The imaginative new film Iroquois Creation Story will premiere this July 2015 at Ganondagan Historic Site, and I’m honored to be their chosen film composer! Yes, it’s an imaginative film, featuring several artistic disciplines living creatively under a single film roof. In addition to the assiduous film score (which I will describe in a moment), the Ganondagan-produced dramatic short features narration by Joanne Shenandoah, choreography by Garth Fagan, drawings and artistic design by producer Peter Jemison, and animation by director Catherine Ashworth and her team at Rochester Institute of Technology. The traditional Iroquois dancers and members of Garth Fagan Dance Company were filmed against a green screen at RIT’s Gannett Hall.

For composer-ly me, the rush is forthcoming(!), because this dramatized story—with stylized artistic design, Iroquois traditional dance, modern dance, and animation—is set to premiere this July, in conjunction with Ganondagan’s annual Native American Dance & Music Festival. Thereafter, the film will be permanently featured in the new Orientation Theater of the Seneca Art and Culture Center at Ganondagan. So the “rush is on” as they say, to start work on the film score.

Welcome to Doodlebug Studio Peter! It’s an exciting week, because Ganondagan’s Peter Jemison is heading to Doodlebug Music Studio this Tuesday! Of course, the first step in the film scoring process is “spotting” the film for music, deciding where music ought to be added, and not added. It’s a laborious process for producers, directors and composers to screen and re-screen the music-less film, making those musically perceptive and intuitive decisions. So starting this week, me and Peter will spot the film over a few days of screenings, and thereafter the spotting results will be placed in my lap to compose the score.

With Iroquois Creation Story, the film scoring process is slightly more complicated than usual, by incorporating traditional Iroquois singing into the orchestra music, and by additionally purposing the film to screen live-to-picture with musicians in a concert hall setting. In the normal course, I’d compose separate film “cues” or smaller bits of music that appear in various places within the film; these cues are then recorded out of order, and after recording are re-edited back into the film’s timeline in proper order. Why? Because in the pricy recording studio “time is money,” so all the larger cues requiring lots of expensive musicians are recorded first. That way, once those larger cues are completed, and the bigger ensembles are no longer needed, a fair number of musicians are let go, off the clock. The smaller cues are then recorded with fewer required musicians, and money is saved.

My process will be different for this film however. Because the film will potentially be screened with live orchestra, I will score the film as one giant piece of music, so that all those individual cues will segue from one to another without stopping. In this way, the orchestra conductor—in the recording session as well as the live screening—will listen to a click track in headphones, so what is conducted synchronizes perfectly with the film. Film scoring is not normally done this way, but for a short 16-minute film, the intrinsic studio/musician savings would be negligible anyway, and we will achieve the dual purpose: music affixed to the film, and music for live screenings. In this way, composing the score will be a different process as an all-in-one, beginning-to-end venture. I hope to blog more about the remaining game plan as the score progresses, check back for future entries!

Some twenty years ago, I wrote a composition for the Kronos Quartet called "Turtle People" utilizing a very large water drum I had designed and constructed. The music also featured my bass quartz crystal flute and one of the Mohican creation stories. 

The drum was styled after a southwestern type of water drum, with a down-turned half gourd floating on the water surface, similar to those used by the Yaqui people. In the northeast, we use a water drum that is an up-turned bowl, that holds a small amount of water inside; a hide membrane is stretched tightly across to completely cover the opening. However, even though Mohicans are from the N.E., I decided to create a S.W. style drum for it's showy potential onstage.

I constructed a very large water drum resembling a turtle shell that could float on water. For the base, I overturned the plastic top of a gumball machine and set it on a cardboard tube. Inside the tube, I wired some lighting, which would shine upward into the clear bowl of water, illuminating the drum during the performances. It was a striking image, with the Kronos Quartet seated on all sides of the drum like around a campfire. Each musician had a long-reaching drum stick at their side, for moments when the string music required drumming. 

Digging through old boxes recently, I found this stage pass allowing me access into the theater, along with a polaroid of the turtle water drum after its initial construction. I was living in Tempe, AZ, at that time having finished my masters degree a few years prior. But I flew to New York, and performed with my quartz flute on "Turtle People," my second string quartet, with the Kronos Quartet at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in early 1995. 

Also, I was proud to share the stage with Tan Dun, who was coordinating his new "Ghost Opera" also being performed by Kronos. At that time, Kronos members were David Harrington (violin), John Sherba (violin), Hank Dutt (viola), and Joan Jeanrenaud (cello). It seems odd that 20 years has passed by already, but it's entirely rewarding to anticipate a number of new string quartets being composed by CANOE participants from Bowler and Gresham high schools, and a fellow tribal citizen of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of the Mohican Nation.