October 26, 2017
The Jonathan Park Adventures is a kid-friendly audio drama – a film for your ears, if you will. Produced by Wise King Media in San Diego, the series encompasses a group of actors to embody each of the different characters, a sound design crew the enliven the drama with realistic audio effects, and an exciting score to enliven the emotional excitement and compelling adventure of each episode.
Composer Jared DePasquale graduated from Duquesne University with a Bachelor of Music in Guitar Performance, and went on to apprentice with film composer Joseph LoDuca, working with him on the television series HERCULES: THE LEGENDARY JOURNEYS, XENA THE WARRIOR PRINCESS, AMERICAN GOTHIC and others. Taking what he’d learned from LoDuca, DePasquale went on to become a professional musician and composer, scoring projects from independent genre films to the Radio Theater and audio dramas that have become his specialty.
The Jonathan Park Adventures series (“Movies For Your Ears”) are exciting family-oriented, faith-based stories involving the titular character and his teenage friends who arrive in Cairo to take part in a captivating archaeological. Discovering a city under a city, an amazing palace, intriguing tombs, a spellbinding statue, missing bones, and a unique waterway next to the Nile – each of which are key pieces of a puzzle that are too compelling to ignore. But with each new discovery, the sinister attempts to sabotage their plans intensifies.
DePasquale has composed 21 scores for the Jonathan Park Adventures to date. “As a lover of classic adventure scores like INDIANA JONES and KING SOLOMON’S MINES, I wanted to compose scores with a strong and instantly recognizable character theme and follow down the path that so many wonderful composers have tread. The series takes place in the Middle East, so it was an obvious choice to incorporate the ney flute and oud into the score along with an Arabic percussion ensemble. The show is geared towards kids anywhere from 7 to 17, so the producers requested some electronic elements as well. I was happily surprised how well it worked into the score, and now that I’ve scored over twenty episodes, I couldn’t imagine not having that additional palette.”
“Jared bolsters the adventure series’ scores with an especially sturdy main theme. Introduced by exotic patterns from ney and oud, the powerful theme propels itself forward from horns over a bed of strings and a scramble of percussion that suggests the galloping of camel hoofs. The melody line begins with a two-note ascending declaration which quickly forms into a provocative measure that carries the melody in a stalwart forward, up, and down jaunt that moves linearly and vertically; it’s quite captivating. Jared carries this main theme through a number of varied interpretations as the story follows the exploits of Jonathan and his compatriots. Maintaining a vivid instrumental timbre keeps the adventure fast-paced and fraught with exciting peril and eloquent compassion. The heroic French horns have a particularly resonant clarity to their tone and the dramatic orchestrations resonate with a masterful harmonic that is quite cinematic.” – Randall D. Larson, author and film music journalist.
Click here to listen to music from the first episode of Jonathan Park Adventures or to purchase the audio dramas from Jared’s web site.
For information on the Jonathan Parker series, see https://www.jonathanpark.com/
For more information on the composer, see: http://jareddepasquale.com
