About George

Performer. Composer. Producer.
George Maurer is all three. But if you asked him to trim his talents to a single word, he would simply say “collaborator”. Whether he’s composing a score for a movie or helping Eric Clapton with a few chords, George has a genius for working as part of a creative team and realizing a collective artistic vision.

COMPOSER.

George is famous among music circles for writing a steady stream of straight-up music for himself and other artists, including jazz, progressive and rock. But in recent years his composing has progressed to new venues that allow him to integrate his music with characters, emotions and action.

George’s composing skills have been called upon to produce scores for projects including the Minnesota Jewish Theater Company’s Ivy Award-winning “Woman Before the Glass”, writing a jazz score for the Saint Paul City Ballet’s performance “Enticed” and creating the music for the audio version of Jon Hassler’s book “Rookery Blues.” His newest composition is the soundtrack for the World War II-based independent movie “The Nihilist.” George embraces the unique set of challenges each project presents.

“With theater, you’re given a character, a scene, a plot, and you need to write music for them,” he explains.  “For dancers, you are given motion connected to intent, and the music helps create texture.  If you’re working with an author of a book and as he’s reading his book and ending a chapter, you need music to bridge and capture the feeling of the end of that chapter and move into the next chapter. A movie score needs musical personality for each character and auditory cues for tension and release.”

Of course, George never misses an opportunity to put some humor into his work. He composed original jazz slapstick for Kenny Ahern, a former Ringling Bros. And Barnum & Bailey clown. Kenny has taken his own physical comedy show from Moscow to Hong Kong, and audiences across the globe have loved the musical accompaniment George wrote for the show.

George also immerses himself in writing song cycles. His admiration for the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, for example, inspired a trip to Prague, where he walked the streets Rilke walked and visited the places Rilke did. That immersion in Rilke’s world helped him write “Dreams Among Sorrows and Songs,” a song cycle based on Rilke’s poems. He also collaborated with lyricist Jim Payne to write “Stations of the Heart,” a song cycle based in the style of the Great American Songbook, created for vocalist Ann Michels.

“You take a theme and develop a number of songs over that subject matter,” George explains.  “The Rilke poems deal with life and spirituality, things he went through. ‘Stations of the Heart’ is about the different stages of love, from meeting to breakup.”

Regardless of what George is writing – a movie or theater score or music for his own recording – he adapts to the demands of the project while subtly infusing each with his own artistic voice. “I look at it as developing the relationship between the music, the movement, the meaning and the words and showing off that compositional style.”