Internal thoughts and external thoughts converse and collide about the meaning of life.

Copyright © 2025 Soul of the Troll Productions, LDM Blumenthal - All Rights Reserved

Soliloquy as Dialogue

Soliloquy as Dialogue, for piano and cello

A strange incident took place in the 1990s in late autumn in the taiga. Not far from the epicenter of the Tunguska meteorite impact site. A group of students went hiking to to see this legendary site. They lost their way after they decided to spend the night in one of the winter huts built by hunters of the land. Their mutilated bodies were later found near an old abandoned geological base with radiation burns. Ugasanie explores this incident together with photographer Alexsandr Yakushev in this eerily cold and unforgiving dark ambient release. 

Available in 24 bit FLAC 

Running time: 57:30

Full Album

Ugasanie - Abandoned Base

Summer of 1960  Larry David MacGregor Blumenthal attended a live San Diego Symphony concert for the first time. He was ten. The piece which truly caught his mind’s fascination was from “El amor brujo" - (Danza ritual del fuego) by Manuel de Falla. Desperately he wanted to keep fresh in his mind the sound and quality of that piece when he got home, so he tried to devise a written code that would recreate the song for him in the future. But he was just not clever enough to create such a system of notation in one night. Not long after he found there indeed was an international system already in place which hailed from over 500 years of Western musical culture! After the impact of that first exposure to classical music, Larry began studying music earnestly on his own. It wasn’t long before he was wading through music theory books, and eventually full scores by Debussy, Ravel, Prokofiev, Holst, Beethoven, Mahler, Delius, Vaughan Williams, Grofé, Rachmaninov, Copland, Britten, and Stravinsky. Despite his love for music, his future would actually be in Television and Film. Larry entered Hollywood as a young assistant cinematographer having set his priorities toward earning a living and raising kids. But the typically long fifteen hour days precluded composition. Yet, music was always involved despite the difficult schedule. Forty years later a producer friend asked if Larry would score his documentary feature. But, the film had to be delivered in five weeks. To the producers' relief, Larry created a 74 minute score in just 4-1/2 weeks. After this successful revival of his interest in composition, Larry had begun listening to his muse once again and a sudden outpouring of new compositions ensued. He even began writing verismo scores for current events just for art and/or historical sake. Although hard to enter the competitive music world so late in life, Blumenthal found inspiration through traveled activism and more recently by involvement with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe as a water protector during the Dakota Access Pipeline standoff in North Dakota in 2016. When he returned to California a switch had been turned on in his mind and soul. The events he witnessed, participated in and experienced, inspired his Symphony 2, "Standing Rock" for full orchestra and chorus which he finished in just ten months. It was as if he was writing a film score for contemporaneous living events. To date Larry considers Symphony 2 “Standing Rock” among his most important works. However, his third symphony, "Slava Ukraini", seems to be his most highly regarded. It is now posted here on SoundCloud.. Virtually all the music posted here was composed since Symphony 2 was completed. Certainly, he will strive to compose as much as possible despite his lack of youth. Musically, Larry was kindly mentored by Gerald Kirk, Danlee Mitchell, David Ward-Steinman, Norman Rost, William Hoehne, David Ernst and Samuel Adler. Despite the influence of these fine musicians, LDMB’s continued study of music and piano has primarily been self pursued and acquired. Although quite knowledgeable of orchestration, musicology and general music theory, Larry feels he is at best a marginal pianist. Nonetheless, many piano performances on this site are him trying his best. Larry composes because he feels he must. Everything you hear is written down, not the product of random improvisation or smatterings on a DAW. Great books and films are made because they have to be, right along with wonderful far reaching classical music or film scores. This is the essence of all great classical art: They exist because they MUST and are written down for posterity! Vita brevis, ars longa.  'Til death we do art! (contact: larry.cinema@gmail.com)

Soliloquy as Dialogue, for piano and cello

Nonverbis

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