BUILDING WORLDS | Timbre in Music for Cinema (analytical dissertation)
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Abstract:
Film composers devote considerable time and energy building a timbral lexicon or “soundworld” for every project. In fact, timbre is the foremost concern throughout the compositional process for many film composers, often superseding pitch structure (e.g theme, harmony, tonal goals). Historically, this emphasis on timbre over pitch structure comes from a practical place — complex pitch structures need time to develop independently, and thus compete with the dramatic action of a film, whereas tone color alone can provide immediate dramatic accompaniment. Many analyses of film music
prioritize the development of theme and its adjacent pitch structures over timbre; the analyses in this dissertation flip these priorities. Through close readings of works by John Williams, Ennio Morricone, and Sergei Prokofiev, I focus on the soundworld of film scores when I analyze them, like film composers do when they compose them. I use several timbral analysis methods to achieve this focus, including the traditional study of orchestration,
musical gesture analysis, embodied cognition research, and acousmatic music theory.
TONBILDER | suite for instrumental ensembles + fixed audio/video (composition dissertation)
The four movements of this suite explore various ways of combining music with visual
media.
Cathedral Grove (2019) for orchestra + fixed video
7’
Winner of the 2019 UC Davis Symphony Orchestra Composition Competition. Premiered 1 June 2019, Christian Baldini, conductor.
For me, the orchestra is a very special thing: I love its beautiful concert halls, its rituals, and the great works that have been written for it. I especially love how so many people assemble together, both onstage and off, to present and hear this music. As I was deciding what to do with this piece, I thought about how much an orchestra, and all its accompanying social structure, is similar to America’s national parks. We take time out of our busy days to go experience something out of the ordinary; we’ve decided as a culture how much certain extraordinary places mean to us, and how important it is to preserve them for future generations. The Muir Woods–of which the “Cathedral Grove” is a part– is one such place for me. And there’s immediate beauty, yes, but these ancient trees have been around long before us and will hopefully still be there long after we’re gone: this evokes a very sublime feeling. John Steinbeck said in his book Travels With Charley that “No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree;” this piece is my humble attempt to, instead, make a painting in sound. I tried to capture some of that sublime feeling, and also vitality, majesty, tenderness, silence, light or color filtering through the tops of trees, etc.
A Kind of Stopwatch (2019) for woodwind trio + fixed video
9’30”
performed by Keyed Kontraptions
Click here for a perusal score
The video for this work is a transformation of beautifully-shot footage from the original Twilight Zone TV series, scored with new music for woodwind trio.
Into Gold (2020) for multiple percussion solo + fixed video
9’
performed by Christopher Froh
Click here for a perusal score
The video for this work was assembled from mid-twentieth century public domain films produced by General Motors, Kodak, and the United States military.
de rerum natura I “el leñador” (2019) for amplified string quartet + video
10’30”
composed for Spektral Quartet — performed at Taproot New Music Festival, January 31, 2020
“But it always happens that we hear the sound of the thunder some time after we perceive it lighten, because objects, which affect the hearing, always come more slowly to the ears, than those, which affect the sight, arrive at the eye. This you may easily understand from the following instance. If you observe a man at a distance cutting down the trunk of a tree with an axe, you will see the stroke itself before the noise of the stroke makes any sound in the air.” Lucretius, De Rerum Natura e. vi. 160-184 (translation by John Selby Watson)
The video for this work is an assemblage of public domain science and art film clips, manipulated with Jitter for Max. The music is designed to react to onscreen events, but almost always after these events have occurred. No click track is used, so the interaction is deliberately intended to be volatile and change from performance to performance. Live audio feeds from the players control video playback speed and blur. I loosely used dactylic hexameter (the poetic meter of Lucretius’ epic De Rerum Natura) as a guide for timing the video editing and, therefore, the accompanying music. Much of the musical material in this piece was built from spectral analyses of speech which I transcribed for string quartet.