Category: music composition

Exclusive: Black Panther 2 composer Ludwig Göransson explains his extensive research process to create Mayan-inspired music for the MCU’s Talokan.

Composer Ludwig Göransson breaks down the intensive research process he went through to create a score based on what Mayan music could have sounded like for Black Panther 2. While preparing for the first Black Panther, Göransson traveled to Africa to research different instruments and sounds. Goransson has created a truly unique musical identity for Wakanda, balancing the traditional superhero style with a score that draws clear inspiration from authentic African music. Thanks to this, the musical identity of Black Panther and Wakanda has become some of the most recognizable in the MCU.

In Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Göransson has a whole new corner of the MCU to play in as he brings Talokan to life musically. During an exclusive interview with Screen Rant, Göransson talked about finding the sound for Namor and the underwater kingdom of Talokan. The composer revealed the influence of Mayan culture and his journey to discovering what Mayan music would sound like, including the heartbreaking truth about what happened to Mayan music many centuries ago.

[When] coming up with the sound for Namor and the Talokans, it’s a completely new world, and we’re spending a lot of time with them. We spend a lot of time seeing their world for the first time. When I read the script, I talked to Ryan, and he told me that the story and people are very heavily inspired by Mayan culture. That was extremely inspiring for me because I was able to travel to Mexico and to Mesoamerica and start working.

I wanted to record Mayan music, but I quickly realized that that music is gone. It was forcibly erased 500 years ago; there’s no traces. They don’t know how the music was performed; there’s no sheet music. There’s no musicians from generation to generation. It’s gone.

So, I started working with some music archeologists in Mexico City that specialize in recreating some of the instruments. They found some of the instruments in some of the graves. They’ve seen the codex, they see what type of instruments they’re [using], like seashells and turtle shells. We started recording and re-imagining what the Mayans’ sound could have been like, so that was the interesting part of [making] the music for Namor.

Related: How Powerful Is Namor Compared To Thanos?

Black Panther: Wakanda’s Music Sheds Light On Mayan Culture

Göansson’s commitment to thorough research has been a major part of his ability to compose such impactful scores. The discovery that he was unable to find or hear any truly authentic Mayan music because all the records were destroyed is a tragedy. Göransson’s work with music-based archeologists is fascinating as they worked together to recreate what the music in Ancient Maya could have sounded like.

This destruction of history and art may have influenced the music and potentially the story itself, however. With Coogler taking inspiration from Indigenous Central and South America when creating Talokan, the history of colonization is likely ingrained in the fictional nation’s DNA. This estimation of what Mayan music sounds like also brings a new layer to Göransson’s score, as he found instruments that were likely used but had to fully re-imagine what the music could be. The inclusion of seashells and turtle shells works twofold by using authentic instruments and incorporating the underwater element of Talokan into the score itself.

Talokan is a nation hidden from the surface world in the MCU, with Namor leading his people and protecting them in part through isolation. Musically, Wakanda is a nation that was never colonized, while Talokan’s history is a bit murkier. Wakanda and Talokan mirror each other in many compelling ways, including isolating themselves to protect their resources and way of life. Whether the nation’s isolation is because it avoided colonization altogether or because the country was targeted in the past, infusing lost music into the theme of a hidden city brings a new depth to the score of Black Panther 2.

Next: Namor’s Mutant Confirmation Means Big Things For His MCU Future

Ballston Lake composer John Carroll has a habit of jumping into new musical territory.

That’s perhaps especially true with his latest work, called “Troubleshooting,” which will premiere on Friday. It’s a micro-opera that will be performed by members of The Quarry Project, a group that includes Areli Mendoza-Pannone, soprano; Robert Frazier, bass-baritone; and Mark Evans, piano.

Clocking in at around half an hour, it depicts a phone call between a lonely, socially dysfunctional young adult (Sam) and a volunteer social worker (Rory) dealing with similar issues. It captures some of the loneliness and struggles that neurodivergent people can face when trying to navigate social situations. It reflects Carroll’s experience as someone with autism spectrum disorder.

“This opera has more or less one goal; to [help] people who struggle with those issues not feel alone,” Carroll said.

The SUNY Schenectady and SUNY Fredonia graduate started working on the piece while studying musical theater writing at New York University earlier this year. Carroll had met Evans, Frazier and Mendoza-Pannone as a student at SUNY Schenectady and wanted to write a piece for the group to take to work through at Avaloch Farm Music Institute, a New Hampshire-based residency program.

At the time, Carroll was itching to compose a dramatic piece with lyrics because while at NYU’s graduate program he’d been strictly studying composition.

“Something about my program, which is a little unusual, is that it is very segregated between composers and lyricists. You are selected as one or the other regardless if you can do both. And for the entirety of your two years there, you’re pretty much relegated to that position,” Carroll said, adding “I was getting this sort of bubbling interest in writing words, despite not really having much experience doing so for music.”

It took about a month to ruminate on the storyline and then another few weeks to write the piece. It’s a stripped-back work and Carroll purposefully made it so that any performer, regardless of gender or vocal capacity, could sing each of the parts.

