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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Exams. It’s that time again and the exams to finish the year are coming up. Fortunately, I’ve already done half of them (although I don’t know yet if I have to do a resit ๐ ), but already next Tuesday the next theory exam is waiting for me. I have never liked exams and I only know a few who are really comfortable with them.
It has to be said that my preparations this year have been really limited. One reason for this is certainly that at ArtEZ, once you have successfully completed the first year, you can no longer be kicked out of the program. But since we had our Ereprijs project shortly before and I’m still working on a project privately, I simply didn’t have the capacity for extensive preparation this year. However, it should also be mentioned that the exams in the second year are only half as many, but much higher in terms of level.
But the exams are actually not what I would like to write about today.
As I already mentioned, I am currently working on an extracurricular project. For this, I was contacted by two dancers from ArtEZ, whom I had the pleasure of meeting back in my first year in the Choco project. They had the opportunity to use a container for an art exhibition of any kind for a festival in Amsterdam.
They had chosen the theme intimacy, which they had already researched and written about in their bachelor thesis. For their artwork they wanted to have music, so they asked me if I could create 15 minutes of soundscape with a lot of self-sampled sounds. Although I’m busy at the moment, I didn’t want to miss this chance and accepted. Especially sampling gives me great pleasure and so the project was made for me ๐
At the beginning everything went very well, and since I get along very well with the two dancers, I was extremely motivated. Quickly the first versions were ready and although at first I thought it could be a challenge to fill 15 minutes with one piece, it went surprisingly easy and well.
I divided the piece into three parts and the first two parts were written very quickly. Except for the third part. Here I struggled somehow and also the dancers were not 100% satisfied with it.
After a couple of weeks we met again online to discuss the situation. There I noticed especially that it is often very difficult for ‘non-musicians’ to express what exactly they mean. They talk more about feelings and often use the wrong words, so it sometimes takes a while until you really know what they mean.
This made me realize once again how important and also difficult communication sometimes is. We probably could have done the project in a much shorter time if I had understood from the beginning exactly what they wanted in the first place. It’s also important as a composer to pull yourself out of the process sometimes. Your taste is not necessarily important, it’s often about meeting the client’s taste.
The project is still not over and I am very curious to see how everything will work together in the end and what the dancers will make of my music. In any case, it was again a very enriching process and I had a lot of fun throwing myself into it ๐
All the best,
Sarah