Zen Violence Films

Known for his mournful "Adagio for Strings," Samuel Barber was never quite fashionable. This acclaimed film is a probing exploration of his music and melancholia. Performance, oral history, musicology, and biography combine to explore the life and music of one of America’s greatest composers. Features Thomas Hampson, Leonard Slatkin, Marin Alsop and many more of the world's leading experts on Barber's music, with tributes from composers Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and William Schuman. The film was broadcast on PBS, and screened at nine film festivals internationally, with three best-of awards. It was named a Recording of the Year 2017 by MusicWeb International.

Is this a film about Scrooge? About a composer’s life? An opera within an opera? The Passion of Scrooge blurs these lines between performance, documentary, and fiction, into a cinematic concert experience that’s seasoned with magical reality. Composer Jon Deak has adapted Charles Dickens’ timeless tale into a contemporary opera that melts the heart, but doesn’t avoid the darkness in Scrooge that’s still resonant with the material concerns of our time. Using neither period costumes, nor set pieces to reconstruct old England, the film invites you to experience A Christmas Carol with the imaginative possibilities of a radio play. And then, to meet those visions in your head, filmmaker H. Paul Moon‘s floating camera intimately captures musicians performing the score as characters themselves, in this ageless haunted redemption story about “us, every one.”

The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. has been presenting concerts alongside its paintings since 1941. Some of the world's leading pianists have played its Steinway Concert D 542016, but they started hearing something wrong with it: the soundboard. This half-hour documentary - named for the spruce wood that replaced it - tells the story of tearing the piano apart, and bringing it back to life. Along the way, we learn how a piano works, and witness the consummate art of restoration by PianoCraft. Rising international star Olivier Cavé puts it to the test, playing his specialty of Joseph Haydn, in this richly textured cinematic music documentary by independent filmmaker H. Paul Moon.

Video documentation of György Ligeti’s "Poème symphonique for 100 metronomes," presented by the 21st Century Consort on December 22, 2020 in Washington, D.C. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church on Capitol Hill.

A music documentary about Olivier Messiaen's transcendent masterpiece, that he composed in a World War II prison camp, and debuted there on January 15, 1941. This film was completed on the 75th Anniversary of that historic premiere, and features "The President's Own" United States Marine Band Ensemble performing in rehearsal and at The Phillips Collection, in Washington, D.C. (Note by H. Paul Moon)

A cinematic setting of poems by Walt Whitman that span his whole life's work, commemorating his bicentennial year. Features the poet's Long Island native "personator" Darrel Blaine Ford, manifesting and reciting "Song of Myself," "There Was a Child Went Forth," "Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun" and "Facing West From California's Shores." Filmed at the poet's birthplace, the Long Island shore, Manhattan, and where West meets East.

The electric guitar has been the most iconic instrument of musical inspiration and social change for almost one hundred years. Today, Yaron Deutsch is one of the world's leading electric guitarists who bridge classical and contemporary music. This documentary is a portrait of the artist, and an exploration of the guitar's evolution in music and electricity. Combining interview, master class, concert, and movie clips, the film asks what it means to interpret a composer's work, and how legacy thrives in shadows of greatness.

Step outside yourself, look back at yourself, whom do you see? That’s the question Bob Holman asks in his poem “Beside Myself.” A small band of Bob's friends voice the poem in alternating identities for this meditative reflection on A.I. and the life cycle of the creative process.