I attended most of the short film screenings at Sundance this year and Max Savikangas’ modern orchestral score (that inspired me to photograph this haunting Park City snow-covered tree) was the one that excited me the most! FILM MUSIC is a pretty broad category. There’s the great film composers of the mid-20th century who were distilling harmonic principles from the late 19th century to underscore a picture. Rock music and electronic music were incorporated into Film Music. Some films have song scores, some have small scores with just a solo guitar. What we don’t hear often enough is a score that could be described as Modern Classical. CLASSICAL MUSIC refers to the period of music that st
As the composer of a short film in this week's Sundance Film Festival, I’ve been eager to see as many as I could of the other short films being screened here. Of course, I’m always most curious about the music they employ. The term Source Music refers to music in a film that is experienced or created by the characters on screen. It’s the music that is not the underscore. For example, in a nightclub scene, it’s the music performed by the singer on stage and the band backing her up. A few of the films I saw here at Sundance were beautifully enhanced by the use of Source Music. One entry to the festival, SEIDE, Elnura Osmonalieva’s moving film about a Kyrgyz woman and the horse she loves,
I finally got to watch Verbatim: The Ferguson Case, the powerful short film that I scored, on the big screen here at Sundance this week. A thrilling experience for many reasons, but I was especially struck by how good the music sounds! I’m not talking about my writing here. I’m referring to the work of both some really good instrumentalists – a string section and a pianist – and the engineer, my long time collaborator Paul Berolzheimer. Paul always mikes the room in a way that allows the instruments to vividly speak. And he expertly mixes the tracks to capture the best takes and create an overall sound where no musical element is lost. Then he EQs the musical cues so that the most importa
