I had the thrilling opportunity to bring together two of my favorite artists: Alex Newell (Glee, Once On This Island) and Love Raptor and the Funky Dawgz Brass Band for a brand new arrangement of “My Strongest Suit”. Check it out!
(And don’t forget to pledge if you can - just because COVID is happening doesn’t mean that AIDS stopped being a thing.)
Episode six of Bite-Sized Broadway is out. This time I had the pleasure of producing and orchestrating The Trial of Bastiano di Bologna, an absurd courtroom farce set in 8th-century Vatican.
This one was a wild orchestration challenge because we chose to use only instruments from medieval Europe for the ensemble! Recorders, Natural Horns, Sackbut (the Trombone’s early ancestor), Tambourines, Pipe Organs, Bass Viol, and a choir of monks. Which is a huge learning curve, especially when we’re making them play jazz chords and show tunes. But they were game for the gig and I’m very proud of the product we created.
Oh! And it’s written by none other than the composer for Schitt’s Creak, Aaron Jensen! And it stars the multi-talented Max Crumm.
What are you waiting for? Check it out!
Recorders by Rob Jacoby,
French Horn by Dakota Corbliss,
Sackbut by Paul Von Hoff,
Bass Viol by Anna Steinhoff,
and Organ and Percussion by Andrew Fox.
It’s finally here: Sheet Music from the StarKid Homecoming Concert, featuring the songs of Darren Criss, AJ Holmes, and the rest of the brilliant minds at StarKid.
Every minute I spent arranging these songs and preparing the sheet music was time taken away from my cat babies, so make sure to buy some copies so that I can use the royalties to buy my cats’ love back.
The year: 2020. Somehow in between nurturing a sourdough starter and getting to know my cat’s deepest thoughts, I orchestrated three new musicals for Beat by Beat Press in 2020. And I’m not gonna lie - I have a clear favorite of the three, and that’s Could You Hug a Cactus? A New Musical.
It’s heartfelt, it’s funny, it’s honest, it’s bizarre. The music is so modern and distinctive, and it’s constantly surprising. And we really went nuts with the orchestrations here - knowing that he was trying a lot of new stuff in his songwriting, I decided to match them with more evocative and specific decisions - mixing electronic drums with old European folk instruments, using machine and bicycle sounds for the drum programming, and including way more FX-as-arranging overall.
”Rodney” is probably the most fun piece I did, for me. We got to use a whole array of hardware synths, bicycle chain and spoke wheel percussion, wah guitar - the works. Skip to that one and listen to it first. You’ll be glad you did. Rodney’s the coolest kid in school.
Once youth theater programs all over the world (no, really!) had done their productions of The Show Must Go Online!, the content beast gaped its hungry maw once more. It beckoned to the Makers of Musicals, “Quench my desire for a new socially-distanced youth musical!” and the makers sought at once to slake its desires.
Which brings us to Super Happy Awesome News! A Virtual Musical, the second in Beat By Beat Press’ series of musicals written for online, socially distanced, and/or hybrid rehearsal and performance.
While their first was a silly and ridiculous farce that reveled in the absurd challenges of people adapting to their new stay-at-home lives, the second one was written later in 2020, and it shows. It’s still fun and silly, but it has a really big heart. It’s the perfect musical for kids trying to process their less-fun feelings in a world that can throw them a lot of curveballs - written in a time when all of us were getting thrown quite a few curveballs.
“Two siblings launch rival good news networks and find themselves competing for the title of happiest news show. Soon, their correspondents are in a whirlwind of ecstatic musical reporting – from joyful weather forecasts, to cheerful cooking segments and blissful political updates! But, when vulnerability starts peeking through the euphoric facade, they’re left wondering: is there room for raw honesty on a super happy broadcast? This new virtual musical (designed specifically to be rehearsed and performed remotely), incorporates real stories from kids age 7-14, offering a positive outlet for them to express their emotions.”
This was a particularly awesome score to orchestrate - Denver Casado, the composer, gave me a lot of different styles and moods to evoke and play with, and it was especially fun to start dipping into electronic palettes - this was the first musical we’ve done together where I got to use a vocoder and a side chained synth, which means nothing to you but which is very exciting for, so just humor me.
Check it out! You can hear the whole score on the site linked above, and just below you can hear two of my favorite tunes from the score.
When we all suddenly went into stay-at-home last year, we didn’t know how long it would last, but it soon became abundantly clear that theater, and by extension school plays and other youth theater, wouldn’t be coming back for awhile. It was unclear how youth theater would survive, especially with overworked teachers trying desperately to adapt stage plays to a new distanced and digital medium.
