week 1

In our second lesson we discussed composition for media further, starting to dig into the scenes we had each chosen. For me this was the cooking scene from Howls Moving Castle. We discussed the principles of ‘Hollywood harmony’, which is the idea of thinking solely about the feelings given by the chords rather than the technical elements such as tonality and key. While I understand the concept of this train of thought, I struggled to appropriately incorporate it, as I was working by ear. The chromatic elements and discordant notes just sounded wrong and out of key in a bad way to my ear, so I created a leading melody in my head and placed chords behind that, which then influenced the melody in return.

Starting with a midi piano in logic, I began my score in the key of A with a dorian feel. I used a lot of suspended and extended chords to reciprocate the dream like quality of the film. when Hal asks Sophie who she is, I wanted to use an uncomfortable chord within the context of the established key, so threw in a B minor 6th, which helped modulate us into F#. When Hal takes control of the cooking I wanted a sense of security and safety back so used an F# major with a very stable ionian melody over the top. The scene cuts back to Sophie looking flustered, to which I modulated down to Eb, a tritone from the starting key. I reused the minor/sus9 chord shape I used at the beginning here as a call back, but as an Eb now. I feel so far the piano score I’ve created is accurately portraying the emotions I want to convey and mirroring the themes and intention of the film.