CLIFFORD J. TASNER Composer

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.

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 backin

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