This hybridized orchestral/contemporary cue features an enigmatic strings and piano texture, acoustic rhythm guitar, and a light garnish of hand percussion.

If you listen to the left stereo channel you’ll just hear a cool African hand drum called an Udu. (It’s a bit low in the mix, unfortunately, so you’ll have to scrunch up your face and concentrate in order to hear it.)

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	Building the Bat

This week’s selection is from Cleve Nettles’ slightly-supernatural romantic comedy, Genie and the Shark, which begins its festival run this fall. The cue is an impish tango with a a touch of Mideastern instrumental flavoring.

Pizzicato strings have a sort of intrinsic light charm that’s made them almost obligatory elements of comedy scoring. They propel the bassline in this cue, and I make generous use of them elsewhere in the score. (Stay tuned for more excerpts!)

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	The Close

This week’s selection is atmospheric and rhythmic, arguably falling under the umbrella of minimalism. The primary sound is of a marimba run through a digital delay processor, lightly garnished with a few unusual instrumental colors. Disclaimer: Actual visits to the tropics may be less peaceful than this music implies.

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	Tropical Vignette

This week’s music is the closing theme from Red Field Media’s short dramatic film, “Broken”. Cello solo by the very talented Venessa Freebairn-Smith.

The mood of the film is pretty desolate, so a sober musical soliloquy seemed like the right artistic approach for the final credits. The mini-cadenza towards the end isn’t the typical virtuosic exhibition you’d find in a concerto, but rather is meant to suggest a final surge of remorse, a last protest before the arrival of the inevitable.

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

	Broken (Closing titles)

Here’s another piece that combines orchestral and mideastern instrumentation, this one of a more martial and driving character.

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

	Clash of the Emirates

There is a long Hollywood tradition of attempting to shoehorn ethnic folk music in orchestral format. Actually, it predates Hollywood; 18th and 19th century symphonic composers were fond of tossing a triangle into an otherwise perfectly Western-sounding movement and dubbing it “Turkish”.

I’m not one to turn down a chance to engage in a little cultural imperialism myself. This cue from Empire Earth 2 opens with a solo from a Armenian wind instrument called a duduk (film composers love it for its sinuous sound, and often use it as a shorthand for “attention audience: we’re now in Damascus”). The music then transitions to a more traditionally symphonic crescendo, meant to evoke the vastness of the desert and civilizations long past. Now if only I had remembered to add a triangle…

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	Sands of Arabia