MUSIC

MUSIC

UVALDE ELEGY

Recoiling with horror and sadness at the Uvalde tragedy, I turned to this work. I tried to transcribe/produce my dad’s Elegy exactly as written, and thought I had succeeded… until playing with voicings I discovered some latino/cowboy schmaltz hidden within. My second or third stab at (shamelessly) arranging this number. Hell, I’ve even written words to the thing. ©1983 by F. van der Steur. Arrangement G. van der Steur ©2022.

Los Angeles Toy, Doll & Amusements Museum

My work with Los Angeles Toy, Doll & Amusements Museum was a labor of love in so many ways. At some point I felt compelled to create a fanfare and other incidental music.

MUSEUM OF NEON ART

I wrote these tunes to accompany a website feature on the history of neon, but Flash fell out of favor before it went anywhere. I tried to convey something of the eerie mystery of the neon glow as it was first seen by Geissler, then a little interlude as Tesla tries and fails to conquer the medium, and finally Georges Claude triumphantly succeeds in monetizing neon for, wait for it, advertising.

from ROCK RIVER BRIDGE

Rock River Bridge is a long term work in progress which can be seen and heard in its unfinished entirety elsewhere on this site. Each of these four examples has some bit or other I’m proud of. The Peddler briefly conflates Roy and Dale’s Happy Trails with Ferde’s On the Trail; At The Poorhouse has a mockingly dark PBS vibe to it (I hope), plus a damn plausible accordion; Lordsburg conveys happiness even with an old, substandard sound set; and Bury Me Not, while not an official part of Rock River Bridge but more of a meditation based on the graveyard of the principals, mixes tropes (tonepoem instrumentation with cowboy touches) and humor to mitigate the bathos.

sketches of shame

As I became more familiar with my composing tools and sounds, tunes would arise out of nowhere. Developing a new idea I would burn a disc of it in the morning before work, listen to it on the 45-minute commute, and spend the rest of the day driving colleagues mad with incessant humming. Well Did I? repeats the musical question, “Did I really do this?”