Compositions & Orchestrations by Christopher Eastburn
All original works except where noted

Ballet Score "Newport Stories"

An emotional exploration of Newport's history through dance, poetry, music and song. Choreography by Island Moving Co. Artistic Director Miki Ohlson & Michael Bolger. Text by journalist John Pantalone. Music composed by Christopher Eastburn. Score combines choral music (settings of Newport Poems), instrumental music and ambient sound. Dance performed by Island Moving Co. music performed by members of Boston's Family Folk Chorale.
Commissioned by Nicole Halbreiner
with support from the Argosy Foundation: Contemporary Music Fund

I Quaker Meeting
II Time Unlike the Tide (child)
III The Rambler IV A Voyage to Africa *
V Time Unlike the Tide (teen)
VI Nikkety Tree of Time
VII Time Unlike the Tide (adult)
VIII Cartographer's Villanelle
IX Rainbow vs. Endeavor
X They Tell of Islands/On the Cliffs
XI White Glove
XII Time Unlike the Tide (senior & ALL)
XIII Parking Meters
XIV Castle Hill

*(origianlly appears in Moses Brown and the Voyage of the Slave Ship Sally)

It was dreamy and delicious, spiritual and sensuous and I felt I was in heaven for an hour and then it was over all too quickly. In that hour I saw and heard many parts of Newport: the Quakers, men lost at sea, the slave trade, over-the-top mansion life, America's Cup and tourists. Sound effects of waves washing and breaking on the shore juxtaposed with the sound of quarters dropping and registering in parking meters. What especially impressed me was the smooth integration of the dance and the music which required exceedingly complex staging and stops and starts. And interspersed through it all was the theme of Time: "Time, unlike the tide, is of a single mind, coursing outward into the depths of eternal space."

Mary Haskell, Lexington, MA

Score for "Tom's Wealth"

A Dance for the Masses, an evening length piece for 35 performers: five Caitlin Corbett Dance Company dancers and 30 non-dancers (men, women and children) based on text taken from Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer*.   Corbett and fellow artists Chris Eastburn, music; Akos Szilvasi, photography; and Ann Steuernagel, production design, use this text as the score with which to structure the choreography, music and set design.  The music score is based upon traditional folk melodies using compositional techniques including inversion, time stretching, meter shifting, reharmonizing etc.


*“And when the middle of the afternoon came, from being a poor poverty-stricken boy in the morning, Tom was literally rolling in wealth. He had twelve marbles, part of a jews-harp, a piece of blue bottle-glass to look through, a spool cannon, a key that wouldn't unlock anything, a fragment of chalk, a glass stopper of a decanter, a tin soldier, a couple of tadpoles, six fire-crackers, a kitten with only one eye, a brass doorknob, a dog collar-but no dog, the handle of a knife, four pieces of orange-peel, and a dilapidated old window sash."

Theatre Score
"Moses Brown and the Voyage of the Slave Ship Sally"

For the past 7 years theatre director Barry Marshall has been bringing together students from the prep school Moses Brown and the public, inner-city Hope high school to explore history and work on a performance project about the Brown Bros. Slave voyage on the ship “the Sally” and the later transformation of Moses into an abolitionist.  In 2008 the Moses Brown School, with a grant from the Rhode Island Council for the Arts, commissioned composer Christopher Eastburn to write string orchestra and chorus music for the project.

Jazzy Old St. Nick

a hip, swing arrangement of a Christmas favorite

for Treble Chorus and Orchestra
published by Hal Leonard Corporation
available Christmas 2009