What Music Is

What Music Is, produced by Concert Theatre Works, is a touring show for narrator, orchestra, and animated projections. I worked closely with the show’s creator Bill Barclay to create the animations, art direction, and digital sound design for the show. With a shared love of the harmonic series, Bill and I devised ways to visualize musical phenomena and integrate them with narration and orchestral performance.

What Music Is provides a new perspective on music’s role in our lives by exploring the strange ubiquity of the harmonic series in our universe, and it’s also a bit of a love letter to orchestras large and small. Imagine something between Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts, a TED talk, Fantasia, Carl Sagan’s COSMOS, and Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land.

We continue to share elements of What Music Is online, and our Instagram reels (@whatmusic) have garnered over a million views. Upcoming tour dates and tickets are available via the Concert Theatre Works website.