Enter Dave Hudson and Denver Casado, who over just a few weeks threw together a ridiculous farce expressly designed for an online, distanced format. And while I only had a handful of (very long, very caffeinated) days to throw together an entire orchestration and notation, we made it happen!
Check out The Show Must Go Online, an absurd show-within-a-show about a group of theater kids who try to use the power of the internet to save their school drama program and its latest production, Brushes With Greatness: The Dental Hygiene Musical.
Embedded here are two of my favorite tunes from the show - “Quite Time”, sung here by the incomparable Samantha Joy Pearlman, and “My Face”, which is a delicious pile of campy cheese. (Mmmm, camp cheese.)
Episode five of Bite-Sized Broadway is out, and in contrast to our previous offering this episode is for the whole family.
This show made me cry in every editing session, which made this an exhausting process. Inspired by The Velveteen Rabbit, Toy Box is a beautiful meditation on obsolescence and mortality, which isn’t a great pitch for its kid-friendliness but you’ll just have to trust me. It stars Thom Sesma (Barrow Street’s Sweeney Todd!), Kennedy Kanagawa, Joseph Cannon, and Alan H. Green, and features a Golden Age-sized orchestral ensemble.
And I got to do the sound effects old-style, with power tools and household objects.
What are you waiting for? Check it out!
Featuring
Violins by Ally Jenkins,
French Horn by Dakota Corbliss,
Trumpet by Pierce Yamaoka,
Trombone by Kenneth Johnson,
and Tuba by Pete Charles Isaac.
Episode four of Bite-Sized Broadway is out, and that uncomfortable feeling you’re getting from the title is intentional. It’s story time!
About six years ago, comedian/actor/executive Jamil Ellis brought me on board to add some music to a one-man show he’d written called The Magical Negro Speaks, interrogating and exploring topics of racism, identity, and media representation through the storytelling trope of the “Magical Negro”, which is a wise one-dimensional Black character who exists solely to help and advise a white protagonist (think Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost, Will Smith in Bagger Vance, or Morgan Freeman in basically everything). The character’s whole M.O. is making the white audience comfortable.
Amidst the BLM protests in the summer of 2020, Jamil and I started talking about writing a sequel together, exploring this moment where white people were fumbling around and desperately trying to do something about racism (or look like they were doing something). Amidst all the tension and tragedy, there was something very farcical about the whole affair - all the empty gestures, all the oversteps, all the performativity. Everyone wanted easy and simple solutions.
The sequel wrote itself: a mediocre white man hires a Magic Negro to teach him how to end racism. And things go awry.
Jamil and I wrote the piece in a mad dash, and our producers assembled an INCREDIBLE cast. AJ Holmes revels in the mediocrity of Chad Sullivan and Darryl Jovann Williams is an exceptional musical chameleon and a fearless performer. The surprise stars of the piece are the two-member ensemble of Simone Zamore and Anthony Chatmon II, who play the other 20+ characters like SNL veterans.
What are you waiting for? Check it out!
Episode three of Bite-Sized Broadway is out! Amazing writer (Timothy Huang) and amazing cast (Telly Leung, Linedy Genao, Karon Mason). And I got to build the entire soundscape and orchestration around a single ticking clock at the front of the classroom. What are you waiting for? Check it out!
A Relative Relationship
Guitars by Matt SanGiovanni
Saxophone by Robby Wingfield,
Trumpet by Isaac Tubb,
and Trombone by Kenneth Johnson.
Episode seven of Bite-Sized Broadway is out. This time I had the pleasure of producing and orchestrating MTA: The Musical, a fantasy set in the hellscape that is the NYC subway system.
What are you waiting for? Check it out!
This one was especially fun to orchestrate for two reasons:
I got to build an SFX drum set out of NYC mechanical sound effects! The percussion system is made up of cards swiping, turnstiles turning, tokens inserting, and all sorts of other iconic NYC sounds past and present.
The guitar was recorded by my amazing songwriting student Lily Arakelyan, who contributed her tracks all the way from Armenia! She’s great, and if you ever find yourself in Yerevan (like ya do) it’ll be pretty impossible to go to a music club and not hear her fantastic playing.
Featuring Gabrielle Ruiz (My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend), Brandon J. Ellis (Bandstand), T.J. Newton, and Yvette Monique Clark. Music and Lyrics by Peter Sax, Book and additional Lyrics by Christopher Michaels (who also directs).
