Music has the power to make or break a mood. Take a busy, traffic-filled drive to work and set it to Clair de Lune. Suddenly a hectic morning commute turns into an invisibly choreographed cityscape, people and cars flowing gracefully around one another in an active and intentionally designed universe.
The influence of an effective score is what the Walker Art Center’s annual Sounds of Silents program is all about. For a fourth year, local artists worked with the Walker to pick experimental films from their Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection. Each artist then composed an original score to accompany each piece, and the result is this series of short films electrified by and reinterpreted with new sound. The artists commissioned this year include Beatrix*Jar, Lady Midnight, Andrew Broder, Cody McKinney, and Dameun Strange.
Under normal circumstances, the films would premiere with their new scores at a free event on the Walker hillside, projected on a giant screen and accompanied by food trucks and drink vendors. This year, to maintain social distancing guidelines, Sound for Silents has moved online in the form a 50-minute program available to the public via YouTube tomorrow, Thursday, August 20.
Part of the challenge of creating a score is the balance between making a piece that doesn’t distract from the visuals while being effective enough to elevate, creating a pairing that is more than the sum of its parts. Here’s a brief preview of what to expect from each film in the series.