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One of the most dramatic spy stories of World War II is a story that very few people know. Moe Berg was a famous baseball player who toured Europe before and during the second world War with a traveling baseball team. What virtually no one knew was that this Jewish baseball hero was secretly a spy for the Allies, given the almost impossible job of infiltrating the atomic bomb development programs in Japan and Germany.

“The Spy Behind Home Plate” is a film with plenty of suspense, twists, and turns, and […]

On the day after Christmas, at 8 pm (check local listings) PBS will be premiering a docudrama about a virtually unknown story that forever changed the history of the world. Almost 800 years ago, St. Francis of Assisi defied his superiors, walked into the enemy camp and started a friendship with an Islamic sultan that helped bring an end to the Crusades.

“The Sultan and the Saint”is a new film that tells this unbelievable – and true – story. In a time when religious wars were normal, two men of […]

One of the things that I love as a music composer is the chance to be dropped into a completely different world every time I score a new project.

Recently, I was dropped into the world of traumatic brain injuries when I scored “Going The Distance: Journeys of Recovery” (PBS), a story of four survivors who take us inside the experience of these injuries, to reveal their personal stories of devastation, heroism, and hope. Learning about these four gave me one more reason to love what I do for a living.
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So, here’s a little-known story I’d never heard – that changed the course of history. Almost 800 years ago, St. Francis of Assisi walked into the enemy camp and started a friendship with the Islamic sultan Al-Kamil – a friendship that helped bring an end to the Crusades.

“The Sultan and the Saint” is a new film that tells this unbelievable – and true – story. In a time when religious wars were normal, two men of different faiths defied the expectations of their time, and changed the course of history.
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Ok, I admit it – I love my job as a music composer. Over the years, I’ve been privileged to write music for hundreds of enjoyable projects, films, tv shows, records, etc. But recently, I was asked to compose the score for a film for the Holocaust Museum in Aushwitz, Poland – a museum honoring the more than one million people who were exterminated at this death camp in World War II.

Watching this horrific footage hour after hour, day after day as I tried to compose the […]

If you’re like me, you have a deep passion for economics and economic theory. 😉 Just kidding – I don’t have a clue about any of this stuff, or how it affects me. And yet almost two hundred years ago, an economist named Adam Smith devised economic theories that describe the cost of almost everything we buy and sell today.

This month, PBS is premiering the two-hour special “Morality and Markets – The Real Adam Smith” (check your local PBS station for air times). It’s a pretty fascinating […]

One of the things that I love in my job as music composer is the chance I get to write in lots of different styles. As you’d guess, each project I work on usually focuses on one particular kind of music.

But “Chaplains” – the new 2-hour PBS series that I just scored – gave me the chance to create music in a lot of different genres. Because chaplains themselves are involved in so many different arenas (prisons, hospitals, government, military, businesses, etc.), I had the chance to compose in […]

Recently, one of my clients asked me to score his new 90-minute PBS documentary about the recent uprisings in Egypt. We decided that musically it would be best to use real Egyptian musicians and musical styles. A great idea. Just one small problem – I’d never worked with Egyptian music or musicians before. Ever. Didn’t even know for sure what Egyptian instruments were. I was – befuddled.

Fast forward a few weeks – I’m in a recording studio with five incredible (and patient) Egyptian musicians – the Egyptian band “Saltanah”. For […]