For our Field Report we interviewed Cristie Munoz. She's a 5th semester Berklee College of Music student majoring in film scoring. The film score is the background music of a film and is separate from outside songs featured in the film. We also analyzed her piece "Undulations of a Snake" and watched a film short called Sidnaw that she scored for a client in Chicago. She talked to us about her current project with an Emerson film student that is being developed as a palindrome and the challenges that go with composing for this kind of film. Cristie also discussed the importance of understanding harmony and counterpoint to understand composition
Sydney's Introduction: Darian, Sean, and I were asked to complete a group project in which we had to interview and musician and view a performance of theirs in order to form a detailed analysis and summary of their work and how they create their “work”. For our project, we decided to interview a Berklee student/composer by the name of Cristie Munoz. The interview took place in her apartment where we asked her many questions to get an idea of what she does as a composer. She also showed us many of her composed pieces and explained how they were created and what the thought process of each piece was. We also asked her to give us an in depth explanation of how musical elements such as harmony and texture, play a big role in her composing. Cristie also allowed us to have a copy of one of her pieces titled, Undulations of a Snake, which got its name because of how the piece moves around. The overall interviewing process was very successful- thanks to the great deal of information that she was able give us.
Part II: Biography-->Cristie Munoz
Cristie Munoz is a young, talented, film composer, saxophonist, and diligent student from Chicago, Illinois. She is currently in her 5th semester of college, and has explored many different interests and possible major paths, such as: conducting, and music business, finally settling on film scoring by her 3rd semester. Now that her school has adopted a minors program, she is looking into picking up a minor in conducting, as she has had many years of experience. While working diligently to complete her major and minor curriculums she spends extensive hours practicing and performing on her saxophone, and creating her own music with synthesizers and vocal editing techniques, as well as composing for clients outside of school.
Cristie originally learned to play classical piano, at age 7, which she says has helped her tremendously with her composing. Shortly after starting the piano, at the age of 10 Cristie fell in love with the alto saxophone, she also played the baritone saxophone during middle school. She kept up a full-time extra-curricular schedule through middle school high school. Not only was she involved in many sports and clubs, but she also participated in marching band, concert band, and jazz band. In addition to her rigorous schedule she also performed with a drum corps in high school playing the vibraphone and marimbas. Most notably, her high school marching band competed on a national level, she marched with them for her freshman and sophomore years. Eventually, during her last two years of high school, she earned the position of drum major, the person in charge of conducting and commanding the marching band. She participated in many marching band competitions, both marching and conducting.
All of these elements brought her to Berklee College of Music, where she is currently studying film scoring.
Part III: Interviews
When you first started learning music, what styles did you play?
I would say that most people who learn through their school system, not from somewhere else, always start out classically trained, for piano I don’t play any jazz. I like to just read sheet music. For saxophone, ironically, I really started out classically based, and got into jazz in middle school. I would say I started with classical, and through high school tried to stay balanced between both genres.
Do you think that your previous study with classical music has helped you write scores? Because Scores aren’t typically jazz.
I would say that the part that helped me most from my classical training is recognizing tendencies in classical writing through the playing of them. Like, recognizing figures like descending thirds scale-ular patterns and things like that- that generally are very common in classical music.- Its all about recognizing, as a player, making things playable. Playing the sax I can not tell you has definitely- I don’t think you can be a composer if you don’t understand the way an instrument works and the tendencies of an instrument. [You have to know] what sounds good and what sounds bad. Reading music as a sax play, classical, has def helped me make music more playable for other musicians
Do you think you would have had to learn how to play the piano if you didn’t know how to already?
Oh yes definitely, because the piano can play chords and saxophone can’t. The basis of a composition is harmony [and melody] and one moves this way [gestures horizontally] and the other moves this way [gestures vertically] and on a saxophone you can only hear the one that moves horizontally, you can’t hear the one that’s coming underneath it. On the piano, you can hear both, so its essential to composition because you have to hear the way a note is effecting against a chord. That’s what creates the emotion-how the note is effected by its harmonic surroundings.
Can you talk about your counterpoint class and how it’s affected your writing? Can you explain what counterpoint is?
