Sarah’s Blog
Hi, I’m Sarah. I absolved the preperatory course ‘Filmscoring and Production’ at Musicube Academy and now I am a second year student of Composition for Film and Theatre. In this blog I’m gonna share my personal experience as a student at ArtEZ in Arnhem.
Any questions: sarahs_blog@yahoo.com
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Today I want to write a little bit about our main subject. Last year it was split into 4 blocks with 4 different topics. First we had to score a short movie while learning how to do and use a cue sheet. The second block we had to do an autonomous percussion piece and talked about a lot of temporary music. Then we did a silent movie with a focus on Micky Mousing and the last and my favourite block was about writing an autonomous piece for a string quartet and recording it live afterwards.
This year we only have three blocks but therefore we have more time for each block. The first one is about a totally different thing: a radio play.
One of our teachers, Rainer, is quite experienced in this area and worked on a lot of professional productions. I personally was never really aware of this job opportunity but the more we talk about it and the more I work on it the better I can imagine to actually work in this area.
It seems like in this kind of business the pressure is less and the relationships between composers and directors are way better. Of course you can’t really judge that ‘cause you can always be lucky or unlucky and it always depends on the person you work with and the person you are 😉
To work on a radio play is quite different than scoring a movie. The one big difference is that you obviously don’t have a picture. But still you have hit points and a dramaturgical line you have to follow. You also have to take care that the dialogue is still audible and to not use the frequencies in this range.
Another thing that we train in this block is coming up with beautiful melodies (themes) for the different characters and even to write a couple songs. That’s actually one of my specialities so I’m really looking forward to write them and also record them in the end.
Unlike most of the others for me it is easier to come up with new themes than to use the material I already have. This task is very important for composers ‘cause it unites all the music and can give kind of a new level of meaning and interpretation to a movie and also a radio play.
A really sensitive thing to learn when scoring is when to start and stop the music. The music changes the effect of the words especially without a picture. Although we talked about the scenes where there has to be music we’re also free to change that if we have a good reason for that.
Because Peter Pan is a radio play Rainer already scored himself he knows what the director wants and also has the original audio files without the music! The second I listend to it I couldn’t stop smiling ‘cause it reminded me of my childhood when I listened to a lot of these radio plays.
Rainer also tries to organise a meeting with the actual director of Peter Pan so she can listen to our music and give us her feedback. I’m really happy about it ‘cause it is such a great opportunity to have a look into the real world and to get an insight into that (maybe future) line of work.
Great work ahead again! 🙂
All the best,
Sarah