For this scoring assignment you can pick the video of your choice. The video must be a minimum of 2 minutes in length. You can use the following websites to select your video. Let Mr. Rosner know your choice. All sound must be created. No use of copyrighted material will be accepted. Any voices that are needed must be overdubbed. Use sound fx and other learned tools to create a professional final product.
Your final project must be turned in with a cue sheet on May 30th. Fill the sheet out completely for a music changes. Download the file below and print off as many as you need.
The image of brooding, winged ghouls wreaking havoc on a mountain village under cover of night has terrified generations of young children in Walt Disney’s Fantasia. Inspired by Russian legend, Mussorgsky’s tone poem depicts the dark ritual of a witches’ sabbath. Sadly, it was never performed in his lifetime, but the arrangement by his friend Rimsky-Korsakov has become a concert blockbuster. The version used in Fantasia was orchestrated by Leopold Stokowski.
The vampires in tabloids and teen novels today have nothing on the 19th-century European variety. The creatures of the night enjoyed a brief vampire craze in theatre and opera of the early 1800s, well before Bram Stoker’s Dracula emerged on the scene. Heinrich August Marschner’s grand opera Der Vampyr (1828) is based on a fragment of a novel by Byron, which was completed by the poet’s doctor. Lord Ruthven Earl of Marsden, a newly created vampire, has asked the Vampire Master for another year on earth before being dragged into hell for eternity. This he is granted, provided he can sacrifice three young ladies by the following midnight. Marschner’s sinister chromatic writing and chorus of witches and hobgoblins is enough to put Twilight to shame.
Saint-Saëns’s creepy 1874 tone poem is a Halloween classic, depicting the revelry of the Grim Reaper at midnight every year at this time. With his cursed fiddle, Death summons the dead from their graves to kick up their heals until dawn. In this vintage Disney animation, listen out for the xylophone sound of rattling bones.
Even without Hitchcock’s horrific shower scene burned on our retinas, Bernard Herrmann’s massed string dissonances in his score for the 1960 film Psycho instantly create an atmosphere of fear and disturbance.
In the final movement of Symphonie fantastique (1830), described by Berlioz as a “diabolical orgy”, a lovelorn artist who has attempted suicide by opium poisoning (but not with a lethal dose as intended) has a tripped-out vision of witches, sorcerers and monsters assembled at his funeral.
Bartòk’s haunting, strangely delicate “night music” in the third movement of this 20th-century masterpiece is so atmospheric and suspenseful that Stanley Kubrick used it in the soundtrack to his horror film The Shining.Listen out for the unusual timpani glissandi effect (the low, other-worldly sliding bass) that underscores the unsettling mood.
For some listeners terrified of atonal music, almost anything Schoenberg wrote could have made this list. But the German composer’s one-act opera Erwartung (Expectation), an extended monologue for solo soprano, is one of his most confronting, intensely paranoid psychological experiences. A lone woman wanders through the woods at night searching for her lover. When she stumbles upon a tree trunk that she believes to be his dead body, a tirade of fears and emotions is unleashed. At the cruel climax of the work, she discovers the real body. It’s no walk in the park.
The harp isn’t usually associated with fear and death, most often relegated to music of a “nymphs and shepherds” variety. André Caplet, who composed many of the loveliest works for harp in the repertoire, took the instrument out of its comfort zone with some incredibly ethereal, chilling music based on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Mask of the Red Death. In the original tale, a prince holds a lavish masked ball, where he confronts a mysterious figure wearing a ghoulish mask and bloodstained robe. When the prince falls dead, his other guests forcibly remove the mask to reveal no solid form underneath: it is the spirit of the “Red Death” plague come to claim them all.
Bach’s towering monument of organ music, with its deep sense of foreboding, will forever be associated with imagery of spooky old castles and a phantom’s lair…
A drugged artist witnesses his own death in a vivid dream, in which he has killed his beloved and faces execution for the crime. He watches as an onlooker outside of himself as the guillotine blade falls (a single G-minor chord) and his own head bounces down the steps and into the waiting basket (a series of descending pizzicato notes).
As we heard in Bartòk’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta,visionary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick had a knack for finding the most haunting classical music to accompany his bold imagery. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, György Ligeti’s Requiem, with its clamouring, massed voices and dissonant microtonal clusters, captures the terrifying vastness and emptiness of the universe.
MUSIC TECH I
Music Tech I introduces students to the advancing world of music creation, manipulation and production. Students will begin by learning the fundamentals of what sound is, what it's properties are and how we can manipulate sound. Students will then create multi-track recordings and learn about live sound production. This is a semester long course will include training in Audacity, GarageBand, AudioTool, music notation, basic equipment setup and use in live sound production. When the course is complete, students will be able to compose, record, manipulate, and produce a final audio product utilizing music industry standard hardware and software.
You can utilize this website by finding course materials below. As the semester progresses, student projects will be added for everyone to get a glimpse of what the average high school student will be able to produce.
Students need to have the following for class:
A good set of headphones. - Look for ones that respond to the full range of human hearing. (20Hz -20,000HZ)
A flash drive (8 GB minimum)
Notebook
Folder
Pen & Pencil
Students will be more productive if they have the following at home. (not required to complete course):
A computer with 4 GB of Ram
An internet connection
A Midi Keyboard (49 keys is usually sufficient) Most now have USB connectors only, older keyboards will need an interface.