Go beyond your comfort zone

Go beyond your comfort zone

I really enjoy the talk by Jonathan Bailey Holland on Monday. The works he presented to us are really diverse. I learn a lot from all of them. From his website, I read that Jonathan likes to get inspiration from classical, jazz, hip hop. I totally agree with it. I think being an composer, especially as a film composer myself. It is important to have a wide range of style in your portfolio and never stop exploring the other genres and try to go beyond your comfort zone.

The first piece Jonathan shows us reminds me of the composer Alfred Schnittke, who are famous for polystylism. I love how Jonathan adapts different styles in the piece. He blends the atonal and tonal contents smoothly. The orchestration is colorful. There are some certain degrees of comedy aspect in the piece, which is quite different from the other stuff he shows in the class.

The second piece, Radius Ensemble (2015) is my favorite one. He explains the concept of incorporating something in reality into the piece, by not using the dissonance sound. He adapts some excerpts from the famous speech into the music. For instance, there is a talk from Obama, and some excerpts from Eric Garner “I Can’t Breath”. In terms of musical aspect, the first section is quite dissonance and emotional. The violin, cello, oboe, clarinet and piano plays the prolong melody in the piece. Later, when the voice comes in, the other instruments hold subtlety or either disappear. It reminds me of the music in the film, the music always become lighter when there is a dialogue. There is one moment in the piece I particularly enjoy. When the sound of the audio comes in at the second time. It is distorted and unclear. The bassoon, string and piano are trying to match with its sound, by plucking and doing over-pressure on strings and performing other extended techniques. This create an interesting interaction between the ensemble and recording audio. It makes me think of how my music should interact with the dialogue/sound effect in the film. There is diegetic and nondiegetic sound in the movie. Diegetic refers to a sound from the movie itself; in the opposite, non Diegetic sound means the sound from the outside, such as a soundtrack. In some cases, non diegetic sounds can transfer to the diegetic sound. There is no clear boundary between the two. For instance, the music box (presenting on the film) is playing a tune. Later, the tune from the music box becomes to the soundtrack and turns into the main theme of the film.

The third piece, is inspired by poems. There is lots of great energy in it. I like how the winds are interlock with each other and how the music is moving forward by using the same justure. There is a narrator in the piece who read the poems. Jonathan mentioned that the narrator don’t read music. I think it is important to keep this in mind, in the writing process and rehearsal.