I usually find that when writing music to accompany text or image, the pre-existing event structure of the foreign material liberates me from my normal formal predilections. I've noticed that in all text settings that I've completed over the last decade, the predetermined event structure of each has allowed me to experiment much more freely with musical material that can best fit the text at any given moment. It is not that the music doesn't follow its own inner logic, although a disjunct non-narrative may occasionally call for such music. However, evocations within the text often smooth over implausibilities in the coherent succession of musical events.
Once such example is found in my collaboration with the journalist-percussionist Jennie Doris, in which she recalls walking through the House on the Rock, a (post-)modernist architectural curiosity in Wisconsin. The complexities of the house itself and its contents within the narrative lend allowed me to transition between high modernist serialism, minimalism, and quotation of even older styles (including a mechanically played rendition of Ravel's Bolero gone hay-wire).
However, when grappling with text or film, I usually find it best to read as much as possible on the reception and criticism surrounding the work. There are obviously many readings of a text, and I usually decide on one that resonates with my perception of a work, and run with it. I've gravitated towards older structuralist interpretations generally, an attitude which I think is quite normal among composers in the twentieth and twenty-first century (for instance, Karlheinz Stockhausen and George Crumb explicitly structure their works around personal mythologies).
That neo-mythologism is a common impulse among concert music composers in the Western Classical tradition is no surprise - our tradition evolved from practice within the church, and our music continues to be produced for reception in a contemplative environment, the concert hall (maybe this is different for composers who grew up in a musical theater or opera context?). As an aside - I noticed a palpable concentration of this "contemplative mood" when hearing my friend Andy Halladay's oratorio performed in his church, merely due to the environment and probably the expected social conditions of such an event.
Post-enlightenment, and particularly in academia, where concert music composers in the US usually work and hail from, the mythological power vacuum left vacant by the retreating Christian church has been filled with composer's personal mythologies. Indeed, I think most artworks reveal at least something of their creators "world models." Consider George Crumb's circular scores - they evoke a planetary sense belonging, something no doubt on the minds of the public when he wrote many of his works in the 1960's.
All of this is a preface to the following: a bibliography on Nosferatu, which will hopefully become annotated, and grow to include general topics of Weimar Cinema and vampire mythology, as the project continues until next fall. As I mentioned previously, readings of a text (and isn't everything just text, including film?) are vital to spurning the creation of a score. Many thanks to German film and literature scholar Petra Watzke for this list:
Lotte Eisner: The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt. ISBN-10: 0520257901 / ISBN-13: 978-0520257900
Thomas Elsaesser: Weimar Cinema and After: Germany's Historical Imaginary. ISBN-10: 041501235X / ISBN-13: 978-0415012355
Noah Isenberg, Ed: Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era. ISBN-10: 0231130554 / ISBN-13: 978-0231130554
Siegfried Kracauer: From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film ISBN-10: 0691115192 / ISBN-13: 978-0691115191
Eric Weitz: Weimar Germany: Promi se and Tragedy. ISBN-10: 0691140960 / ISBN-13: 978-0691140964
Kaes, Anton. Shell Shock Cinema. Weimar culture and the wounds of the war. 2009
