah, the early stages of a war game. The mood is optimistic. We haven’t yet heard the blood-curdling screams of onscreen avatars (and real-life players). For the civilization-selection phase of Empires Apart I wanted the music to feel expansive, forward-looking, and a bit mysterious. The second half of the cue is a positive spin on an arching melody that will reemerge, in more dire form, in later battle music.

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The title above is a bit of a cheat, since in Empires Apart this music represents all meso-American cultures rather than strictly the Aztecs. (Tenochtitlan was the famed Aztec capitol, constructed on Lake Texcoco.)

This battle cue uses percussion and winds to evoke a sense of location, and orchestral strings for continuity with the game’s overall narrative.

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Empires Apart, launching this month, is a real-time strategy game that revisits the genre with beautiful stylized visuals.

RTS games start peacefully, as the player begins constructing a town in a relatively unsettled natural environment, then pass through phases I call “bustling society” and finally “all out carnage” as other players get involved.

I wrote this track to accompany early gameplay for players who opt to participate as the French. The music draws from European folk traditions and makes use of instruments such as the mandolin and dulcimer.

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Sometimes the flow of a film requires a very short musical cue. These are surprisingly tricky to write. An entire scene may be emotionally defined by one musical phrase, which creates pressure to come up the exact right one from countless possibilities.

Usually when writing micro-cues I reprise a fragment of existing musical material. However, for the moody driving scene from the film Craving Greatness I came up with a standalone theme just for that moment. In retrospect, I wish I could have made it longer!

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This weeks’s selection is a two-part cue that opens Stephanie Keefer’s film about the joys and struggles of the creative process. (I featured the closing cue in a prior week’s post.)

This cue introduces the film’s main theme, meant to evoke the quiet satisfaction that creativity can bring. Following that is a jaunty section for the film’s depiction of some of the amusing realities of a writer’s life: disorganization, scatter-brainedness, and the occasional fit of expletives. To match the film’s intimate perspective, I stick to piano throughout the score.

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When my friend and collaborator Stephanie Keefer approached me about her quasi-autobiographical film about inspiration and the creative process, I immediately became excited. A mere two or so years later (we were both busy) I delivered this accompaniment for the film’s conclusion.

As Craving Greatness is a personal statement, I decided to approach the score with just piano. The instrumentation matched the intimate perspective, and on an emotional level just seemed to click.

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