My second foray into the world of electronic music is decidedly unelectronic, more just a low-tech remix of some examples of my favorite genre, film noir.  I tried to create a sort of collage-fantasy of the themes in these movies, a distillation of the central tropes of 1940′s grisled Hollywood cinema.

The source material comes from 4 films:

• Suddenly (1954) starring Frank Sinatra (a major boon for a huge Sinatraphile like me, I can use his voice in my piece because this film is in the public domain), in which he plays a deranged assassin out to kill the president.  Download
• The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) starring Barbara Stanwyck (my favorite Hollywood actress of all time), Lizabeth Scott and Kirk Douglas, is the story of a complicated love triangle (rectangle), power, deceit and secrets.  Download
• Scarlett Street (1945) directed by Fritz Lang and starring Edward G. Robinson, is a sultry tale about petty con artists taking a sensitive, demure painter for a ride.  Download
• The Second Woman (1950) a melodramatic story of a man who was responsible for his first wife’s death and how enacts his guilt in increasingly destructive ways.  Interestingly, the entire score consists of arrangements and re-orchestrations of music by Tchaikovsky.  Download

My take on the ancient legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, this is a sort of electronic étude, my first attempt in the medium of “electronic music”.  Electronic music has a lot going for it: namely, the fact that one doesn’t really have to deal with other people in order to make one’s music.  Not that I’m a curmudgeon or anything.  In this case, however, I had a really great time recording the harp parts with Haley Rhodeside.

Speaking of which, in this piece, Eurydice is represented by the chorus and Orpheus by the harp.  The piece opens with the door to hell closing on Eurydice and her mangled voice disappearing into the netherworld.  We then transition to an outdoor scene, complete with a “babbling brook” in which little fairies alert Orpheus to the disappearance of Eurydice.  Orpheus then descends into the underworld (in my version, the descent is via a sort of industrial metal staircase).  As he descends, he hears the hellish cries of the deceased, which become louder and louder.

The underworld turns out to be a sort of hellish dance club (which maybe says more about me than anything else).  Having found Eurydice, Orpheus ascends the stairs whence he came.  His heart fills with excitement and growing anticipation.  He reaches the top of the staircase and turns around, only to see Eurydice plummet back into the underworld as the door shuts down on her.