Film Music 101 - Robert Kraft - Pharmacy Music

Listen while reading!

This fall, I have been proposed to produce the music for a very special movie: a commercial to be played in the waiting room of a pharmacy. I thought "Why not?" I would surely learn new things and improve my Logic Studio skills.

Coincidence, on October 26th, when I was drafting the music, Robert Kraft was invited at Harvard. Robert Kraft is the President of Fox Music Inc.

He gave me interesting comments on Dérives. But he was even more helpful on my pharmaceutical work in progress:

• Be more repetitive. The audience likes repetition. Don't waste all your ideas in a short amount of time. And the audience expects the theme to come back.
  Indeed, my first version was an accumulation of musical loops, very varied, because I was afraid of being too repetitive!
• It's good to use a clear structure. For instance, a 4 or 8-bar looping structure.
  As you can hear, the new version is very much 4-bar oriented. I synchronized the music with the picture through slight tempo changes throughout the piece.
• Why this minor harmony here? Is something getting suddenly emotional?
  I must admit there were too many minor chords in my first draft. Every change of harmony must fit the image!
• Write footballs. When there's a dialogue, write footballs. Do you know footballs?
  Footballs: whole notes.

Robert Kraft has been responsible for each note of music in all the following films! From choosing the composers to validating the final soundtracks.

Mariam Nazarian, pianist, singer, and very active Graduate student in Performance Practice, convinced the Music Department and the Office for the Arts to organize this "Film Music 101" master class. The other composers who shared their work were Elizabeth Lim, Edgar Barroso, and Russ Gershon.

Feel free to download the music on your iPod, and to listen to it next time you go to the pharmacy! And if you want to know more about the robots that prepare your medication, check out Script Pro web site.

Morphologic free improv in Boston

Morphology is Ruth Lepson and Walter Crump's new book. It features "Dream poems" and pictures by poet Ruth Lepson, as well as pictures by photographer Walter Crump.

On October 13th, a great evening celebrating the publication of the book took place at Studio Soto, Boston. In the form of a slide talk, Ruth Lepson read poetry and projected images, and Walter Crump, presented new work and work from the book. With Joe Moffett (trumpet), Eric Lane (keyboard and electronics), and Noah Preminger (tenor sax), we played improvised music, interacting with Ruth reading her poetry. Ruth is poet-in-residence at New England Conservatory

Ruth Lepson and me had lunch together two weeks ago: I would like to feature some poems of hers in a new composition. It would be a new piece for flute, electronics, and poetry reading, that I envision for Mario Caroli's coming in Cambridge in May 2008 (see also my previous post about recording Mario Caroli). I will set several poems, in verse (I really like her games with meanings and sonorities of the words) and prose (like the "Dream poems" in Morphology).

EQUATION

MARKS, MARK, MAX, SHARKS, FAX, RELAX        =        SYNTAX

Ruth Lepson.

The book is edited by BlazeVox and is available as a free pdf download on the Morphology page. You can also support artists by buying Ruth Lepson's books on amazon.

Lithophone - Agate Music

	Sawing
	Brazing
	Drilling
	Laughing

And the result is... a new lithophone (after the big one built for Magma).

The sounding stones are made of agate. The "mallets" (picture below) come in two types: hard (hematite chunks) and soft (orange calcite). I acquired all the stones last summer at the Harvard Natural History Museum, a few hours before my plane flew from Boston to France. We built the instrument between August 20th and 22nd, 2007.

Many thanks to:

• my father for his invaluable help
• my mother for the assistance beyond the making of the lithophone
• Suzanne and Freddy for their incredible reactivity

Tilia - Boston Microtonal Society Concert

Sunday, November 18, 5:30 p.m.
St. Paul's Cathedral, Tremont Street, Boston

I am honored and excited that the Boston Microtonal Society included my piece Tilia for flute, violin, and cello, in the Fall concert of Notariotous (featuring Jessi Rosinski (flute), Gabriela Diaz (violin), David Russell (cello), and James Bergin (director)).

Music in the form of a tree

Like the tree, Tilia has roots, a trunk, and inflorescences twirling in the wind. I composed the piece in 2000 after a musical formula, designed as the musical image of a tree (click to enlarge):

Here are the program notes:

Tilia spreads as the tree develops. The roots, meeting resistance, penetrate the earth little by little. The trunk widens in the rhythm of the seasons; Spring, summer, autumn and winter bring an additional ring to it. The wind blows in the foliage and makes the inflorescences whirl.

Listen to a live recording featuring Jessi Rosinski (flute), Gabriela Diaz (violin), Alexei Yupanqui Gonzales (cello), and Eric Hewitt (conductor). The concert took place in Cambridge, Paine Hall, Harvard University, on November 12th, 2005.

You will recognize the characters of the roots (from the beginning), trunk (from 3'48"), and inflorescences in the wind (5'41" to the end).

French-American Connection

The program also features the music of:

• Alain Bancquart
• James Bergin
• Pascale Criton
• Jason Eckardt
• Joe Maneri
• Julia Werntz
• Franck Yeznikian

Treffpunkt - Karlheinz Stockhausen - Intuitive Music

"Around the Zodiac" has been the first show of the Ensemble New Flore. The all-Stockhausen program was:

• Treffpunkt (double bass and clarinet)
• In Freundschaft (solo clarinet)
• Tierkreis, in a version with Paul Dirmeikis's poem Sirius on this music. The poem is part of SHU, poems on music by Karlheinz Stockhausen.

The premiere took place on January 21st, 2001, in "Le Tambourin", the concert hall of ARES, a Music School in Strasbourg, with Franck Cottet-Dumoulin (double bass), myself (Bb clarinet), and Jean-Luc Tartera (actor). Later in 2001 and 2002, we performed the show with the actor Maurice Gabioud in Gaillard, Villeurbanne, and Geneva.

Intuitive Music

The music you are listening to (well, if you hit play on the widget at the top of this page...) is intuitive music. While recording this track, we were inspired by Karlheinz Stockhausen's Treffpunkt, part of the cycle Aus den sieben Tagen. With Franck, we played this piece without any pre-conceived idea of a form. I remember we agreed on the very first pitch before playing. To play this intuitive music, we didn't rely on our previous experiences of improvisation in other contexts, but rather focused on Stockhausen's text for Treffpunkt, and on our instantaneous listening experience.

Sound engineer François Geneste recorded us directly on DAT, in the chapel of the Sacré-Coeur Middle School, Thonon-les-Bains, on May 12th, 2001. I love Franck's sound on this recording (I mean, when I listen to it on good headphones, not on my tiny laptop's built-in speakers), and François really managed to capture it in a beautiful way. The sound file is the raw recording: no sound processing has been used. Just 2 microphones and press record. Listen to more by Franck on youtube.

Aus den sieben Tagen's score is available from Universal Edition. In Freundschaft and Tierkreis's scores, as well as recordings supervised by Karlheinz Stockhausen, and beautiful Tierkreis music boxes, are available from Stockhausen Verlag.

Other recordings of Aus den sieben Tagen, In Freundschaft, and Tierkreis: