First Pacific Media is excited to offer The Return of The Daughters Original Soundtrack for half price for the next two weeks. Since I finished the music and produced the CD two years ago, I have received a lot of encouraging feedback on it.

“This soundtrack is unique, and very, very strong. It is actually significantly better than many of the professional soundtracks I have heard, and I’m being quite honest about that. Any student or lover of original composition needs to have your work in his library of sounds. Thank you for making it available on CD.” - John Moore

Three weeks ago I stated that the first person to recognize every element I intentionally included in my spy music re-mix would receive a free download of the Return of The Daughters Original Soundtrack. After a lot of astute observation and deduction in the comment section, every melody and theme in the mix was properly guessed …save for one. It only comes in for a moment, but I intentionally left the orchestration pretty bare so that the “secret” melody, played by flute at 0.59, would be more exposed and therefore easier to hear.

Hint: Chances of your recognizing it without having grown up in 1970s Soviet Russia are slim. I never would have heard this music if it hadn’t been passed to my brother by a Soviet Navy shipbuilder from Vladivostok. It’s from Semnadtsat Mgnovenij Vesny, or in English, The 17 Moments of Spring, a 1973 Russian miniseries about a Soviet spy operating in Nazi Germany under a false identity. The melody I “pulled” from it can be heard in this clip.

Knowing it was a little unfair to require listener familiarity with a melody this obscure, (hey, spying is about keeping secrets, right?) I decided to award the first person to correctly identify the four other melodies (Mission Impossible, James Bond, The Incredibles and Secret Agent Man) intentionally placed in the mix. His name is Warren. Jeremiah Warren.

I wish this resource filled with over 28,000 public domain scores had existed back in my piano playing days, but I still find it helpful for a number of reasons.

If you are a student of composition, I recommend you go to the IMSLP and download some of the full orchestral scores hosted on the site, and study them while listening to an mp3 of the actual piece. This has been helpful to me in the past because the sheet music shows you exactly which orchestral actions create which results. “Ah… so that’s how Tchaikovsky got the woodwinds to sound that way….”

This is the site of composer and music theoretician Benjamin Botkin.

Here you can find samples of his compositions as well as articles, analytical reviews and commentary on the theory, philosophy, theology, history, mechanics, science, technology and future of music. Benjamin Botkin is a Christian composer dedicated to taking the realm of music captive to the obedience of Christ by the continual reforming of ideas, presuppositions, and actions in accordance with Biblical principles.

Ben started composing for film and visual media in 2005, and has since composed music for several nationally broadcast TV documentaries, and lectured on film scoring at the Christian Filmmakers Academy and the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival, as well as composing music for various other projects. He is entirely self-taught in composition, arrangement, and orchestration.

Benjamin is the grateful son of the best parents in the world, Geoffrey Botkin and Victoria Botkin, through whom Christ has worked and continues to work mightily for the edification of many. He currently lives in San Antonio, Texas, where he and his two brothers run a post-production studio.