Sehnsucht

"Sehnsucht" - Credits and Introductory Intertitles (from the UCSD Nosferatu Project)
Paul Hembree, composer

About this scene and the music:

This is the first music the audience will hear in the theater.  These are the original credits for the film, in addition to the introductory intertitles, which provide the background to the story.

My favorite intertitle:  "Nosferatu: Does not this name not sound like the deathbird calling your name at midnight?  Beware you never say it - for then the pictures of life will fade to shadows, haunting dreams with climb forth from your heart and feed on your blood."

The last line is particularly telling.  Is Nosferatu a real person, a corporeal menace who murders his victims with claws and teeth?  Or is he a dream, the product of a fevered mind, haggard from disease and the aftermath of war?  Does he come from afar, a with the gaunt countenance of foreigner, or does he come from within - does he "climb forth from your heart?"

The idea that a part of Nosferatu is our own dark desires manifested is a driving force within this music.  It is constantly searching, yearning for something which it cannot find.

Shoptalk:

Though I haven't uploaded anything in the last week, I've been busy with the project.  Logistically, composing for an 84 minute film, with no dialogue, is quite difficult and exhausting.  With dialogue, foley and background noise to dodge around, music for the "talkies" is less dense.  And I'm a composer who usually writes dense concert music.

All of the harmonic material for the score is based on a core repertoire of tortured neo-expressionist harmonies that are none-the-less flexible in that they can evoke many moods.  Here, open, neutral intervals within the harmonies are emphasized, though they compress as the dire mood of the introductory intertitles sets in.  

The exercise of rarefying a core set of materials in different has been enlightening.  I've been relying on traditional techniques of variation, in addition to simply taking more time between events.

One interesting technique used in this excerpt is "pedaling" a single harmony by using smooth voice leading to traverse between several inversions of the same chord.  Of course, this more accessible within my music than in traditional tonal music, because the harmonies here predominantly have five or six distinct pitch classes in them.  These "extended chords" have nearly as many notes as regular scales in western music.  To a certain degree, this contributes to the sense that the music is perpetually modulating between keys, because the total repertoire of pitches continually shift.  I'd like to think that the smooth voice leading and directionality of the lines combined with the lack of a "home" creates a sense of yearning in the music.