Collaboration with Deborah Oropallo

Selected Works

CRUDE and MELTDOWN (2018) are two of the initial four collaborative works and the first to feature original scores. Both deal with environmental themes: ravages of oil spills in CRUDE and the disappearances of ice formations in MELTDOWN. Both contrast stark beauty with horrifying global consequence. The scores were written to echo this paradox.

ONE WORLD (2021) is a remembrance of the World Trade Center, created on the 20th anniversary of 9/11. While the images of the destruction of buildings is now firmly etched in the world’s collective conscience, this work uses hundreds of constructed images, many drawn from actual postcards, displayed as videos on 35 post card sized monitors as a reminder of the life the of buildings before they came down. Of course, the ending is known even at the beginning.

For the score, Andy programmed a 5-piece jazz ensemble and composed a piece in the style of the musicians he associates with the 1970s New York Jazz. It’s an upbeat piece that devolves into chaos at the end.

FLIGHT (2019) depicts the universality of suffering as refugees seek escape and shelter on essentially every continent. The work shows on nine framed monitors, the ornate frames suggesting ancestral portraits — our ancestors were refugees; the survivors depicted here will be someone’s ancestors. It’s a reminder that this is a problem of humanity not just of numbers.

This work has been shown in several museums, but the artists had the opportunity in December 2019 to show it outdoors on the beach in Miami, only a mile or two from some of the landing scenes depicted in the work.

The score makes heavy use of randomness inside regular musical rhythms, an intentional metaphor.

FLOOD (2019) uses three screens and non-linear sequencing of images to confront viewers with the constancy of water and the devastation too much of it wreaks, especially in areas of relative poverty. The work was first shown outdoors in a pool at the Los Angeles Arboretum. The installation video here not only shows the work, but captures the sound of the local peacocks that responded to various instruments and themes in the score.

113 documents 113 U.S. high school shootings between the shooting at Columbine, CO in 1999 and the start of work on this piece in 2018. Deborah Oropallo realized that each of those high schools has athletic fields, each ringed with an oval track the evokes oval overlaying the human form in the NRA shooting target. Each of those schools also has a marching band, playing drum battles for school spirit around those fields. The artists had read that victims of schools shootings don’t register the sound of gunshots at first, leading Andy to compose a drum battle score, but with snare drums becoming slowly recognizable as gunshots at the end.