Friends,

This is the one I’ve been waiting to share. Danse L’Intervention is the closing track of Cú Chulainn, and it’s the most personal piece of music I’ve made. The other four songs on the album are mythic: warriors, gods, riddles, the death of a hero. This one is about my mom.

In January 2016, my mother Ginny had a massive stroke while playing forward for her women’s soccer team. She was 54. They rushed her to Froedtert Hospital, where a pioneering mechanical thrombectomy procedure saved her life and gave her a near-full recovery. She went back to nursing as a vascular neurology stroke specialist at the same hospital that saved her. The Medical College of Wisconsin’s Project Wonder team reached out asking if I’d score a film for them at the intersection of music and medicine. I asked if I could put the piece inside Cú Chulainn. They said yes.

A baroque epic for the modern world

The piece is seven minutes and eighteen seconds, a full reworking of Camille Saint-Saëns’ 1874 Danse Macabre. Saint-Saëns wrote his version about Death playing fiddle at midnight on Halloween, raising the dead for one last dance before the rooster crows them back into the ground. I kept that bones-and-violins skeleton and rebuilt it around what happens inside a hospital when a stroke hits. The dance never stops. It just changes who’s leading.

Piet Levy of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel called the closing of Cú Chulainn “a heart-racing baroque string piece.” That’s exactly the swing I wanted: from the album’s opening warrior-rage all the way out into the operating room, the recovery floor, the slow walk home.

The room

Live strings on the track are the Brusubardis Family. Sonora on Violin I, Kristian on Violin II, Viktor on Cello. Three siblings who play together the way only siblings do — you can hear it in how they breathe.

Recorded by Josh Evert at Silver City Studios in Milwaukee. The film was directed and edited by Wes Tank (TankThink) — the same Wes who went viral in 2020 with the Dr. Seuss-over-Dr. Dre rap series and serves as Artist-in-Residence at Betty Brinn Children’s Museum. Produced by Alex Boyes and the Project Wonder team at MCW. The ribbon dancer in the film is Mie, one of the other artists on the Awen network.

We shot on location at Froedtert Hospital, Cudahy Middle School, and Washington Park Media Center. I’m in it. So is mom.

Ginny McCullough, MSN, FNP, APNP

My mother is the inspiration and the featured subject. She is a vascular neurology nurse practitioner at the Medical College of Wisconsin and a stroke survivor.

What’s wild about all of this: the hospital that saved her is the same institution whose Project Wonder program now hosts the music video about her. Her story has been featured by WISN and Froedtert & MCW as a testament to the life-saving research happening there. That her son would one day end up collaborating with that same institution through music is a full-circle moment I still don’t fully believe.

About Project Wonder

Project Wonder is MCW’s art-and-science program. They pair Milwaukee artists with researchers to translate cutting-edge biomedical work into pieces the public can actually feel. The program has reached more than 1.5 million people globally and holds an AAMC GIA Award, one of the highest honors in academic medical center communications. Danse L’Intervention is their first deep collaboration with a Milwaukee musician on a video of this scale, and getting to make it with them was a gift.

Full credits

• Director & Editor: Wes Tank, TankThink
• Project Wonder: Alex Boyes, Medical College of Wisconsin
• Music written & produced by: Cullah (Ian McCullough)
• Inspiration & featuring: Ginny McCullough, MSN, FNP, APNP — Vascular Neurology, MCW
• Violin I: Sonora Brusubardis
• Violin II: Kristian Brusubardis
• Cello: Viktor Brusubardis
• Recording engineer: Josh Evert, Silver City Studios
• Ribbon dancer: Mie
• Filmed on location at: Froedtert Hospital · Cudahy Middle School · Washington Park Media Center
• Source material: Adapted from Danse Macabre by Camille Saint-Saëns (1874)

Where to go from here

• Watch the film at Project Wonder (full quality, MCW’s own page)
• Download the single track (free under CC BY-SA)
• Stream the full Cú Chulainn album (the 5-track cycle)
• Explore Project Wonder at MCW

Thanks for being here. The fact that this collaboration even existed is downstream of the kind of patronage the Cullective makes possible. Every album, every video, every commission is a chain of “someone said yes.” Yours included.

Cullah