I’m writing in today with a bit of very exciting news: Blue, a short film by Ziad Foty that I scored over Summer 2020, just saw its premiere at the Beverly Hills Film Festival, and was selected for the Audience Choice Award of Best Short Film. You can view the trailer for the film here. A huge thank you is due to Ziad and the rest of the creative team for including me on this. I’m so proud of the way this project turned out, in that I got to draw on a lot of my diverse interests as a composer. In addition to the incidental music, I also got to write and record an original song for this one, called Breaking Away (sung by the incredibly talented Nadine El-Bayoumi Foty).

While I’ve been fortunate this past year compared to many in the arts, writing music was incredibly hard to make time for within all the pandemic-related craziness. I’m also kind of shocked that I’ve let updates on this site slide for as long as I have: I knew it had been awhile, but…Dec 2019? I’m sorry, dear reader. In summary: the pandemic has dried up many opportunities for performances this past year, and, much of my energy has been focused on my family since March 2020. My very last live performance was right before everything shut down in March (Mercurial Shadows, for Gideon, a solo oboe and electronics commission that was featured on the 2020 Atlas Intersections Festival), and while I’m a bit ashamed to have not edited the audio into a presentable recording 13 months later, I hope to get to it as soon as my semester closes out at Catholic University. In addition to composing the music for Blue this year, I also did the music to a filmed short play festival at CUA in the fall (and will hopefully be able to post some highlights shortly), and I’ve been working ever so slowly on a new commission for a piano trio that will hopefully see the light of day at the end of 2021. Posting all of this will hopefully motivate me to stick to my word and get back in the studio.