“I want anybody to be able to sing this. The message of the opera is already quite universal, I wanted it to be in the hands of as many people as possible and accessible to as many people as possible,” Carroll said.

Along with that, Carroll designed the piece to have flexible performance needs.
“A stereotype of opera is that it is lavishly expensive and impractical to perform,” Carroll said.

“Troubleshooting” is the opposite. There are no opulent costumes and the only set piece is a phone.

The format of the micro-opera, where two performers sing back and forth on the phone, was also true to Carroll’s experiences.

“The majority of the revelations that I came to [and] that I put in the opera to the best of my ability, happened with conversations with friends over the phone. The phone call aspect of it is very true to my life,” Carroll said.

The Quarry Project and Carroll started rehearsing the piece at Avaloch over the summer and have fine-tuned it since then.

Carroll noted that while the piece is personal, listeners often find something in it that they can relate to.

“Whenever I show it to people, every time, there’s always been a sense of ‘I feel like that’s me. You wrote about me to a certain degree.’ And that’s so validating because that’s the reason why I wrote it,” Carroll said. “This is the first time I’ve written something that I feel [is] helping people on some level or validating them. It makes me feel like this piece is bigger than myself.”

“The fact that it moves people on some level and makes them feel like their issues are being recognized . . . the piece is automatically a success,” Carroll added.

It premieres at 7:30 p.m. tomorrow in the Taylor Auditorium at SUNY Schenectady.

The Quarry Project will also perform Brett Wery’s “Quarry Songs.”

For more information visit sunyschenectady.edu.

Categories: Entertainment, Life and Arts, Life and Arts, Saratoga Springs

SAN DIEGO (AP) — California voters on Tuesday approved a ballot measure backed by a celebrity lineup that included Barbra Streisand and Los Angeles-born rappers will.i.am and Dr. Dre that could pump as much as $1 billion a year from the state’s general fund into arts education.

The measure had faced no organized opposition, a rarity. With about a quarter of the ballots counted, Proposition 28 won handily with 75.8% of the vote. It will require the state to provide the equivalent of 1% of California’s state funding for public schools from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade for the arts.

Supporters said it would benefit public school programs that go beyond the traditional art, theater, dance and music classes to include graphic design, computer coding, animation, music composition and script writing.

Despite California’s vibrant arts and music scene that has given the world everything from Hollywood to surf rock, fewer than a quarter of its public schools have a full-time arts or music education teacher, and some schools offer no such classes at all.

The measure will send 30% of the earmarked money to low-income school districts, which have a large number of Black and Latino students.

It was backed by everyone from Austin Beutner, the former superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, to the Los Angeles County Business Federation.

Some critics had expressed concerns about earmarking more money from the state’s general fund when California faces many other challenges, from homelessness to wildfires.

Beth Orton’s “Weather Alive” is an album bustling with firsts.

Orton has been a working musician for nearly 30 years. In that time she has distinguished herself as a ruminative folk artist whose “two-finger ditties” (her phrase) are soulfully strummed, but “Weather Alive” is Orton’s first album to make copious use of the piano. It is also her first album to be released in conjunction with Partisan Records. It is her first album, really, to take life on life’s terms.

Humanity’s rougher edges typically hover in the foreground of an Orton composition. With “Weather Alive,” Orton has done something out of character: she’s made a record that is self-content, self-affirming and hopeful. The title track in particular is a glowy dreamscape, a paean to simple and in this case bodily pleasures. Orton nails the physical sensations of drinking in gorgeous scenery.

“Some people write songs to people or about people,” Orton says. “With this record, I wrote to something much more intangible. It was a sensory record. I would write to that light — I would write to that feeling when the light burst through the trees.”

Though Orton, in concert later this week at the Irish American Heritage Center, is rightly admired as a poetess of British folk-rock, her closest analog might be a poetess of Francophone cinema: Claire Denis. “Weather Alive” has a good deal in common with Denis’ film “Friday Night,” in which two Parisians — strangers — converge for an unplanned tryst never to be repeated again. Both the film and the album are examples of delicate, perfectly appointed minimalism. Both revel in a kind of hushed intimacy. By coincidence, Orton studied drama and has worked as an actress (most recently in the festival fave “Light Years”).

Orton’s approach is not wily or gamesmanlike: “I’ve never contrived a plan,” she says. “Like, ‘Oh, this is what my next move will be! How clever!’ I’ve never thought it through in that respect.” Still, the singer’s willingness to confound preconceptions has always been apparent; it proved especially eventful in the last album cycle. There was much furor over “Kidsticks,” Orton’s 2016 record, an experiment in syncopated pop music that left some listeners feeling bushwhacked. Orton describes Kidsticks as “very off-the-cuff.”

This time it’s different. “Weather Alive” plays out much as you’d expect from the inaugural single, which incidentally is titled “Friday Night.” Orton calls the album “really meditative … I was really engaging with this idea of peace.” Her vocals are craggy but comforting, her arrangements cavernous (especially the horn and woodwind fanfare that dominates “Haunted Satellite”) but sublimely mellow.

