Something hopeful and uplifting for the end of 2021. Sorry but not sorry for the Latin title… it just felt right.

Because it’s easy to make the joke, but takes time to follow thru on it.

Maybe it’s a bit of a cheat, but emulating another composer’s work can be fun. Hopefully people can guess the film score I’m trying to mimic here…. the title is a bit clue!

Looking to evoke a sense of mystery, awe, and maybe a little bit of fear, I happened to also get something that sounds ancient and.... a bit Egyptian? It might be so, in a cliché way. But it works.

During the summer of 2006, on break at a job, I was playing around with a small motif in my head. I had recently listened to John Williams' Superman March (for the five millionth time) and I wanted to try my own superhero-y kind of march going, just for giggles.

Instead, what I got was something that sounded more like a fanfare from Eastern Europe - not quite Americana, but I was happy with the result, and kept working on it.

A family friend asked me to write something to honor her parents, whom had recently passed away. She wanted it to be performed by a youth orchestra-level group, which made writing something interesting to me but playable a nice little challenge.

Feeling inspired by the great music that is coming out of the world of video games right now, I decided to try my hand at something that might fit into the vein of "Destiny". This is the result.

A sort of 'mini-concerto' for cello and orchestra. The cello part started out as a request from a friend that needed a solo for a local dance event. After hearing the result, we both thought that an orchestrated version would be quite interesting...

Written for a viola competition in the UK, I decided to feature the 7/8 time signature quite a bit. It always seems like it's getting rushed anyway.

As the simple title suggests, this is my first (completed) symphony. Total work time on it was over two years. Each movement is a self-contained piece, barring the framing elements at the start and end of the whole work. The first movement involves contrasts between solo lines and large-scale chords, the second repeated rhythmic figures, and the third is a draw-out exercise in pointalism.

A trip to the UK and the Cliffs of Dover inspired this ongoing work about the Battle of Britain, which is considered to be the first battle fought almost entirely by aircraft. Planned to have four movements, movement one represents the first sneak attack by the Germans.

One of the first things that I wrote, not including arrangements, this was me working on getting the random, useless, different things out onto the page. One of my professors has said "Almost every student has a 'kitchen sink' piece". Well, here's mine.

Michael Giacchino is both an amazing rising star in the film music world, and one of my favorite composers. Go watch The Incredibles, Ratatouille, the new Star Trek, or turn on the TV and check out Fringe and Lost. All feature amazing music.

This composition features one of his themes, with some of my own twists. It was a challenge to come up with interesting variations, due to the fact that Giacchino himself uses this theme so often, and in such interesting ways.