My portfolio includes scoring, arrangement and composition work for video games, feature film and television. As a musician and producer I have released over forty albums of jazz, folk, electronic, punk and modern classical music. I am currently accepting new commissions.
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Why Chris Schlarb?
The world is full of musicians, composers and producers. The hard part is matching the right person with the project they are best suited for.

Here is a quick example: if you want to approximate an orchestra of instruments with a single keyboard, I am probably not the right one for the job. My best work utilizes any number of unique, real world instruments including tabla, euphonium, mandolin, marimba and upright double bass. I thoroughly enjoy working with real instruments, in real spaces, with real musicians.

If your film, video game or album requires texture and atmospheric depth, unique or unusual live instrumentation, and thoughtful arrangement, I would love to hear from you. For the last decade I have explored the ambient, jazz, folk, electronic and modern classical genres as a member of both the American Composers Forum and ASCAP.

I specialize in taking small and medium sized budgets and turning them into expensive sounding recordings. I operate my own mobile recording studio and engineer most sessions, saving time and cost.

My work can be heard on this site and read about in the New York Times, All About Jazz, Time Out New York, Chicago Reader and Pitchfork.

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God Is Not Great

Last week I finished Christopher Hitchens‘ newest book and current best-seller, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, thus completing a Trinity of recent readings about God which included Richard Dawkins‘ The God Delusion and Francis Collins‘ The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.

While I found Dawkins’ book intelligently written and informative I found it too condescending to be enjoyable. His seeming contempt at all who have believed in the Divine prior to the age of scientific enlightenment, while understandable, is hard to take page after page. Collins, a born again Christian, pro-Darwinist and head of the Human Genome Project, provides a welcome ballast to multitudes of undernourished zealots who find in science nothing more than pagan contradictions to the Holy Word of God. The Language of God provided a number of illuminating anecdotes (and theoretical similarities to Dawkins’ book) but Collins’ own faith seems to be more deeply influenced by the words and concepts of C.S. Lewis than that of the Bible itself.

Hitchens, however, struck a long dormant chord within my internal skeptic and successfully disrupted some of my already tenuous beliefs. Although the book is by no means an all inclusive manifesto it is written with passion, experience, anger, wisdom and, thankfully, a good bit of humor. Hitchens is not above hyperbole; in some ways the scope of the book welcomes misquotes and, occasionally, stereotype. However, he distributes his scathing, common sense critiques across all belief systems and he provides a deep, welcome breadth of first hand experience in cultures and climates very different from those I am familiar with.

Personally, I have long attempted a well balanced world view that succumbed neither to Nihilism nor Fundamentalism but rather walked down the lonely road of the critical thinker. Today, I am further down that road than ever.

Sep 19, 2007 | reading