Chronogram    "Movements in the Mountains"

Even from the outside it's clear that music fills the Bearsville home of Tasso Zapanti.  Approaching via the garden path that links the home's back door to its tree-lined driveway brings to the ears an ominous series of low, continuous, humming sounds emitting from the two-story abode. Once inside, you're face to face with a regal 1930s Hardman Peck baby grand piano. Peak beneath the open top of that stately, polished instrument, toward the far end of the airy living room, and you spy its owner on the sofa with one of his electric guitars. "I don't really play the guitar," he says while thrumming the low stings to stoke the bundle of parallel drones piping from his speaker system. "But sometimes I just like to play with the sounds."

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 "Composing in this room always puts me in a very inspired, creative state—look at those trees," he says, pointing excitedly to the tall grove that lords over the generous front yard of the two-acre Wittenberg Road property. "They're like a brass section, like trumpets.  I call that leaning one over there [a lone, tilted tree separate from the central cluster], 'the Dancer' because he looks like he's off somewhere else, moving in his own way."   Dance has been another source of inspiration for Zapanti's music.  "Stravinsky is one of my biggest influences, and he wrote for ballet," says Zapanti, gesturing toward a sculpture perched on a sideboard.   Made from a piece of driftwood he found on a beach in the Turks and Caicos Islands, its limbs are spread outward with a graceful span. "We were drawn to it because it reminded us of a dancer," says the pianist and songwriter. "I guess I got into writing for soundtracks because I think of music visually."

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"I started to want more complexity [in the music] and this was when I really began listening more to Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and other composers." Also increasingly on his radar were soundtrack luminaries like Ennio Morricone, Mark Isham, and Zapanti's fellow Greek, Vangelis, who is best known for the theme to the 1981 epic Chariots of Fire.    One of his classmates was aspiring director Joseph B. Vasquez, who enlisted him to write and record the music for the 1991 comedy Hangin' with the Homeboys (starring future Rosendale resident John Leguizamo) and the gang drama The Bronx War.  Zapanti's more recent film projects include the 2002 superhero flick Black Cougar and 2004's Proud, which stars Ossie Davis and tells the true but forgotten story of an African-American naval crew in World War II.

The soundtracks to the latter three films have been compiled for

"Cinematic Plateau", released this year on Zapanti's Music of Az label.