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Star Spangled Banner for SATB and hand drum
I created a new arrangement of The Star Spangled Banner for Global Harmony Community Chorus to sing at a nationally televised Minnesota Lynx WNBA game on June 1. I’m very excited about it! It departs from the traditional harmonies and also adds some African-inspired rhythms and harmonic progressions. A fair amount of I-IV-I thrown in [...]
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Upgraded to Sibelius 6
After years and years of using Sibelius 1.4 for my notation software, I finally upgraded it to Sibelius 6. So far, with only a week of using the upgrade, I’m pretty impressed. Before the Dynamic Parts feature, you would extract parts into separate files and then worry about syncing them back up with the score [...]
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A couple days of inspiration
The Minnesota Orchestra along with the American Composers Forum put on a Composers Institute each year. This is an incredible program where seven composers are selected from a pool of applicants to have their works premiered by the Minnesota Orchestra in an all-new-music concert. During the week leading up to the concert, the composers have [...]
Argh! Curse of the composer
Anyone steeped in a trade pays attention to certain details that perhaps most people don’t. For me as a composer, it really bothers me when artists ruin an otherwise excellent song by mispronouncing the words. Here’s two current pop songs that drive me nuts: 1. I’m Yours by Jason Mraz. He puts each syllable with [...]
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Sound clip added for Savoy-Lease Arrhythmia
I just uploaded the first 1:11 of Savoy-Lease Arrhythmia, which I composed in 1998 for jazz combo. Specifically, I used piano, bass, saxophone, and conga drums. I think it has one of the best grooves I’ve composed and I like its type of tonality. Take a listen!
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Listening: Mahna, Mahna
Every once in a while, you need to distract your toddler long enough for a diaper change or to get some food in him. I use YouTube on occasion and this song is one of my son’s favorites. Besides being ridiculously catchy, it also is a nice introduction to jazz improvisation. It strikes a little [...]
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Listening: La Boheme
I’m currently on an opera junket and finding Puccini arias to be sublime. Opera can be daunting to many, and to those I say Puccini is a great starting point. Melodic and compelling, his operas have a dramatic arc that is more familiar and less bizarre to modern audiences than much of the opera canon.
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Joined ASCAP