...near the end of act I of Golden Boy, Joe's father gives him a beautiful violin, hoping to entice him away from the world of commercial boxing. Joe walks with it into the next room and plays...

Offstage violin from Golden Boy - played by Jennifer Choi

...ah, the first season at Boise Contemporary Theater... Kimo Muraki and I trying for the nastiest sound we can get with a little old practice-amp. I think we used an SM57 and a U87 - did we slit the cone? I don't remember...

End of Act I, True West - solo guitar: Kimo Muraki

...how to get away from the anecdotal cultural anthropological - just for variety!  SoundForge's time-expand function struggles to cope with a solo Afghan drummer!  And I remember Chris Akerlind's amazing bright side-lighting look that happened with this music... like most of what I do: you had to be there...

transition from Homebody/Kabul - at the Intiman Theatre, Seattle

...the huge, tall warehouse of the Guthrie Lab instead of an English cathedral, two lovely actresses and the vocal coach instead of the cream of Oxford sopranoes... we literally make the air dance in harmony, just as our ancestors did half a millenium ago, in the chantries of pre-Reformation England, to do magic for the spirits of THEIR ancestors...

Music of the Spheres from Pericles - in the Guthrie Lab

...if a platform with no walls can be a jewel box, Nora was a jewel box. Endless moving memories... Aled Davies walking off into the light... it all had to get struck for the final scene - so I had to write a longer piece of music... as often happens, after four intense weeks, the extra material came easily...

transition to the final scene of Nora - Portland Stage Company

...the river flows...there might be snow on the ground - or fresh green grass - the sun might be rising, or it might be midnight, and a hazy full moon...  try to be part of the landscape before becoming part of the river... "Tou kami, emi tame - Kan Gon Shin Son Rikon Daken - Harahi tamae, kiyome de tamou!!!!"

Mikusa no O-Harahi - on the banks of the Boise River

...the music from Pericles became a set of Preces and Responses for my old village church of All Saints' Thurcaston, in the fields of the county of Leicestershire, choirmaster David Evans. My old friend from times at Oxford, Geoffrey Webber, picked them up for his choir at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge...

The Lord's Prayer - from the Thurcaston Preces and Responses

...it's dark, and the nobleman whose wife, whose babe, whose son the Scottish king slaughtered...fights his way to the center of the castle to confront his enemy... taiko drums and huge sheets of textured steel... the flames are flickering...

final confrontation of The Scottish Tragedy - Idaho Shakespeare Festival

...a multi-national cast (graduate program at the University of Leeds)...actors from the Market Theatre Jo'burg, from the No Theatre...and all parts of rural England where the Thomas Hardy short story is set... a brilliant young American director - who has just completed his dissertation on Tadeusz Kantor...

Peter John Still