Latest News
UPDATED 6/21/2017
Grimoire RPG Steam Greenlight
Ellsworth composed the MIDI music soundtrack for the RPG Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar back in the late 1990s. There were some format tweaks done in the early 2000s. Now the game is finally finished and will be released July 7th for the Steam game platform.
Ellsworth is currently working on the soundtrack album which will feature new orchestral reworkings of the original MIDI music. The soundtrack will be available on the Steam site.
Poetry of the Air
A new book on the inspiration for influential musicians has been released.
Poetry of the Air: A Collection of Love Letters to Music from Musicians by Gary Hill
The book features interviews with composer Ellsworth Hall along with Jon Anderson, Steve Hackett, Rick Wakeman, Jeff Berlin, Larry Fast, Jordan Rudess and many more!
Lamp of Conscience premiere
Ellsworth co-scripted and scored this medieval drama having assisted
director Edward Hopf with editing. The epic was produced by Joseph
M. Dwyer for Flyboy Films Productions. The production also features
cult actors Conrad Brooks (Ed Wood) and George Stover (Female Trouble).
Lamp of Conscience had its March 12, 2016 premiere at the
Enoch Pratt
Library on Eastern Avenue in Baltimore after a screening of Plan 9 From
Outer Space. Star Conrad Brooks was in attendance.
The revised DVD edition will be released in March 2017.
I just got word that my piano teacher of 12 years, John M.E. Hasslinger passed away on December 30, of 2015. I knew he'd not been well and made sure last October he got a copy of my latest CD which has my piano concerto dedicated to him.
The John M.E. Hasslinger Memorial Page
Melodic Revolution Records artist Ellsworth Hall receives the 2014 Outstanding Music Award from ZED FEST
Best International Film - Canberra Film Festival
Best Short - Brigand Shorts Denver Film Festival
Outstanding Sci-Fi Short - Zed Film Festival
The film has also currently received 5 nominations from the London International Film Festival
Ellsworth composed the song "In Grief Unbound" (from his solo CD Conversations with George Edgar Selby and the soundtrack to the movie Beside the Manor Selby). The song was awarded Semi-Finalist placement in the Song of the Year Contest. The 'Semi-Finalist' placement is the highest placement next only to the one winner and four finalists from each category.
http://writers.songoftheyear.com/ellsworthhall.html
Also, Ellsworth and Mark Van Natta received Runner Up Award from the 2014 Song of the Year Contest The song awarded is "Believe In Somebody," originally written and recorded in 1987.
http://songcontest.songoftheyear.com/ellsworthhall.html
Latest Video
Ellsworth Hall is an award-winning versatile composer creating soundtracks in a variety of styles for features, corporate videos, and computer games.
He has
an extensive background in
music theory, music performance, and recording.
Ellsworth also produces videos, is involved in feature production, and
is a songwriter/keyboardist/vocalist with his progressive rock band
Aethellis.
His
most recent video production is the
World War I epic production
Beside
the
Manor Selby
which he wrote, directed and scored.
Album Review
Conversations with George Edgar Selby music CD
(includes the soundtrack)
On the Composer's Oeuvre
By Boulevard Denim
Ellsworth Hall occupies a peculiar place, entirely of his own creation,
in the field of contemporary music. He is a seeker after the
realities of shadowy and dim illusions, an artist in grays and greens
and subtle golds while still dabbling in opulent purples. Mr. Hall is
of the "children of revelry," a weaver of dreams. For him, indeed,
shadows and dreams are the invincible realities, and from them he
derives a compelling music; music which serenely rebukes dissection.
That serenity, that innocence of intention, are indeed remarkable.
After the plangent splendors, the torrential rhetoric of his earlier
works, Mr. Hall's contemporary oeuvre, owing something of the subdued
and elusive beauty of antique tapestries, addresses the spirit with a
unique appeal.
His is music in which the emotion conveyed is the emotion of remembered
rapture, the beauty, "the surviving beauty of gathered dreams;" seldom
the emotion and beauty of that which is actual and present. Mr. Hall is
most urgently aroused by such moods of longing and remote enchantment
as find jeweled expression in Beside the Manor Selby for which he has
written unforgetable music.
At times his habit of artistic speech tempt him to such
outbursts of passionate lament as fill the movements of his Piano
Concerto No.1 with so insupportable a poignancy. There is the driving
rhythmic asymmetry of the opening movement; the decorative flourishes
surrounding the resurfacing primary theme in the second; the
modal and jazzy harmonies of the third; and the adroit use of
fortspinnung (along with recapitulations of a leitmotif from the second
movement) in the fourth.
Mr. Hall perceives his world with as rapt a gaze, with as complete an
absorption in its emotional panorama, as the most vivid and declamatory
of the moderns; but the issue of his understanding is certain veiled
and continent intensity, an interior passion, a conviction implied
rather than than declared. That is, finally, the peculiarity of his art.
Check out the latest Aethellis album featuring vocals and keyboards by Ellsworth!