Scoring for film and theatre play : original music written with a narrative approach

Abstract

‘Story’ is one of the most popular, historical, and influential media that human beings have ever used to pass on wisdom, messages, and value that the storyteller has acquired or treasured. Many artists work as storytellers by applying their art languages with a narrative approach in delivering a story effectively and artistically. This thesis documents my creative approach as a composer as well as a storyteller in interdisciplinary collaboration. In this artist research, I conducted theoretical and practical research to investigate how a composer can create and apply original music so that it functionally and aesthetically serves a storytelling purpose in a narrative film or theatre play. The two art forms belong to two different kinds of performing arts; they are delivered as recorded performance and live performance, respectively. By studying how music works within these two art forms, my research provides insight into a composer’s working process, considerations, and constraints. These findings may also be applied to different interdisciplinary art forms, such as dance theatre. In this research, I fully participated in the whole process of producing the original soundtracks for five feature films, two short films, and three theatre plays. My works include finding out the suitable musical-narrative approach by communicating with my collaborators, conducting various studies, and producing the soundtracks that best served these projects. For some of these projects, I collaborated with another composer. However, the examples discussed in this thesis were chosen from four hours of music produced by myself alone. The package of this thesis comprises two physical components: [1] a written thesis that explains the theoretical framework and creative approach that I applied to produce the original soundtracks and [2] a Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) storing multiple audio and audio-visual files. Instead of showing the video clips of those films that are publicly accessible, most of these files are original material that illustrates how different versions of the soundtracks were created in the production process. Some files are the non-archived soundtracks for the theatre plays, and some are demonstration videos showing my programming sequences for various musical cues. All these supplementary files are clearly referred to in the written thesis, which is further enhanced by musical examples, tables, charts, pictures, still-shots from the performance, and screenshots of digital-audio workstation (DAW). For practical reasons, digital copies of the publicly accessible films and soundtracks are not included in this thesis package, but precise time references are provided in the text to allow the reader to locate the specific parts of a film easily. However, readers are highly recommended to watch the entire film in order to appreciate the artistic values in context.