A piece I hope to re-orchestrate to fit into the Solarian Suite some day.  

It's for 8 clarinets and percussion, and borrows heavily from Alexander Courage's work on the original Star Trek TV series.

I'll leave it to y'all to figure out which bits I lifted and and which bits I stole.  And the other bits that I pinched.

The Orbit Of Chiron - Perihelion and Aphelion

Kurt M. Landré 

Born in the dimming haze of the latter half of the late 20th Century, Landré's musical fate was sealed even before his birth when his mother began pushing the family piano around the living room in an attempt to induce a fruitful end to her 10-month pregnancy. Landré apparently got the message and found his way into this world the very next day, with piano moving lessons following just a few years later. 

He was afterwards raised on a steady musical diet of Bach, Beatles, Beethoven, Chicago, Rossini, Three Dog Night, and the raw, pure horror of live, dueling accordion music (and yes, there were many fatalities). After his first musical forays into classical piano and cello, he discovered synthesizers in the mid 80's and his tastes began rapidly migrating from New Wave, to Punk, to modern classical composition.

Landré's formal education consisted of stints at Pacific Lutheran and the University of Oregon, where he annoyed all his professors with a continual and unyielding insistence on parallel fifths in every composition. Finally, in a desperate attempt to get himself barred from all things musical, he began playing Post Pop Punk and quickly devolved into a cruel Pacific Northwest caricature of an over-caffeinated, rim-spectacled, folk-strumming-three-chord monstrosity. He is most famous for having blackened the jubilant mood of a crowd of over 1000 people after striking only a single, well-timed chord on a poorly tuned mandolin.

Having fully alienated all popular music lovers worldwide, Landré returned to his roots and began composing music for entirely virtual orchestras, and quickly established himself as a demo composer, creating works for sound library companies such as Impact Soundworks, CL-Projects, Samplism, Lux Nox, Versilian Studios, and others. 

He is currently the House Composer for Bela D. Media, but can be still found attempting to strangle and torture the joy and happiness out of numerous acoustic instruments.

Influences:

Alexander Courage (Star Trek, Original Series)
John Williams
Samuel Barber
Gustav Holst
Steve Reich (steve Reich Steve reich steve riech STEVE REICH - does *anyone* other than me ever get that joke?)
Sean Beeson
Ennio Morricone
Peter Gabriel (Birdy, Last Temptation of Christ)
My grandfather and mother's accordion playing (play the accordion, go to jail - THAT'S THE LAW.)
Martin O'Donnell

The Orbit Of Chiron - Perihelion and Aphelion

kmlandre