Orchestrating cinematic string quartets
arranging contemporary film music for the string quartetOrchestrating cinematic string quartets
arranging contemporary film music for the string quartetSamenvatting
The following research seeks to enlarge the string quartet repertoire by making and performing original re-orchestrations of contemporary film music. It examines the art of storytelling and how to reproduce a cinematic drama on a smaller scale – divorced from its visual component. The basis of this project is composer James Newton Howard’s score for the Hollywood blockbuster Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016), using the recorded audio from Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them – Official Motion Picture Sound Track (2016). The instrumental complexity of the soundtrack, combined with its narratively based formal structure, forward the quality of the research by posing methodical questions such as: ‘How to convey the story of the film when the instrumentation is changed and the images are gone?’, ‘how to cut and shorten a long movie score without compromising the story line?’, ‘how to replicate orchestral and electronic music on acoustic string instruments?’, and ‘how to structure an arrangement to make it stage appropriate – in terms of length, thematic treatment, formal structure and emotional curve?’. Using structural analysis, transcription, orchestrating strategies, arrangement techniques and several layers of experimentation, the outcome of this research not only assumes a unique format – by its experimental orchestration techniques, its ability to tell a full-length musical story, and its pristine preservation of the original soundtracks texture, colour and emotional impact – but also hopes to have earned its title as a cinematic string quartet. This paper outlines a systematic method for arranging, transcribing and orchestrating what is initially a 1:08:51 minutes film soundtrack into a 30-minute concert piece for string quartet, in a way that preserves the underlying story of the film and the style of the composer.
Organisatie | Fontys |
Opleiding | Master of Music |
Afdeling | Fontys Academy of the Arts |
Datum | 2018-02-19 |
Type | Master |
Taal | Engels |