To celebrate the celestial spectacle of Conway’s total eclipse, guests were treated to a screening of the classic silent film “Voyage dans la Lune” accompanied by professor Blake Tyson’s new score, which an ensemble of nine of his students performed April 7 at the Windgate Center.
“I started working on it last semester really, in terms of getting some ideas and getting the pacing and just watching the movie a lot because I wanted to internalize all the pacing and all the emotions so that I could think about it as a whole,” Tyson said.
Tyson said he helped a previous student with writing music for the film a few years ago.
“I never really thought about writing my own score until Dr. [Gayle] Seymour asked me to, and then I was like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’ Because whenever Dr. Seymour asks you to do something, you know it’s going to be part of a really cool project,” Tyson said.
Tyson said he aimed to “clarify through music what was happening on screen and set the different moods.”
“I tried to convey personalities in the music of the different characters. I tried to portray the emotional aspects of each scene,” he said.
“I think the picture that’s in everyone’s head, even if you haven’t seen this movie, is the moon with a rocket in its eye. That moment looms very large when you’re composing; ‘how do I build up to this?’ In the end, I tried to make it a surprise to create these somewhat joyful, somewhat expansive, melodic, ringing sounds as we go to the moon.
“The whole section with the throne room where they’re captured, I decided to try to make that terrifying, with lots of drums and rattles,” Tyson said.
Freshman music education major Owen Starnes played various drums for the performance, and said his favorite part was his timpani solo in the throne room scene.
Freshman physics major Nova Ward said their favorite part was “the mushroom growing scene because I just get to hit a triangle as much as I can, as fast as I can.”
Ward said her parts involved some improvisation: “In the first part when they’re making the rocket, I don’t actually have music written in there. I’m just kind of hitting stuff and I just struggled to keep counting while hitting stuff.”
Tyson said, “The great thing about my students is, as percussionists at UCA, they can all play any of the instruments, so I didn’t have to worry about tailoring it. I could do whatever I wanted inside their parts, so I guess my students make it easy because I’m able to write whatever I want.
“There’s so much brilliance in that movie,” Tyson said. “We’re 122 years away from when that movie came out … and here we are in Arkansas watching it and writing new music for it, so that says something about both the inventiveness of it, and how it says with us, and also the quality of what happens there,” Tyson said.
