About the Composer

As long as I’m kvelling about other bloggers, today I notice that Fredösphere shares my enthusiasm for Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest, both the film and the score.

Fred’s comparison with Philip Glass is valid, and that opening montage is a great combination of music and image.

I first encountered that “Overture” when I was in my teens. I was sitting at a piano playing some sort of noodley-noodley ersatz Philip Glass thingy, when a friend pointed out that it sounded just like the North By Northwest “Overture”, so I had to check it out.

Does anyone know if there’s a study score available, by the way? Some other Bernard Herrmann scores are out there, but I haven’t seen this one. I once did a fairly meticulous mental transcription of the basic material, but I’d love to see the real thing.

In today’s San Francisco Chronicle there’s a little profile of Hollywood film composer Hans Zimmer. It looks like I’ve never seen any of the film he’s scored so far: “Gladiator”, “Batman Begins”, “The Last Samurai”, “The Thin Red Line”…. shrug.

So, I have no opinion of him one way or the other as a composer, but apparently he came to a wise conclusion around using computer-generated melodies based on the Fibonacci Sequence as a basis for the score of “The Da Vinci Code”

“… I realized I can’t get away with a mathematical game because I’ll be found out. So I stopped writing the superficial riddle stuff… on the surface, ‘Da Vinci Code’ is a thriller — no more no less — “

Way to go, Hans! Nothing against the Fibonacci Sequence as a basis for musical composition. Debussy, Bartók and many others used it, and I wouldn’t pick a fight with those guys, but they didn’t do it with computers.

Also, it would strike me as a little weird to use computer-generated Fibonacci fodder in a dramatic work, such as a film score, where you already have an inherent basis for musical composition: the drama!

In 2004 I wrote the score for Shakespeare’s Merchant, an independent film adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. The film is still making its way through the process of festival submissions, etc., but I’m so proud of the score that I’ve taken it upon myself to arrange for it to be released on CD.

It’s a short movie with an epic score. The director wanted a lot of underscoring, and so in many places the music resembles opera, where the orchestra frequently carries the subtext and the emotional weight. I frequently accuse myself of being derivative, but this is some of my most original work, (although any listener who’s a Sondheim fan will hear that influence). One of my jobs was to help set a scene where people are routinely nasty to each other, and so it’s mostly a dark, tense score with some lyrical and humorous moments.

The CD is available now at CD Baby, and will soon be on Amazon as well. Sound clips can be heard on the film’s web site. (Click “Soundtrack”)

I thought I’d share something weird. Although I’m a little old to be horsing around with mobile phone ringtones, last year I did just that. Just for the heck of it, I took a tiny excerpt from a film score I’d recently finished, and created a ringtone out of it. I suppose I just wanted to see if I could do it. Turns out it’s a simple matter of placing any mp3 on a web server where a WAP-enabled phone can retrieve it. Go know.

Anyway, I’m still using it on my phone. It’s very gentle and soothing, whereas I’ve never heard another ringtone that didn’t irritate the bejeezus out of me.

So, have a listen. (Picture it repeating until you answer, of course.)

Please be my guest and download it to your phone from http://www.aboutthecomposer.com/audio/mk.mp3

Last year I composed the score for an independent film adaptation of The Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare’s Merchant finally premiered at the Philadelphia International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in July.

The film hasn’t been widely reviewed, but here are two that I’ve found; one terrible, and one not too bad. Neither mentions the music. So, what else is new.

• The terrible one. Actually, this is a “user comment” on the film’s IMDB page. It’s not very thorough, but he/she has some valid points, particularly about the sound quality. We’re hoping for another round of audio cleanup.
• The not-too-bad one From FilmThreat.com. At least it recognizes Bruce Cornwall’s performance as Shylock, and director/screenwriter Paul Wagar’s adaptation of the text.