Episode two of Bite-Sized Broadway is out. This time I had the pleasure of producing and orchestrating Blue Cross Blues, a Kafka-esque comedy about a middle-aged man trapped in a series of phone calls with his health insurance company (it’s funnier than it sounds). Featuring Ann Harada, Alan H Green, Karen Mason, and Lance Burton.
Because they’re a middle-aged couple, I wanted to orchestrate it in an older style, so I had a ton of fun orchestrating it in the style of a 1990s off-Broadway musical. Saxophone tremolos? Check. DX7 Clav sounds? Check. And because most of the show takes place over the phone we got to do a lot of fun stuff with sound design.
What are you waiting for? Check it out!
Mitzy Colletes: Flute
Robby Wingfield: Saxophones
Pierce Yamaoka: Trumpet
Kenneth Johnson: Trombone
Andrew Fox: Keyboards
IT’S THE BIG PREMIERE. Bite-Sized Broadway has been a labor of love for the entire Indieworks team over the past several months. We’ve recorded and orchestrated nine new musicals, and we’re starting out with a bang with The Getaway.
It tells the story of a first-day Uber driver who unwittingly becomes the getaway driver for a pair of over-the-top bank robbers. It’s super wacky, we get to do some crazy huge orchestrations with SO MANY HORNS, and I recorded a jazz piano solo under tempo and then sped it up in post because I’m a deeply dishonest fraud of a pianist.
What are you waiting for? Check it out!
Starring: Rick Negron, Johanna Carlisle-Zepeda, and A.J. Holmes, with Andy Roninson and Lance Roberts
Guitars: Matt SanGiovanni
Saxophones: Robbie Wingfield
Trumpet: Derek Ganong
Trombone: Kenneth Johnson
Piano/Keyboards: Andrew Fox
A couple years ago, a songwriter named Matthew Hardy approached me to orchestrate a new musical he was working on. It was commissioned by a state-backed arts organization in Warsaw, see, and was about a Polish classical pianist and politician named Paderewski who played a lot of Chopin, bedded a lot of women named Helen, and had a winery in California. Naturally, of course, Matthew thought the best way to represent the statesman’s life was as an epic rock musical.
Well…when you write it out like that it sounds pretty ridiculous, but the songs were really fun and Matthew’s a very charming guy so I said yes anyway. And the next thing we knew it had a workshop in New Orleans. And his script and score were, like, really good. And now it has an officially scheduled production for Fall of 2020 - in Poland!
Read all about this wild journey in the latest American Theatre.
Well, I haven’t updated in over a year, so a few pieces of news:
1) I spent about five months in China teaching musical theater performance, devised theater, and instrumental ensemble playing throughout China. While there I collaborated with the amazing Viola NoOne to found Urban Nomad, Shanghai’s very first (to our knowledge!) improvisational a cappella ensemble. Our work together culminated in multiple public performances throughout the city. The humans I met there were wonderful and I am so excited to go back soon to see the work they have continued in my absence.
2) While I was in China, my friend and favorite violinist Ally Jenkins came through town with the Manhattan Four String Quartet, who were in need of an arrangement of the Chinese Folk Song “Mo Li Hua” for the second encore. I dashed off a version of it written in the American Nationalist style (a la Elmer Bernstein and Aaron Copland, except I’m not them and never will be…but I’m working that out with my therapist) and it premiered the following week at the Jasmine Theater in Fuzhou. The whole quartet was amazing, but I have to give a special shout-out to their translator Alice, who graciously put up with a whole bunch of American musicians (we bring much more drama than a Chinese student is used to) and then served as my tour guide in Chongqing. Chongqing is amazing. It should be on everybody’s bucket list. Tucked away in the mountains of China is a city of 9 million people who are expressive, artistic, outspoken, and wild.
3) I orchestrated a workshop of the musical Virtuoso, which is having a special concert this fall in Poland AND NYC for backers and producers. Fingers crossed. This is a really, really fun show that I can tell you absolutely nothing about.
4) The minute I returned from China I had about two and a half weeks’ time to orchestrate about 100 minutes of music for Starkid: Homecoming, the 10th anniversary celebration of A Very Potter Musical (and everything that followed it). AJ Holmes and I formed a base camp on the Upper West Side where neither of us slept or really went outside for about two weeks, and at the end of it I lived out every musician’s dream of having Vulfpeck’s Jack Stratton play my drum charts.
