Lacu Miseriae

Working on the Road - St. Louis Logistics:

The Nosferatu project has gone well since my last post earlier this month.  Despite the crippling heat, I haven't slowed down much, partly because my workstation is directly in front of an air conditioner.  Petra's Roland digital piano serves as instrument and desk, with my main computer sitting on it.  It is an older keyboard, and so is only equipped with MIDI I/O - no USB port. This is fine - I find usually that MIDI over USB incurs an unacceptable amount of latency in older products.  Instead, I use an EMU 0404 as an intermediary.  No perceptible latency with this USB device, and it receives the MIDI from the keyboard.  This makes improvising to the moving images on the computer directly in front of me quite easy, though I honestly hardly ever keep a complete improvisation (why, for good or bad, that I do this, could be the topic for my dissertation).  At any rate, I like the EMU because it is so small, but don't get me started on Creative Labs' terrible Snow Leopard support - despite their good quality products, they are most certainly a PC driven company.

Updates to the Score:

After the my last post, I chose to tackle the most difficult sections of the live score - the climactic final Act of Nosferatu, and the "masculinity in crisis" introduction, when we first meet the characters.  These are difficult in different ways. 

The climax of the film has a complex series of potential hit points, in my analysis, combined with a complex contour of anticipation (tension) and realization (release). 

The introduction of the film is bizarre in that the uncanny, slightly excessive frame rate, combined with Hutter's boyish, Dandy-like antics, push the envelope for what is acceptable in a male protagonist.  Of course, this view of acceptable male acting, now almost one hundred years after this film was made, is anachronistic - the actor playing Hutter was perfectly within the norms of acting at that time.  His histrionic style, as was popular then, communicates emotions more through body language, rather than through dialogue and the "grain of the voice" (Roland Barthes' essay of the same name is surely applicable outside of music, to speech in acting). 

Another section that I completed was the epic journey up Borgo pass, as it is known in Dracula (the pass is unnamed in Nosferatu).  In this section, I tip my hat to Werner Herzog (and Richard Wagner), whose 1979 rendition of the Nosferatu / Dracula tale is influential to me, despite being another anachronism in relation to the Murnau version.

I will present the three new sections of music in the order they appear in the film.  First we will see the rather plainly titled "Hutter and Ellen's Waltz," wherein the seeds of their destruction are already evident.  This is a fairly plain Waltz, without (many) metric eccentricities, because these are saved for later developments in the music and plot. 

Then, we will see Hutter's march, onward and upward to the top of "Borgo Pass."  This motoric music is thickened greatly by the use of delay lines at regular metric intervals, which give the illusion of four contrabasses and four bass clarinets. 

Finally, I will present some of the music from the final act, under the title "Lacu Miseriae," Latin for "Pit of Misery."  This will be accompanied by stills, rather than the moving image, for I do not want to give too much of the score away (come to the show in October!).  These are "double" stills - artifacts of oversampling the older, slower frame rate with the faster NTSC 29.97 fps.  They depict scene transitions that are half the pixels of one scene with half of another - and they are almost always eerie in the their implications.  There is always hidden beauty in the accidental artifacts of our technology.

Hutter and Ellen's Waltz

Borgo Pass

Lacu Miseriae

Sehnsucht

"Sehnsucht" - Credits and Introductory Intertitles (from the UCSD Nosferatu Project)
Paul Hembree, composer

About this scene and the music:

This is the first music the audience will hear in the theater.  These are the original credits for the film, in addition to the introductory intertitles, which provide the background to the story.

My favorite intertitle:  "Nosferatu: Does not this name not sound like the deathbird calling your name at midnight?  Beware you never say it - for then the pictures of life will fade to shadows, haunting dreams with climb forth from your heart and feed on your blood."

The last line is particularly telling.  Is Nosferatu a real person, a corporeal menace who murders his victims with claws and teeth?  Or is he a dream, the product of a fevered mind, haggard from disease and the aftermath of war?  Does he come from afar, a with the gaunt countenance of foreigner, or does he come from within - does he "climb forth from your heart?"

The idea that a part of Nosferatu is our own dark desires manifested is a driving force within this music.  It is constantly searching, yearning for something which it cannot find.

Shoptalk:

Though I haven't uploaded anything in the last week, I've been busy with the project.  Logistically, composing for an 84 minute film, with no dialogue, is quite difficult and exhausting.  With dialogue, foley and background noise to dodge around, music for the "talkies" is less dense.  And I'm a composer who usually writes dense concert music.

All of the harmonic material for the score is based on a core repertoire of tortured neo-expressionist harmonies that are none-the-less flexible in that they can evoke many moods.  Here, open, neutral intervals within the harmonies are emphasized, though they compress as the dire mood of the introductory intertitles sets in.  

The exercise of rarefying a core set of materials in different has been enlightening.  I've been relying on traditional techniques of variation, in addition to simply taking more time between events.

One interesting technique used in this excerpt is "pedaling" a single harmony by using smooth voice leading to traverse between several inversions of the same chord.  Of course, this more accessible within my music than in traditional tonal music, because the harmonies here predominantly have five or six distinct pitch classes in them.  These "extended chords" have nearly as many notes as regular scales in western music.  To a certain degree, this contributes to the sense that the music is perpetually modulating between keys, because the total repertoire of pitches continually shift.  I'd like to think that the smooth voice leading and directionality of the lines combined with the lack of a "home" creates a sense of yearning in the music.