“Weather Alive” was a happy accident. It may not have materialized but for a fateful stroll in Camden, the eternally bohemian North London neighborhood. Orton was stopped in her tracks by an upright piano, a rinky-dink hand-me-down that even the shopkeeper cautioned against buying.

“He had this one piano at the back of the room — it just had the most beautiful warmth and a really lovely resonance,” Orton says. “I was like, ‘How about this one?’ And he says, ‘Oh, no, you don’t want that! That’s my grandmum’s piano.’” Orton persisted and, well, the rest is history.

Back then Orton was living with Camden friends and trying to make sense of the carnage around her, which seemed to multiply with ever greater velocity. Britain was in a bad way politically speaking; then came the COVID-19 outbreak. According to Orton, “Weather Alive” is suggestive of “a very particular moment and very particular circumstances.”

“I got really quite bitter about it,” Orton says of COVID-19. “The fact that people couldn’t pull together on this one thing.” Britons are famous for their “wartime spirit,” as Orton calls it, but the virus was too big a logjam even for these historically resilient isles.

Given its origins, “Weather Alive” has a remarkable sense of equilibrium; this record is utterly at peace with itself. How did Orton pull it off? She found communion in her local music scene.

Her first recruit was Tom Skinner, a London rhythm guru known for his work with The Smile, a jazzified Radiohead spinoff. Orton’s instructions for Skinner — she wanted something “percussive” and “imaginative” — were elliptical, even vague, but it didn’t take long for the pair to make concrete progress. Their formative sessions resulted in “Fractals,” one of the album’s rockingest, boomingest tunes, as well as the fetching album closer “Unwritten.” Also involved at this stage was Skinner’s friend, the Mercury Prize-winning Tom Herbert.

Orton’s operation later expanded to include saxophonist Alabaster dePlume, whose part-time pursuits are too plenteous to list here, and guitar wonk Grey McMurray. Yet much of the heavy lifting was done by Orton and Orton alone. “Weather Alive” was her first stab at self-production, which for any musician without prior experience is a meteoric event. She met the challenge with unstinting focus (“If I hadn’t seen this through, I would have been really demoralized,” Orton says). It helped that Orton, who had taken courses on the weedier, more technical aspects of songcraft, was probably more learned than the average newbie.

“There were no drawbacks,” she says. “I had incredible raw material, beautiful players, beautiful songs. I just dug in and it became this incredibly creative, interesting experiment.”

Orton is too modest. Her “experiment” is in fact a feast for the senses, a tranquil and radiant mood piece; folk-rock meets cinéma du look. Now there’s a first.

7:30 p.m. Nov. 10 with Heather Woods Broderick at the Mayfair Theatre at the Irish American Heritage Center, 4626 N. Knox Ave.; tickets $40 at eventbrite.com

Matthew Richards is a freelance writer.

© Provided by Khaleej Times
Image used for illustrative purpose.

Dubai Culture and Arts Authority (Dubai Culture) announced the launch of the first edition of the Dubai Festival for Youth Music 2022, which is scheduled for November 24, 2022. The festival will reflect the ideas and musical compositions of the youth. It will be inaugurated in a distinctive musical evening, with performances from the young citizens and residents of the UAE.

The organisation of the festival, which will be held annually in November, is aligned with Dubai Culture’s commitment to supporting a stimulating infrastructure for the cultural and creative industries, enabling a sustainable and thriving ecosystem that supports Dubai’s economic growth and cements its position as a major hub for arts and culture.

Dubai Culture invites young talented musicians, citizens and residents within the country, aged 15 and 35, to participate in the festival with their musical work. Applications open on November 7, and close on November 19 via Dubai Culture’s website, provided that these works are produced by bands or collectives certified in the UAE.

The festival aims to shed light on the creativity of public and private musical arts centres and individual companies located in the UAE, in addition to celebrating individual participation, including public and private school students. It will also provide a valuable platform for introducing young talent and their musical potential, such as singing, composition, instrumentalism, and performance, among others.

Each year, the festival will also celebrate a pioneering and influential musical arts figure.

Dr Saeed Mubarak bin Kharbash, CEO of the Arts and Literature Sector at Dubai Culture, said: “The Dubai Festival for Youth Music is considered a tribute to the artistic and musical sector in Dubai. This is the first edition of the festival and we will work to ensure its continuity and achieve the Authority’s strategic objectives in discovering young talent in these various musical fields.”

As for the details of the festival, Fatma Al Jallaf, Acting Director of the Performing Arts Department at Dubai Culture, said: “Before the closing ceremony of the festival to be held on 24 November, the participants will undergo an evaluation and selection period for less than 1 week, and the winners will be announced and awarded at the ceremony according to the specific categories, which include: Best Singing Award, Best Arabic Playing Award (Oud), Best Classical Playing Award (Violin), Best Piano Playing Award, and Best Integrated Orchestra Award. Based on the Authority’s constant keenness to address underrepresentation, we will also be awarding people of determination in each of the musical categories.”

In order to ensure the quality of the submissions, Dubai Culture has set some conditions, namely: