A Backdrop For Ellen's Premonitions

"The Sonambulist"

About this scene and the music:

I've begun to test out musical "pads" to set the mood for each major scene in the movie.  Currently these pads are mostly acousmatic, that is, they are composed of acoustic sounds that have been altered with the computer.  In the October performance, live performers will intermingle with these prerecorded sounds. 

For this scene, I'm drawing upon the book on which this film is based: Bram Stoker's Dracula.  As the protagonist Jonathan Harker (roughly the same character as Hutter in Nosferatu) lies paralyzed on a couch in a remote wing of Castle Dracula, three female vampires approach, ready to drain him of life.  Harker comments upon their voices:

"They whispered together, and then they all three laughed - such a silvery, musical laugh, but as hard as though the sound never could have come through the softness of human lips.  It was like the intolerable, tingling sweetness of water-glasses when played on by a cunning hand" (Stoker 1897, 38).

This scene does not occur in Nosferatu, because there are no female vampires in Count Orlok's castle.  However, the idea of a sweet siren song, calling over great distances seems appropriate as a back drop for Ellen's premonitions of Hutter's impending doom.

Marked Hit Points in Act I, Investigating Occult Markings

After getting some repairs rolling on equipment I use in my other research assistantship, I was able to work on marking up hit points and major transitions in Act I of Nosferatu.  In the process, I started looking for fuel for composition.  My approach to composition frequently involves puzzles from the very beginning as a way to prompt a musical response.  Though the main prompt for my musical response is the event structure of the film itself, it is handy to have other sources of Otherness to respond to.  Knock and Count Orlok both read notes, presumably sent to each other, that supposedly detail the impending real estate transaction they are going through.  However, the notes filled with arcane, occult markings.  I took stills from the film and enhanced them a bit:

 The front of Knock's note from Count Orlok.

The back of Knock's note from Count Orlok.

Count Orlok reading Knock's reply.

These are really quite striking and fairly complex.  Of great interest to me are the magic squares, the boxes with number like symbols in them.  There are also some pictograms (snakes, crosses, a skull) as well as traditional Zodiac signs, but most are probably gibberish.  But what if they aren't...

...

Well, I just spent about an hour wandering around the Internet to see if people had already figured this out.  Apparently, the set designer for Nosferatu, Albin Grau, was an occultist and friend of Aleister Crowley.  The Wikipedia article notes that the symbols on these letters resemble Enochian, the language invented/discovered by 16th century English occultists John Dee and Edward Kelley.   So there may indeed be "real magic" in the letters between Knock and Count Orlok.  The investigation will continue, later, as well as solutions to the real problem - if these are spells, how do they sound?

Summer is here - time to get to work!

Now that summer is here, it means less time writing papers, teaching or researching, and more time composing.  My main summer project is writing a film score for the 1922 silent film Nosfertu, by F. W. Murnau.  The work will be performed live in Mandeville auditorium at UCSD, on Friday, October 21st, at 8 pm.  This event is sponsored by the UCSD German Studies Department.

I'll be providing updates on the project in both this blog and the related UCSD Noseratu Project blog, which is embedded in our main website: http://www.thenosferatuproject.org/

After touring the auditorium and discussing the technical aspects of the performance with the Mandeville staff, we've decided on screening the film with digital video.  Though we were prepared to screen the film with the 35mm reels from Kino International, the problem of synchronizing the musicians with the analog reels was too much.  Kino authorized us to screen the video with a DVD, so I'm using their video and a custom sound track.

In the live performance, I'm currently planning on using amplified clean and processed acoustic sound from my four musicians, synchronized with a click track, along with some fixed and live electronic sound.


I've started the process of analyzing the film, using Final Cut Pro.  I'm making exact measurements of all of the scenes, along with the locations "hit points."  This is an interesting an somewhat agonizingly slow process of watching each scene a few times before moving on, deciding what are the important points, and marking them with FCP. 

In the process, you get a sense of what signifiers and signifieds lie hidden in the composition of the shots and in the non-verbal cues of the actors.  For instance, the introduction exhibits signs of "masculinity in crisis," indicated by Hutter's insane, childish antics.  Furthermore, in many of the early shots, Ellen stands almost a foot taller than Hutter because of some kind of step she is standing on near the window sill.  This height difference is eventually reversed as Hutter is packing his clothes to leave for Transylvania, but his boyish face betrays the manliness of his sudden embrace of Ellen.


Though the crisis mentioned above is interesting, it is difficult to make scoring decisions based on it.  What is maybe more important is the broad "going off to war" feeling of the entire introduction, while Hutter is still in Wisborg.  This film was shot two years after the end of World War I, and three years after the 1918 flu epidemic hobbled much of the German military.  In the film, we see the obvious connection to the plague, but less so to military conflict.  For more on the connection between World War I and film in the Weimar Republic, check out Shell Shock Cinema.

UCSD Nosferatu Project

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