Portfolio

San Diego Zoo
Safari Park Arbor Walk

This was a team project directed by the San Diego Zoo’s in-house composer, Karl Soukup. I was hired to write music for the Arbor Walk portion of the San Diego Safari Park’s Holiday Light Celebration. The material I wrote was to be used as a foundation for Karl and the sound designer to build off of. The audio tracks contain Karl Soukup’s additions. The sound designer added ambient nature and animal sounds.

Vision/Concept:

The instrumentation and mood was decided on by Karl. The direction of the instrumentation was to invoke a classic winter wonderland while inspiring a mystic view of nature through the use of mostly brass, strings, and percussion.

Technical & Creative Process:

The process was a game of exquisite corps between Karl and I before it was handed off to the ambient sound director.

Foxglove

I wanted to create a jazz song which embodied the mood and minimalism of Erik Satie’s works like Gnossiennes.

Vision/Concept:

You are lying in the shade of a tree in a park after eating a large meal. Unbeknownst to you the meal was poisoned, and the usual post-meal lethargy is masking your slow descent into death.

Technical & Creative Process:

I started with a static bassline with minimal harmonic information and placed that over a standard 16 bar form. I chose to use nonfunctional postbop style harmonies to further create a sense of blurry stagnation and take advantage of the F#/C# pedal. All the chords were found through experimentation. There are no functional pulls in any direction, the harmonies are a progression of more or less tension with F#sus9 being the least tense and functioning as home. The D#sus9 and C#m7/B create phrasing and reduced monotony without straying too far from the mood. The melody was written around the harmonic movement, and creates the feeling of descent.

The Haunted Begonia

I wrote this short work in grad school for a one-semester Classical Orchestration class that was meant for experienced composers who usually do not work with traditional orchestras.

Vision/Concept:

The assignment was to use a master work as a guide for shaping your own symphonic piece. I envisioned this piece as a score for an imaginary Studio Ghibli-esque haunted house movie, mixing drama and humor.

Technical & Creative Process:

My master's study was Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler Symphony. I was particularly inspired by his orchestration of the woodwinds to create a feeling of expansion (rehearsal mark [A] in The Haunted Begonia), and large open string voicings (rehearsal mark [C] in The Haunted Begonia). At rehearsal mark [D] I broke away from following Hindemith so closely so I could create more light hearted moments. The [D] section was mostly inspired by Joe Hisaishi.

BLAME!
Read Along Content

This is a personal project I started recently. My strongest inspirations come from landscapes, and I find the large scale fantasy sci-fi landscapes of the manga BLAME! to be particularly inspiring. As a fun break from my other projects I score a few pages at a time and occasionally post them.

Vision/Concept:

Making this at home and as quickly as possible means I am limited to instruments I own and know how to play. For this segment, I was focused on the almost graceful yet ominous portrayal of the buildings in the panels at 17 seconds. I built the mood around the impact of the page turn, followed by a dream-like feeling for the character’s journey through the landscape.

Technical & Creative Process:

The pannel at 17 seconds has C minor 7 with a major 6 as a melody note which I broke into a cascade of 4ths and 5ths in C Dorian with Eb in the bass to give me room to create movement resolving it to root position. I chose 4ths and 5ths for the grand and natural feeling they create. The major 6th is a simple lone melody to build up to the cascade, emphasizing its size. For the dreamlike winding path the character takes, I used a pattern in whole tone leading to a similar pattern in C Dorian to match the mood and ground the dream-like feeling as the character reaches what seems like a destination.