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Rochester in mid-October would not be mistaken for Hollywood, but next weekend the Eastman School of Music will bring some of the best names in film, TV, and video game music to town for the brand-new, ambitious Soundtrax Festival.
Mark Watters, the director of Eastman’s Beal Institute for Film Music and Contemporary Media, is an industry veteran whose credits include six Emmys and the music directorships of two Olympics games. He’s a natural to curate a film music festival, and he reveals that Soundtrax has been a few years in the making.
The idea for the three-day festival grew out of a conversation between Watters, who had recently joined the Eastman faculty, and Mark Bocko, director of the University of Rochester’s audio and music engineering program.
“We were discussing that Rochester is such a great area for festivals, with something going on almost every weekend,” says Watters. “It also occurred to us that there never had been an extended, multi-event film music festival in the United States. They are very popular in Europe, and the guests are often American composers, so we thought, why not have them come to an event at home, and at a time of year that shows off our area?” And indeed, the university and Eastman were “gung-ho” for the idea, in Watters’ words.
With its original history as a movie palace with live orchestra, Watters saw the Eastman School of Music is a natural fit: “After all, George Eastman created the Eastman Theatre (now Kodak Hall) to promote live music with silent films.” Now, a century later, Eastman has become a hub for the training of film music composers and music recording through the Beal Institute of Film Music and Contemporary Media, founded in 2015 with a gift from Jeff Beal, an Eastman alumnus and Oscar-nominated, Emmy-winning composer, and his wife Joan Beal, who continue to visit the institute frequently and take part in its offerings. (A new donation from the Beals is the largest individual gift made to the school in its history.)
Film music includes a number of categories, and the list of Soundtrax guest speakers and artists—a mixture of marquee names and well-regarded insiders—shows it.
To open the evening concerts, jazz great Terence Blanchard and his quintet, the E-Collective, will perform music from his scores for Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X,” “BlacKkKlansman,” and other movies with the Gateways Festival Orchestra. The most famous name in film music, John Williams, will be represented by chamber-music arrangements of some of his indelible themes from “Star Wars,” “E.T.” and other blockbuster movies.
Award-winning composers Carter Burwell, Jeff Beal, and John Corigliano will take part in discussions, along with prominent movie music historians, record producers, and arrangers. Watters himself, who reckons that almost 70 percent of his composing has been for animation, will recall his years working for Disney in a session with “my old boss”: the former head of Disney Animation, Bambi Moé. (See here for the complete Soundtrax schedule.)
An important part of contemporary media consists of musical scores for video games, and Watters invited three prominent composers from three generations (yes, video games have been around that long) to discuss their work.
“Video game music is where a lot of the excitement is for composers,” Watters explains. “Film and TV now spend less and less on music, but video games still have large music budgets for orchestras and choruses.”
He adds that the youngest of this trio of game composers, Seth Wright, was the first graduate of Eastman’s Beal Institute.
“He came here only wanting to be a video game composer, and now he’s a very successful one,” Watters says.
Wright’s output includes the award-winning “Batman: Arkham Shadow.”
The festival will end with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra in a live-to-picture presentation, playing Alexandre Desplat’s score for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2.” Classical music lovers will also be interested in seeing and hearing another live-to-picture show, “The Red Violin” (1997), whose Oscar-winning score is by Corigliano, one of America’s foremost composers.
Live-to-picture performances of favorite movies have become an important part of the repertoire (and the earnings) of American orchestras. The RPO has presented several Star Wars and Harry Potter movies in concert, and has a 50th-anniversary showing of “Jaws” slated for November.
You might think that classically trained musicians would balk at this, but, Watters says, “Orchestras like to be challenged. Learning a 90-minute score with three days of rehearsal? That is definitely a challenge, and a valuable experience. Those John Williams scores, and so many others, are incredible music, and they love it.”
For his cinematic saga of a mysterious red-varnished violin that travels across several centuries and continents, Canadian director Francois Girard hired a famous contemporary classical composer, Corigliano.
“He has only written three major film scores,” says Watters of Corigliano, “but they’re all phenomenal.” (Besides “The Red Violin,” they are “Altered States” and “Revolution.”) His imaginative score showcases a virtuoso violin soloist (Joshua Bell in the movie), and its musical styles reflect the historic periods with witty takeoffs of Vivaldi, Paganini, and other violinists.
Corigliano—one of only two composers to win an Oscar and the Pulitzer Prize (the other was Aaron Copland)—will discuss his score earlier that day with the man who’ll conduct it that night, Jeff Beal, leading the students of the Eastman Philharmonia.
The job of rehearsing the Philharmonia musicians in “The Red Violin” fell to Brett Miller, an Eastman master’s student in conducting. He found it a congenial assignment.
“I have experience in playing organ accompaniment to silent movies,” Miller says, “and I conducted the film orchestra as an undergrad at Eastman.” His preparation for “The Red Violin” included watching a conductor’s video containing markers for the musical cues and a “click track,” a kind of metronome of regular beats to guide the performers.
Often movie scores precisely parallel on-screen action (for example, in a fight scene or a chase sequence), but Miller says “there’s no Mickey-Mousing in Corigliano’s score,” using the popular term for that exact correspondence. “It’s almost entirely for strings. Much of the music is atmospheric; it allows me a little more freedom. But it always fits the action. Some of it is even eerie, ghostly, with aleatory (improvisational) effects.
“Before starting rehearsals, I just monitor the video, and practice and practice the tempos until they’re second nature. By the performance, I really can just watch the movie and conduct the music.”
Eastman professor of violin Yoojin Jang will play the extensive solo violin role—and it really is a role, since the “red violin” is the movie’s central character. “I am also practicing with a click track,” she says. “There are several sections of the movie where I do have to synchronize with the person on screen playing; that has to be exact.
“The music itself is very virtuosic,” the violinist points out, adding that Corigliano knows the instrument well; his father was a concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic. He used his “Red Violin” score as a basis for several concert and solo works, which are popular contemporary violin repertoire. (Jang has also performed one of Corigliano’s violin sonatas in Carnegie Hall.)
The Soundtrax festival demonstrates that in a fairly short time the study of film music composing, conducting, and performing, 21st century style, has been enthusiastically adopted at Eastman.
As Miller puts it, “If you’re studying to become a conductor, or to perform in a symphony orchestra, you’d better learn your Brahms symphonies and your Harry Potter film scores.”
The Eastman School of Music presents the Soundtrax Film Music Festival Oct. 16-18 at various Eastman venues. Daytime sessions are free to the public; evening concerts require tickets. Click here to see the festival schedule, and to order tickets.
Learn more about the Eastman School of Music’s Beal Institute for Film Music and Contemporary Media.
David Raymond is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer.
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