Inspired by Olga Broumas's reading of her poem "Sometimes, as a child," which echoes the lilt of Brahms's Lullaby, I composed this piano (mostly) miniature.

Sometimes As A Child

For Kate Gill's play Pilgrim Soul, starring Katherine O'Sullivan, the director — Siobhan Dunne — commissioned me to compose 8 variations on the old folk tune The Parting Glass.

Variations On Parting Glass

Underscore for a documentary film about the artist and critic Robert Cenedella

Cenedella Provokiev

Scene from the musical Starring Elizabeth (Book: Joanne Hoersch. Music: Donald Stark)

Weighing The Scales

Uplifting theme for Jacqueline Goldfinger's theatre drama Backwards Forwards Back, about a vet who undergoes virtual reality therapy upon returning from combat with severe PSTD.

Backwards Forwards Back

Sound underlying a scene in Jacqueline Goldfinger's theatre drama Backwards Forwards Back when a returning PTSD-afflicted combat vet at a July 4 celebration loses the sense of here-and-now and slips back into the experience of battle.

Fourth Of July

In breezy beach-tune style with Caribe percussion & Spanish guitars, a protest ditty about dumping medical waste offshore which then washes ashore.  Homage to Artie Resnick & Kenny Young, Richard Adler & Jerry Ross, Frank Metis & Randy Starr, Tom Waits, and of course Dmitri Tiomkin and Chuck Berry.

Blood Bag Beach

Spooky supernatural underscore for Necromancers, a stage drama about the undead.

Sir Henry's Dream

From the theater production of Portrait of Jennie.  Instrumental version of song that the title character sings.

Where I Come From

For Robert Clem's radio docudrama Untouchable Dr Wilson — about the political rise of Woodrow Wilson — I composed this march as a campaign theme, performed here by me, acting as a ragtag group of Jersey City pick-up players at a rally

New Nassau Ragtag March

For Vincent Lamberti's 1995 penny-dreadful revivifivation of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, I wrote and performed this Mephistophelian waltz.

Festival of Fools

Bos'n Donnie & the Five Admirals (all vocals sung & instruments played by me) perform this Civil War sea shanty in support of Bob Clem's film Sink the Alabama

Roll Alabama

New-age music, meditation music, and parodies of these tend to be indistinguishable.  This genre-fluid theater piece, commissioned for Steven Sater's Asylum, riffs on the opening melodic phrase from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, and underscores a scene in an asylum.

DonaldStark

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