A rollicking orchestral cue written for a feature film early in my career. It’s also one of the first full orchestra pieces I conducted personally. Given that this was a seasoned AFM ensemble, the experience was a bit intimidating. (Especially since I often had to tell the musicians to quit talking so much!)

The cue has been recently remastered, and thus sounds more detailed and, for lack of a better term, shinier than ever.

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This week’s selection is a dark orchestral denouement. The cue starts with an elegiac introduction then shifts to a darker end title section. Or in cinematic terms, “everything’s going to be okay” followed by “… I guess.”

The second section features one of my favorite woodwind tricks: having an alto flute play in its highest register to create a pale, haunting sound.

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This week’s selection is a nostalgic cue for solo piano.

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This week’s selection is a film cue for cello, piano, and strings. Composed for a supernatural thriller about malevolent paintings, the music tries to find a balance between being lyrical and disquieting.

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Written for APM’s Endgame production music library, this rambunctious cue is more in the spirit of family-friendly monsters than, say, the one from Cloverfield.

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This week’s selection is a somber and somewhat disquieting bit of underscore for a hospital visit scene.

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This cue from the film Against Time had a more spoilery title on the album, of the form “[Character Name] Dies”. These days I lean towards the view that track titles shouldn’t reveal plot points like this unless the person dying is, say, Julius Caesar. But I will reveal that a beloved character is hit by a car as an unintended consequence of a heated argument. The music first follows the growing tension of the fight, with mournful woodwind solos over a prolonged bass pedal, then shifts gears at the tragic moment.

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This week’s selection is the orchestral main theme of the film Against Time, a family-friendly time travel adventure featuring familiar faces such as Robert Loggia and Craig T. Nelson. The mood I aimed for here was one of yearning and nostalgia, with such a hint of mysterious sci-fi goings-on.

(Click on the play button to stream, or the cue title to download.)

	Against Time