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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There are a lot of things coming up this week. Over the weekend we have already been working hard on setting up everything for this year’s Matangi project.
Matangi is a string quartet that you are asked to write for in your first year as a Bachelor Composition for Film and Theatre student. The pieces are all played by the quartet and recorded.
For this purpose, various microphone set-ups are set up in the concert hall of the ArtEZ in Arnhem. The organisation and preparations are mostly done by the students.
The second-year students have another project, the Ereprijs project. Ereprijs is a somewhat unusual orchestra with 2 flutes, clarinet, 2 saxophones, horn, trumpet, 2 trombones, tuba, piano and percussion.
For this project, everyone had to choose a film scene of up to 5 minutes and write a score for it. The special thing about this project is that you have to use hybrid strings, which the ensemble will hear later via headphones. Of course, the whole thing will be recorded again with different microphones set-ups.
Tonight, one day before the recording, there will be a concert where all this year’s pieces will be performed. The film will also be shown and the strings will be played over speakers.
Before that, there will be a few rehearsals. During this, the musicians and especially the conductor must all already have headphones and be able to listen to a click track together with the strings on them. This involves a lot of technical effort, but this year it is going surprisingly well.
The larger number of musicians and the hybrid form alone make this project much more complex and complicated than the Matangi-Project. However, there is also a lot of learning potential here. From the compositional side, you learn what sounds good and what doesn’t with an ‘orchestra’. And from the technical side, you learn how to mic, how the studio works (routing, patching) and generally about pitfalls you have working with live musicians.
I had already heard from the higher years of our studies that many composers were quite unsatisfied with this project. It’s always an adjustment coming from technical programmes like DAWs and music notation programmes, as live musicians always have to intonate and will never sound the same (most of them at least) as when you use your tuned libraries.
From what the other students told me, my expectations were relatively low. They were exceeded, but only to a certain extent. In my opinion, the level is too low for a professional project, but for a learning and practice project it is a good thing.
Tomorrow the recordings will take place, which is always something very special for the musicians. Even though the last time has been quite stressful, this project has been a lot of fun again and has brought me a bit further in my process 🙂
All my best,
Sarah