5) Having spent three summers (and the two years in between) nurturing and raising Nvak Foundation, in July of 2018 I parted ways with my co-founder and waved goodbye to one of the most wonderful projects I’ve ever been a part of. I am so proud of what we accomplished together and can’t wait to find an excuse to go back to Yerevan under other circumstances so I can see my amazing students (and, let’s be real, eat a ton of lahmajun).
While I was working in China, my longtime friend and favorite violinist Ally Jenkins happened to also be coming through. So there we were in Changzhou on a Tuesday, drinking some very suspect rice liquor and dealing with the madness of a foreign country when word came in from on high that her quartet needed to find an arrangement of the Chinese traditional song “Mo Li Hua” for a second encore. And that it needed to be ready in less than a week.
That Friday afternoon, I sent them a new setting of the classic Chinese melody. Inspired by the journeys of the thousands of Chinese men who built the railroad and settled in the American West, it sees the traditional melody gradually transform to become more and more rhythmic and Western, until the next thing you know it’s a fiddle solo and I’m plagiarizing Aaron Copland. Did I say plagiarizing? I meant, uh…homage. It’s an homage.
Anyway: Here it is!
And you can read the whole article right here. My favorite quote:
She's a role model that women of all ages need today, and Catie Turner is doing everyone a service by unapologetically being herself, always. And even if she doesn't win American Idol, America has definitely won her.
I had the insane privilege of getting to work with Catie at AMDA NY last summer, and I can assure you of two things:
1) None of her persona is an act. Everything she does that is weird, quirky, supportive, or awkward is 100% real and 100% wonderful.
2) She arrived fully formed and I can't take any responsibility for any of her musical ability or talent. It's all her. All I was able to say was "Don't be afraid to take yourself seriously, because you are worth taking seriously". I also gave her some fashion advice that has since been proven COMPLETELY WRONG by her success, which is leaving me feeling like a total idiot. But that's what happens when a 30-year-old man tries to tell a 16-year-old girl anything about what clothes work onstage and what don't - she inevitably starts the next amazing new trend of quirky clothes, and he's reminded of the importance of keeping his outdated opinions to himself.
I am so fucking proud of this girl. This artist. This sensation.
Hi all -
First off, if you happen to be a fan of Armenian music television (and who isn't?), be sure to check out Depi Evratesil. Armenia chooses its Eurovision entry via contest rounds held on Depi, and currently two of the popular entries are written by graduates of my Nvak workshop! Nvak participant Lusine Mardanyan's song, "If You Don't Walk Me Home" (co-written by Nvak lyricist Gagach Derkhorenian) just advanced to the next round of semifinals! And while Tamar Kaprelian's "Poison (Ari, Ari)" did not advance to the semifinals, I am still massively proud of its Nvak-trained writers Sanahin Papazian, Yana Karapetyan, and Ovsanna Khublaryan for putting together such an incredibly groovy and hook-y song.
Secondly, my voice student Catie Turner, who attended AMDA's Contemporary Vocals program in Summer 2017, is going to be a featured contestant on this upcoming season of American Idol! She's the kind of exceptional talent that you get once in a blue moon, so you sort of HAVE to tune in now.
A few months ago, Samantha Joy Pearlman started planning a concert with a really incredible set of tunes from Regina Spektor's catalog, and she graciously invited me to music direct. We are gonna be doing some awesome stuff - we've got Anthony Lee Medina (from Broadway's Hamilton), tapdancing from Jenn Rose, and a beautifully weird musical ensemble featuring the Meraki Chamber Players playing orchestrations by yours truly.
And it's 54 Below, so you know the cocktails are gonna be baller.
Get your reservation now! May 5, 11:30 PM
NVAK at TUMO (which was the subject of an Al Jazeera documentary on innovative education throughout the world) is now accepting applications for its 2017 summer program in songwriting, vocal performance, and music production. In addition to myself and NVAK founder Tamar Kaprelian, this year's staff will also include Cobra Starship's Gabe Saporta, international producer DerHova, and some guy named Xandy Barry, whose writing and producing credits include tracks by such up-and-comers as Miley Cyrus, Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys, and Maroon 5.
The program accepts applicants aged 12-22. Housing and Board for international students is provided by Camp TUMO. The program offers a chance to study with an international faculty of some serious heavy-hitters in an incredibly friendly, culturally rich city (Yerevan, the capital of Armenia).
A few tidbits: United States citizens do not need a Visa to travel to Armenia, which has lower crime than the States (and lower prices! I had a personal trainer there for $12/hr!). And the whole program will be conducted in English, which is pretty widely spoken in Yerevan.
