Nothing can ever be complete, these are my notes on what I could not do.
Inspiration: La Rabbia
This project completely pushed me out of my comfort zone. I knew the direction I wanted to go in: I was inspired by the third movement of Luciano Berio's Sinfonia: a musical collage joining composition with writing as he picks selected sections of various pieces to make an enchanting contemplation about the role of an audience (link). It is peppered with wonderful quotes from Beckett and protest graffiti, and Joyce.
Have I mixed sounds before? Technically, yes. Was it any good? Absolutely not. For my high school physics class, I took the longest route possible to turn wine glass playing into a rendition of Saint-Saëns' Le cygne, using a patchwork of individual notes rather than a complete performance, much like Frankenstein's monster (granted, it does have meme quality) (link). I am also no stranger to using classical music to drive home a message, having created a drinking PSA to the tune of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana (link).
With these projects, I had at least been introduced to video-making tools, and decided to undertake the rather involved process of creating music without understanding any theory for my final translation.
To begin, I returned to the pieces I knew and loved (Florence Price's Violin Concerto and Pamela Z's "Attention"), and found new ones to add to the mix (Marian Anderson's "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" and Silvestre White Violin Concerto). I combined all of these using Adobe Audition, wanting them to be the dominant pieces while the background holds older composers with a mutated version of Bach's Fugues and sounds from Bryn Mawr's campus.
Origin of the story:
Catalogued in the Pennsylvania State Library Reference Collections 1745 edition (link).
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