(i-phone video of 1st movement) SWARMIUS with The California Chamber Orchestra.
This is the world premiere November 7, 2009 Old Town Community Theater, Temecula, California (home of Erle Stanley Gardner - creator/author of the Perry Mason character).
SWARMIUS ensemble: Joel Bluestone - percussion, Felix Olschofka- violin, Todd Rewoldt - saxophone and Joseph Waters - composer)
Commissioned and premiered by the California Chamber Orchestra: conductor and artistic director Warren Gref
More about the composer and the music:
... the music is based on TV & film music of the '50s & '60's through a prism of today...and the style lies between the sound of a Hollywood scoring stage and a jazz club orchestra i.e. slightly bigger than life, slightly amplified, lush jazz harmonies
Waters notes:
"New U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has said that watching Perry Mason shows influenced her decision to become a prosecutor. Erle Stanley Gardner was a criminal lawyer for 18 years before he started to write. This idiosyncratic author and creator of the Perry Mason character wrote of the city but lived in the desert, traveled with a caravan extensively throughout the Baja - sometimes sending stories back by carrier pigeon. He was not only the author of the iconic Perry Mason character, the lonely justice-seeking attorney; but Gardner was also, in real-life, the founder of the 'Court of Last Resort' (a predecessor to the current day 'Innocence Project').
My goal was to write a piece influenced by the early 1960s with the artistic perspective of the 21st century. The work is a musical journey through many landscapes, and it takes its form after the 30-minute television drama, with station IDs, commercial breaks, musical characters and themes.
There is no explicit program, but I had in mind the girdled, constrained sexiness of post WWII USA; the dimly lit, smoke-filled NYC 42nd St. of the '60s, chase scenes and big imagined Hollywood moviescapes..... scored TV dramas, sitcoms and cartoons that color our shared cultural recollections of those times..."
