The “Muse Room” is the room in my house where I make music and my wife makes visual art. Published the first Friday of the month, each issue of Letters from the Muse Room will include news and updates about my music, as well as something that has inspired me creatively over the past month.
Dear friends,
Happy Fifth of July! I hope you had a chance to celebrate the Fourth with your favorite traditions. Our family spent time with Grandma and Grandpa, grilled some tasty food, listened to Hamilton (only the non-explicit tracks, at this point, due to the kids), and enjoyed watching some fireworks in our neighborhood and on the Missouri River.
This last month hasn’t been the most productive — our whole family was sick, some of us twice, so sleep, energy, time and motivation have all been in short supply. But! I do have a few things for you!
1. New music, part 1: As I mentioned last month, I led music for our church’s vacation Bible school program, and I wrote the music for this year’s theme song, which was from Ephesians 1:3. You can see the words and hear a demo recording on my website at https://www.ajharbison.com/music/pop/blessed-be.
2. New music, part 2: I also mentioned last month that I might record the ending of panicpanicpanic, and I did want to share that with you. It’s the only part of the piece with singing. You can hear it here: https://www.ajharbison.com/wp-content/uploads/panicpanicpanicendingdemo.mp3.
3. New perusal score: I’ve added to my website the perusal score for the piece I finished before panicpanicpanic, which is a piece for soprano and cello titled Requiem. It uses excerpts from the traditional Requiem Mass’ text, with some interspersed texts from the book of Psalms. You can see it here: https://www.ajharbison.com/music/concert/requiem.
4. New piece: At the request of my wife, my daughter, and a Letters reader or two, I’ve started working on setting Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Seal Lullaby” to music. I wrote about the poem in May, and I’m trying to write a fairly simple arrangement for chorus. I’ll probably arrange it for women’s chorus as well after I finish the mixed chorus version. More to come in future Letters!
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I’m not much of a podcast guy, but this last month it was a podcast that inspired me. A long time ago I donated to a Kickstarter campaign for SCORE, the first full-length documentary about film music and film composers.
The creators of SCORE recently launched a podcast they’re calling a “biopod” — like a biopic movie, but in podcast form. They bill it as “a movie for your ears,” and it really is. It’s called BLOCKBUSTER, and it’s a dramatization of the lives of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas through the 1970s and the filming and release of Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Wars. It’s six episodes long, totaling a little under three hours.
The podcast is really well done — the actors are great, the sound design is excellent, and the background music does an amazing job of evoking the scores of the movies they’re talking about without actually playing those scores.
The emotional and musical climax of the podcast is in episode 5, with the recording of John Williams’ score for Star Wars in London. They play a fair chunk of the score on the podcast, and listening to it in this context brought it alive to me in a way I hadn’t experienced it before.
George Lucas said that John Williams’ music saved Star Wars, and the BLOCKBUSTER podcast is an excellent illustration of the power of music to tell a story.
You can listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or their website, https://www.getblockbuster.com.
Peace,
AJ Harbison