Orchestrations

ONE THOUSAND NIGHTS AND ONE DAY

In the spring of 2018, my friend Erin Ortman brought me aboard a new musical she was directing at Prospect Theater. I had the great pleasure to work with composer Marisa Michelson, electronic music programmer Enrico DeTrizio, choreographer Karla Garcia, and a host of incredibly talented actors and musicians. As co-orchestrator with Marisa, it was my first time creating a score for a full-length piece of musical theater. I studied Persian music, contemporary Palestinian pop and jazz, electronic music and Marisa's intricate vocal writing. In the end, our goal was to create and then meld three distinct worlds, the 'ancient' Persian world, the contemporary New York world, and the post-apocalyptic near future. Using world instruments like tabla, santur, duduk and bansuri as well as Western instruments like mandolin, saxophone, piano, and a host of electric guitar effects and electronic 'whooshes', this band of five made a mighty sound.

HEAR HER SONG

During the 2017-2018 season, I served as Music Director for a project called Hear Her Song, co-conceived with inspiring Carla Dirlikov Canales through her non-profit, The Canales Project. It was a commissioning project to find female songwriters to write a song honoring a woman who has been a leader in some capacity. This clip explains the project in greater detail, but essentially I served to help identify songwriters, work with them through the composition project, make arrangements and orchestrations for many of the pieces, and then play for the premieres in concert in Washington, D.C. and San Jose, CA.