# Aletsch glacier - composition between film music and "art music"



## verandai (Dec 10, 2021)

Hi,

I know that the title seems a bit provocative 

But this goal stated in the title is what I tried to achieve with my new composition:

using film-music-patterns to support the images of the video
But also to break free of these patterns and develop the inspirations I received from the mountain bird (second video)
Of course in comparison to real film music composing, I had more options to choose from, as I wasn't as restrained as with a finalized movie cut. I had 2 dimensions to work with: the music and the images. Sometimes I also changed the images or their timings if they didn't fit the current progress of the music.

There are some places though, where it would have been too time-consuming to select new fitting pictures, so I left some kind of quirky musical transitions unchanged:

timecode 4:34
timecode 4:49
also I would have prefered to elaborate the ending a bit more
I wrote the score with _Sibelius _and exported the sound with _NotePerformer_. I know that some DAW-enthusiasts will complain about the sound, but my goal here was to export the sound as well as possible, but without postprocessing. Of course, I had to do some hacks in the score, to lead NotePerformer to the sound I wanted (different phrasings, different dynamics etc). But altogether I'm happy with the result!

Here are the videos - have fun watching! Best regards, Alex


*Aletsch glacier (ski mountaineering slideshow): *







*Inspiration from a mountain bird *


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## verandai (Dec 10, 2021)

Some more infos about the film-music-patterns and the other parts. Sometimes it's not clear which column the passage belongs to, but I gave my best ;-)
Maybe it helps a little to understand the differences between film music and the rest - as I did something in between.
Some of these points I just did by intuition and I made sense of them afterwards while writing:


*timecode**film-music patterns / moments**other parts*0:00-0:193 motifs of the mountain bird are presented. I'll use mainly the third one for further development0:23upwards scale representing the climb up the stairs0:34first entry of the brass, accompanying a scene with the vast concordia place0:46the bird motif repeated by the horn, illustrating the great Aletschhornfirst development of 3rd bird motif0:58-1:12change of atmosphere as we get closer to our first key passage (the Fieschersattel). Slowdown of the musical movement to increase the tension1:13typical pattern for the climb to our first "crux". But I wanted to make the pattern a bit more creative, so I tried to find something interesting in 7/8 time2:01-2:08repeating the bird motif with the oboe at our first summit (2:03)trying to switch gently from 7/8 to 4/42:26after the martial-like passages, I wanted to change to a sweeter atmosphere. I chose the right pictures so that it matched together with the end of our first tour2:37playing the 3rd bird motif in a different atmosphere (major)2:53transitioning between the previous atmosphere to a more jazzy vibe2:57for our next ascent I wanted a different vibe than at the first ascent. I chose a short jazzy passage with a walking baseline2:59first bird motif in a variation (first 3 notes of clarinet)3:14developing the jazz-motif with the flute3:22mixed feelings as we're getting to the more challenging climbing parts3:31music gets more optimistic as we're doing well in these parts and are getting closer to the summit3:38first bird motif in another variation (trumpet)3:43-4:00first peak moment as we reach the summit4:01-4:26a kind of a coda, only musical development between 4:01 and 4:26 (reference to the pictures is incidental)4:27musical resolution as we get close to our last summit4:34combination of the peak motive (3:43) and the third bird motif (variation), in another time (3/4) and the subdominant key, as we see our main summit (Finsteraarhorn) from far away4:52I wanted to integrate the original 3rd bird motif in the 3/4 - time. Of course it sounds a bit humoristic in this waltz-style, but I still like it ;-)5:10I've managed to match the 3/4-rythm quite well to the brushstrokes of our route, but it got a little off-sync during the uploadlast recurrence of the 3rd bird motif (horn)5:19I would have liked to elaborate the ending more, but here it would have been too much work to sync all the route images again


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