Ten years ago, I was spending my birthday working on cleaning out my grandfather’s house. He’d passed away on July 29 from Cancer- his death had a profound effect on me, and it took a long time to heal from it.
Music helped me in that process. When I returned to Georgia State that Fall for my last year of college, I had some free time in my schedule to take Orchestration and study Composition (areas of interest I’d had no chances to study before) under Dr. Nick Demos. The pieces I worked on that year helped get my emotions out, and take risks in a creative path that I’m grateful to still be following.
That Fall, I spent the semester working on a chamber piece entitled “Dawn of Man.” It was intended to be the first piece for an album entitled “Beyond the Infinite,” inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” as well as an electronic piece of the same name I’d written in 1999. The introductory measures for the piece- written for flute, cello and marimba- were intended to be my music for the beginning of the sequence of the same name, and the piece still includes among my most complicated rhythmic writing.
Starting during the holiday break, I began work on an ambitious piece for viola and electronics entitled “Sonic Contemplation.” Intended originally for a viola comp competition, the deadline came and went without it being yet finished, but the desire to continue the piece made it my composition “project” for that semester.
“Sonic Contemplation” was full of bold ideas musically (including rhythms that even now make me go “WTF?”) and an emotional center that drove me. This was my way of dealing with my grandfather’s death, by attempting to say musically what I wasn’t ready to discuss in words. Sadly, graduation came and went and the piece was no closer to being finished. In 2002, I decided to start anew on the piece, this time for trombone and electronics, but the time wasn’t right for me to start writing again, even after I’d written two trombone quartets prior to it.
In 2006, during a time of great emotional distress and uncertainty, I began “Sonic Contemplation” again, again for trombone and electronics. Roughly a month later, I’d finished it at last. The time that’d passed allowed me to be honest with others and myself about the motivations behind the piece, the past couple year’s of music had made me a more focused composer structurally, and the emotions I was struggling with were similar enough to those I’d experienced in 2000 that they would fuel and inspire my art.
Ten years later, much has changed since I was 23 and working on organizing my grandfather’s things for a trip down to Georgia, and for the most part, these two pieces have come full circle. The longer version of “Dawn of Man” is still unrecorded (I’m not that proficient on keyboard to record it MIDI), but “Beyond the Infinite: A Musical Odyssey” is finally ready for release without it.
Officially my fourth album, “Beyond the Infinite” has remained true to my original intention as being an “alternative soundtrack” to Kubrick’s film. To prepare, I watched the film, marked times which featured music and for how long, and treated it like a film score, but one inspired (in ways surprising and fitting) by the music forever wedded to the film.
In addition to the release of the album (and its’ superb artwork by my friend Carrie, who also did the artwork for “Sonic Visions of a New Old West”) on CDBaby and other online vendors like iTunes later this year (tight finances are keeping it from official release for now at least), I’ve also taken an original approach in marketing the album, and making it available. Placing the tracks in context of the parts of the film they were written for, I recorded my own audio commentary- heard when the music isn’t on- discussing the film itself, as well as my methods in composing the album itself. It’s a pretty compelling listen if I do say so myself, and is available for free (along w/ an introduction with sync instructions) on my Commentaries page at Sonic Cinema here.
Still on a high from completing “Beyond the Infinite,” I’d been wanting to mark the decade since my grandfather’s death somehow. It was time to finally record “Sonic Contemplation.” And true, I’m not my first choice to perform the trombone part (and still not- the performance here is MIDI-performed; I will perform live for the album version, however), but it seems quite fitting under the circumstances. I quietly posted it online on the 29th, and it’s available to hear on Sonic Cinema’s Music page and here.
Well, that is all for me right now. I will keep you posted on when “Beyond the Infinite: A Musical Odyssey” is available for sale online, and I hope you’re as excited to hear it as I am to finally release it.
Thanks for listening,
Brian Skutle
www.sonic-cinema.com
www.reverbnation.com/brianskutle
www.myspace.com/brianskutle
www.myspace.com/cinemanouveau
www.youtube.com/bskutle
Sonic Cinema Shop
“Creative Beginnings” at CDBaby
“Dark Experiments” at CDBaby
“Sonic Visions of a New Old West” at CDBaby
