Dylan's research on famous pianists

As piano was nominated the instrument mostly associated with romance films, I wanted to consider using famous pianists music (or listen to their music, and see if i can find influence).

Yiruma:

The 32 year old Korean is accordingly internationally known for creating colourful music that uplifts spirits. His most famous song being 'River Flows In You'. This song is so emotional, and full of happiness, but at the same time, gives you a feeling that you are longing for something or perhaps someone. Perfect cadences and twinkling ornaments (acciaccaturas) will produce the perfect atmosphere and mode. 'River Flows In You' is probably my favourite piano piece of music, so i would passionately incorporate this into our opening sequence if we used this. Another one of my favourites (also by Yiruma) is 'May Be' similar to 'River Flows In You', however contains more of a story line, and expresses itself through changing its key into its relevant minor a back frequently (which would add to the tragic side of our film as well as the romantic side). The dynamics and pitch are also explored more in this piece of music- if being used in our film, will convey the way that Jades (the main character) mental illness is spontaneous and uncontrollable.

Lang Lang:

A Chinese pianist aged 28, extremely well known in Europe and North America. The song that i have looked at, and love is called 'Time For Dreams' (featuring Schiller), it is a fantastic piano piece accompanied by synths timpani's and other percussion. Although these instruments create quite a modern up beat sound, this could challenge the usual, romantic tragedy films. This piece of music portrays quite an adventurous, spontaneous mood. You could say it is quite an enthusiastic composition creating a variation of positive moods, however it is intense, a lot is going on in the piece, the texture is thick. This could somehow link in with our opening sequence, keeping the atmosphere less depressing. We need to look at what classification our film is as this type of music will be more suited to the younger.

Joe Hisaishi:

Joe Hisaishi (Japenese, 60 years old) is most well known for working with Ghibli Studios, creating piano and orchestral music for animated films such as the famous 'Spirited Away', 'Howls Moving Castle' and 'Princess Mononoke'. The fact that Joe Hisaishi is known for exclusively working with these animated films, there is no way we could use of of his pieces, as people who have seen those films well automatically know that it is also from that film, we need to be unique. I will use Joe Hisaishi as huge inspiration, as from what i've listened to (tracks such as 'One Summers Day', 'The Sixth Station' and 'Reprise' from the film Spirited Away, i can gather that them pieces of music portray the scenes, in terms of story line and also the emotion being shown. For example if we use 'One Summers Day', the main piano solo line (one note at a time to begin with) with distorted chords and an accompanied strings section that plays a background role, which however carries out an occasional call and response technique where one instruments speaks, and the other instrument answers-this is a good technique for if there is two main characters. At around 1:30 (from the link), we hear a beautiful, lonely high pitched phrase representing the character, but suddenly the next phrase is the strings reassuring the first phrase (call and response), the third phrase is a repititition of the first phrase in this extract however textured more thick, gushing out pure emotion, expressing the feeling heavily. This is only 30 seconds of the piece I analysed, and already that has helped me explore how i can express real emotion through music- creating characters within each instrument-whether i choose to use this technique in my copmosition or not.

Links:

River Flows In You- Yiruma

May Be- Yiruma

Time For Dreams- Lang Lang featuring Schiller

One Summer's Day- Joe Hisaishi

The Sixth Station- Joe Hisaishi

Reprise- Joe Hisaishi