Quest 4: Elfluenza, the Christmas Musical

I hereby challenge you to the 4th Composer Quest quest! We will be writing songs for a new Christmas musical, to be performed by the first, second, and third graders at KMS Elementary (in the rural Minnesota town of Murdock, MN). I wrote music for their Christmas musical last year, and it was a blast hearing my songs performed by these kids, who were so excited about it. Maia Hamann, from episode 10, teaches music at KMS, and she'll direct the musical. Her mom, Zita Hamann, taught at KMS Elementary for many years, and she has just written a fun story called Elfluenza.

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Marketing Your Music with Patrick Hertz

Tinderbox Music's Patrick Hertz specializes in promoting music to college radio stations. In this special episode of Composer Quest, I ask Patrick a bunch of listener-submitted questions about the music business. He shares advice on how to get noticed by music supervisors and get your music licensed for TV and film. He also explains how the artists he sees get ahead are (unsurprisingly) the most organized and business-minded. Although our conversation is geared more towards promoting recorded songs, I believe his commonsense advice is useful for classical composers, too.

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Young Composer’s Contest Winners Taylor Isberner and James Farrell

MusicWorks MN Director Tim Cheesebrow (from Episode 19) is the mastermind behind the new Young Composer's Contest here in Minnesota. Two talented White Bear Lake composers were chosen as the winners. It's pretty impressive what these students were able to do with their string quartet pieces. In this special Composer Quest episode, Taylor Isberner and James Farrell share their insights for other young composers thinking about trying out this contest next year.

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Experiments in the Revival of Organisms: A Trailer

A short film of mine premiered last night at St. Paul's Northern Spark festival, with the short film group I contribute to called MNKino. The theme was "arrivals and departures," and I had no idea what I was going to make until midnight the night before it was due. I was browsing archive.org and found a disturbing, but fascinating 1940 film documenting experiments on reviving dogs from the dead.

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Highlights from the First Composer Quest Concert

Composer Quest Podcast Guests

We recently had our first ever Composer Quest concert at Yoga Sol. The Twin Cities Trio performed some awesome listener-submitted arrangements of pop tunes and film/video game scores for bassoon, clarinet, and oboe. We also got to hear the indie pop duo Matt & Donna Schubbe, indie rocker Peter Frey of Kazyak, and indie folker Paul Spring. Here's a special Composer Quest podcast episode with highlights from the concert.

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Sound Installation Under the Times Square Sidewalk

Walking through Times Square on my first trip to New York City, I noticed some strangely musical sounds coming from under the grate in the sidewalk. What might seem like subway noise or a mechanical hum to the average passerby is actually a sound installation that's been playing almost constantly since 1977. It's kind of like an oasis of peaceful ambient tone in a desert of commercial noise.

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