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Sound Clips
(click on titles to play)

Full symphony orchestra
mood piece

End title from The Sons Of Fun
Meet Dr. Death

Pop groove and sex from
Cannes In 1999

End title from Cannes In 1999, classical/pop noir

Sheep In The Big City Demo (dialogue mixed in back)

Sheep In The Big City Demo
(dialogue mixed in back)

Small orchestra
(film noir pastiche)

Symphonic
dramatic cue

I just finished orchestrating and conducting the third season of Wonder Pets! (Nickelodeon, produced by Little Airplane Productions.) Since its debut in March 2006, Wonder Pets! has ranked among the top three children's shows in the U.S. and around the world.

Larry Hochman is Lead composer, and Grammy-winning Jeffrey Lesser is the Music Supervisor. Composers of episodes have included Jason Robert Brown, Michael John LaChiusa, and Jerry Bock. Each episode is a twelve-minute, through-composed mini-operetta recorded with live orchestra – not your average children's fare in this rock-pop world.

 
I composed and orchestred three seasons of The Magic Schoolbus (PBS, Fox, international syndication) under the auspices of head composer Peter Lurye. The shows were science lessons packaged as full-out adventure shows, as Miss Frizzle, portrayed by Lily Tomlin, led her students into outer space, into the human body, and inside such memorable objects as pickles and water treatment systems.

So I pulled out the John Williams and let 'er rip.

The show played on PBS, then Fox Network picked it up, and The Magic Schoolbus continues to play in markets around the country and around the world.

It was my great privilege to contribute music to Michael Moore's series, The Awful Truth, including, among other sequences, a wild pseudo-Awards ceremony full-orchestra scoring for the hilarious "Man Of The Year" sequence, and a sensitive, syrupy musical backdrop for a scandalous "Make A Wish" parody.

The entire series is currently available in a boxed DVD set.

And Michael Moore's done a few little things since then.

Even before I took the USC Film Scoring program, Peter Lurye showed me the ropes by bringing me on as his associate on Eureeka's Castle for Nickelodeon.

The score was built on the mighty Synclavier (which preceded the vastly time-saving innovations in sampler and digital audio technology which have since occurred.)

I was the night shift in the Synclavier studio – and it's always fun to work with such a low-maintenance and happy cast (see left).

The show still shows up every now and then on the BMI statements, so it must still be playing, somewhere.... and a generation of YouTubers are recalling it fondly.

Director Andy Erish commissioned me to create the orchestral-simulation score for his short film The Sons Of Fun Meet Dr. Death, a pastiche of the Abbott & Costello genre; the end title of this film became the piece I’ve retitled “Cornball Concerto” (soundclip).

Director Allen Barton (of Milton Katselas’s Beverly Hills Playhouse) commissioned me to create the orchestral-simulation score for his short film Cannes In 1999, for which I provided a mix of film noir and pop styles. The film was screened in the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival.

My first film assignment, a dance film with Dance Theatre of Harlem, was done with a live orchestra of New York’s best (contracted by John Monaco, Saga Productions, George S. George, producer). To score this nocturnal fantasy film, I interwove ethereal and sensual motifs into a symphonic rhapsody based on Rodgers’ & Hart’s “Blue Moon.”

I was trained in the USC Film Scoring graduate program, as one of twelve composers selected nationwide in 1990, and won the annual Harry Warren Scholarship for my work in the program. I scored movie and TV scenes, conducting live ensembles from the full USC Symphony to “TV” orchestras and various odd groups designed to test our ingenuity. I also got the priceless opportunity to study with Jerry Goldsmith, Henry Mancini, Bruce Broughton, Joe Yarnell, Buddy Baker et al.

If you have film or TV work that needs to be scored, contact me.