Score and Parts for Violin, Piano, and Reader
7 Musical Movements and 6 Articles
Duration: 45 minutes

On an intuitive hunch, filmmaker Aviva Kempner urged me to meet Daniel Pearl’s parents. During a wonderful impromptu evening together, the Pearls captivated me with stories of Danny’s humor and insight. I had already known that both of us had grown up in Encino and attended Birmingham High School. What I didn’t know was that Danny himself was an accomplished violinist and that his passion to play music helped him establish networks of friends wherever he went. How fascinating that Danny’s curiosity and brilliant journalism led him from humble Encino to the central nexus of world politics. The result of our meeting was “Stories From My Favorite Planet,” The piece intertwines readings from five articles published in At Home in the World, into a musical tapestry that portray Danny’s compassion as well as his sense of the ridiculous.

We begin with a musical overture that represents Danny’s drive from California to Massachusetts for his first job at the North Adams Transcript. In the first article, a young Danny delivers a hilarious indictment against the bureaucracy of the Registry of Motor Vehicles. A melancholy violin soliloquy precedes the next article, a powerful Wall Street Journal story set in Kosovo where Danny tries to discover if any Serb and Albanian friendships still remain amidst the war. Perhaps Danny’s most humorous article concerns the rediscovery of a UCLA-owned Stradivarius violin that fell off the roof of someone’s car, but whose new owner is loathe to return it! Musically, I couldn’t resist setting this movement as a tango. The climax of the piece is a musical tarantella that prepares one of Danny’s darkest stories detailing Osama Bin Laden’s gem smuggling trade in Africa. Here Danny discovers how strongly Islamic fundamentalists desire to kill Americans, eerily anticipating his own fate. In the musical elegy that follows, I composed a ‘ghost’ version of the earlier tango.

Danny Pearl’s wit would not stand for a depressing conclusion, so we end as we began, with a sequel to the first article in Massachusetts. Danny gloats that he has outlasted his “tormentor,” the chief of the Motor Vehicle Registry, only to learn that you can’t beat City Hall! “

Stories From My Favorite Planet” was commissioned by the Daniel Pearl Foundation for the second annual worldwide Daniel Pearl Music Day.