Deferred gratification is still gratifying: A project started in 2019 is now on two Billboard Top 10 lists!! I’ve been Stewart Copeland’s orchestrator and copyist since 2010. In 2019 we prepped a live tour of Police songs with full orchestra, replacing Sting’s voice with three women and replacing Andy with the orchestra. Stewart would still play drums. Covid canceled the tour, so we fiddled with it for another year just because we could. The live shows began in late 2021 and I think we’re up to about 30 performances of it now in the US and Europe. The album was finally released this June, and now as of July 8 it’s #2 on the Billboard Classical Crossover Albums chart and #3 on the Classical Albums chart. The Police is Stewart’s legacy, so I almost purely a copyist for this show and had little creative musical input. The 400-page score is massive though, and I’m still proud of my role in it. Many congrats Stewart!
Grammy win for Women Warriors: The Voices of Change
Many congratulations to all the women that created the history-making and now Grammy-winning project Women Warriors: The Voices of Change. It is a film, a live orchestral concert experience with film, and an album, with music composed by many of the top woman composers in the industry today. Created and conducted by Amy Anderson, and co-produced by Lolita Ritmanis, it includes music by composers Nathalie Bonin, Miriam Cutler, Anne-Kathrin Dern, Isolde Fair, Sharon Farber, Penka Kouneva, Starr Parodi, and Lolita Ritmanis. Working with Penka I did some percussion arranging and notation for five of the pieces, and it was an honor to support this superstar team of women.
I am especially happy about this award because I know most of these women personally, so a whole group of friends and colleagues just won a Grammy. I have worked with Penka Kouneva as part of her orchestration team for many years. Miriam Cutler is featured in my book and documentary Guerrilla Film Scoring. I’ve worked with Nathalie Bonin on some of her music for the MPath music library. I know Amy Anderson through mutual friends, and she has taken my daughter to the Hollywood Bowl. I know Sharon Farber and Lolita Ritmanis through our participation in the Society of Composers and Lyricists.
The documentary honors the strength and heroism of global activists fighting for social justice, human and civil rights, and for the right of every girl to an education.
Matt Cook recording session in Prague
Today Matt Cook and I had a very good recording session with the orchestra in Prague. Matt is working on an ambitious demo project and has written a lot of really interesting music. I’m orchestrating and doing score prep for him, but also coaching him a bit on orchestration. I’ll be doing the music mixes later on also.
Matt travelled to Prague for the session and I stayed in Los Angeles. In the past I have produced sessions both in person and remotely, but this was my first time co-producing a session when one of us was there and one of us was not. It took a bit of getting used to, but it worked well in the end.
The orchestra in Prague sounds really good. When I first used them perhaps 12-14 years ago they were notably weaker, and it took 4 hours there to accomplish what we could do in 3 in LA. They have closed that gap almost entirely, and at 60% the cost of LA or Nashville it’s unfortunately hard to justify keeping the money in our own local music economy.
Penka Kouneva and Bulgarian Youth Symphony Orchestra Progressive
Penka Kouneva and I just finished another orchestral project, a 10-minute commission titled “Triptych” that she composed for the Youth Symphony Orchestra Progressive in her home country of Bulgaria.
Penka did all the composing and orchestrating for the orchestral instruments, but because she was busy working on other projects at the same time she entrusted me with the percussion arranging to support her writing. Penka is a very high-caliber and exacting composer, so the fact that she entrusts me with her music is always a great honor. We dropped my percussion writing into her score, our trusty ally Junko Tamura did the music copyist work, and everything worked wonderfully.
Rehearsals begin soon, and the concert will be held on July 24 in the ancient Roman Amphitheater in the city of Plovdiv, which was built between 90-100 A.D.
Air Strike released
Released today, Bruce Willis stars in the film Air Strike, which is also known as The Bombing and Unbreakable Spirit in other regions. The film is about the Japanese bombings of the Chinese city Chongqing during World War II, and was filmed as a memorial for the 70th anniversary of the Allied victory.
I orchestrated this film with Penka Kouneva for composer Liguang Wang. He is the President of China Conservatory of Music, and it was an honor to work with him. This particular project was much more involved than the average orchestration job because some of the sketches we got from Mr. Wang were quite sparse, so Penka and I had an enormous amount of freedom and latitude in the arranging. On occasion we received only a melody and the instruction to “do the Hollywood thing,” which of course we have a lot of fun with and do very well. We are officially orchestrators, but it felt very much like co-composing and I’m proud of how it turned out.
The score was recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra using a large ensemble of about 100 players.
Mark Abel clarinet trio performed in Portland
Now in its 50th season, Chamber Music Northwest serves more than 50,000 people annually in Oregon and SW Washington with exceptional chamber music through over 100 events annually, including their flagship Summer Festival which is the only chamber music festival of its kind in the Northwest.
This week their 49th Annual Summer Festival is on, and tonight a Mark Abel piece will be performed in Portland’s Lincoln Recital Hall. It’s an exceptionally difficult piece entitled “Trio for Clarinet, Cello and Piano.” A virtuosic piece for all involved, we were fortunate to have remarkable players.
World-renowned clarinetist David Shifrin is in his 39th season as the Artistic Director of CMNW, he’s had a long and successful performing career, and he’s also one of of most-recorded classical musicians in America. The cellist is Fred Sherry, who among many other accomplishments is a member of the cello faculty of The Juilliard School, The Mannes College of Music and The Manhattan School of Music.
I was Mark’s music copyist and editor for the clarinet trio, and it’s always an honor to collaborate with him and his superb players.
Guerrilla Film Scoring documentary released
My book Guerrilla Film Scoring was released in 2015, and it was almost immediately adopted by universities across the country and many aspiring film composers. Today, Amazon released the feature-length documentary in 9 episodes.
The documentary is entirely segments from celebrity interviews which contributed to the book, so for those of you who aren’t likely to read it’s now streaming! It’s free to Amazon Prime members and very affordable to everybody else.
Guerrilla Film Scoring explains how to create a great film score quickly and cost effectively in the current industry climate, and it fills a much-needed hole between the study of music and a career as a composer. To create the book I built a team of 20 celebrity composers and other experts, and their insight and wisdom is shared in quotes throughout.
If you want a mentor for your composing career, now you have twenty!
The book is also on Amazon, and it has even more content.
Arranging for David Arkenstone – 28 shows with 8 orchestras
Three-time Grammy nominee David Arkenstone began his Winter Fantasy tour last night. This year he’s combining his unique folk-inspired sound with 8 orchestras in 28 shows throughout December, collaborating with Cirque de la Symphonie to bring Cirque de Soleil style performances to the concert hall. I had the honor of writing some of the orchestral arrangements for David, and it was real pleasure. Check out his album, and if you’re in any of these cities check out the live show.
Our show is playing with:
San Francisco Symphony, CA
Atlanta Symphony, GA
Phoenix Symphony, AZ
Portland Symphony, ME
Grand Rapids Symphony, MI
Hartford Symphony, CT
Milwaukee Symphony, WI
Midland Symphony, MI
GameSoundCon video game sound and music conference
GameSoundCon is one of the premiere conferences and educational opportunities for those looking for highly specific education in the areas of video game sound design and scoring. Every year it’s a pleasure to attend and rub shoulders with my colleagues, since the vast majority of us work separately on different projects for most of the year.
Pictured here is Li Xiao’an, the head of East Coast Scoring in Boston, and Chance Thomas, a fantastic composer and fellow book author. Chance’s book Composing Music for Games is a fantastic companion to my book Guerrilla Film Scoring, and we will most likely collaborate in some educational events or seminars in the future.