Counterpoint is the overall study of how a note is effected when played against by another note, and their interactions and their harmonic relations.My over-all belief in learning classical harmony and classical counterpoint is that you need to learn the rules before you can break them. So, I would say that I think its essential to learn counterpoint, to learn the way notes do move together and how they’re supposed to sound from a classical sense, so, that when I’m writing more contemporary scores, and I’m doing something that’s against the counterpoint rules, i’m not unaware of what i’m doing. I should be aware of the basic fundamentals of composition before just trying to compose, I should know that I’m breaking a rule. If you’re not aware of those then you’re not a real composer, you’re just the same as five year old banging random notes on a piano. You have to h
ave the essential basics to move forward in composition and counterpoint is one of those essential basics.
I know you’re also into conducting, do you think that helps you rhythmically develop your pieces? Or do you not take conducting into consideration when you’re writing?
I really like conducting, but I don’t really take it into consideration when writing. There are some things that would be really hard for a conductor, but I just write them anyway. In the back of my mind subconsciously i’m thinking ‘Oh this would be hard to conduct,’ but a lot of times in conducting its not even about whether the piece is hard or not its just about whether you know how it goes or not.If I wrote something that’s hard to conduct, I would know how to conduct it, because I know how the music goes. I guess it helps- it definitely helps- with choosing tempos for music and stuff.
Do you have any pieces where you’ve come up with ridiculous time signatures?
I do, it’s a Stravinsky inspired piece. The title’s “Abozo” but I just chose a random word. That rhythmic passage went through 7/8-5/8-3/4-7/8-5/8-5/8 and then to 4/4, that passage went like that because I needed some variation from the previous passage. Different odd meter is a good way to move from one section to another section
You had talked to us about a film scoring project you were working on for an Emerson student. Can you elaborate on that?
The project is for a movie that he’s doing, i’m not sure about the title yet, but the over-all concept is a palindrome. For those who don’t know what a palindrome is, it’s something that’s the same thing forwards and backwards. So, for example the name ‘Hannah’ can be the same backwards as it is forwards. The concept for the movie is that there’s a center point- I haven’t actually seen it yet- but, from talking with the film director the movie is going to be played backwards at this point, and going to be kind of mirror. He told me the script writer is a genius and they’re going to be saying things backwards that make sense [for the second half of the film]. The story starts with a couple breaking up, and somehow in the other half of the movie, something happy happens at the end. When I thought of it, I originally wanted to be able to play my work backwards with the movie, but that is physically impossible, I’ve discovered, due to tendencies of instruments.Whenever you play a note on a piano you have an attack, and a decay, so it kind of looks like [gestures a wedge] like a “V” and its physically impossible to make that the same thing backwards. When you play a piano note it sounds like “DA” and when you play it backwards it sounds like “RAHHHH.” So, I’m going at the concept that actually, when you look at the music, it’s going to be mirror image of each other at a certain point. The idea of doing this is from a class that I took called counterpoint 2, canon writing, which is very similar to what i’m doing right now, taking a measure and putting it at the end. Right now I only have the first half of it that I’m working on, because I haven’t seen the film yet, and I’m going to mirror it at the end. [Plays piece]
That’s an overall rough sketch that I’m going to be writing for the film student the whole process is, well, I made a midi file first, and I’m just kind of transcribing it now into my notation system. That’s just a film composition just at the beginning of the process.
Can you take us through the whole process from finding people to work with, and translating the director’s ideas?
Finding people to work with:
You have to just always be on your toes if you’re a film composer, at parties, especially if you’re a Berklee student if you’re at a party, if your just out walking around, [or] you’re hanging out with friends. We have this thing here at Berklee called film scoring club, which I’m not a part of but I should be, [laughs] that’s a great networking opportunity. Jason Parks, the head of the film scoring club, definitely is innovative [about] getting Berklee film composers out to film students and the neighboring community. Thank god, Berklee is in Boston and near so many colleges because there is a huge opportunity to meet film students and compose their films. With the Emerson project, I actually met the student on Halloween coming home from a party that I just randomly started talking to, and sometimes that’s just how it is. So I’ve found that when finding film students, sometimes it can be a random person you just meet, but the best is when you compose for friends. You wanna get friends with film student friends because once you start composing their films and they like your style, or like that you’re compatible with their style of films, or they like your professionalism about it, usually they’re going to keep calling you back. Usually film scorers tend to go with the same directors because they work well together.
Translating the directors vision:
Sometimes it’s really hard because directors know absolutely nothing about music. They just know the same thing as a common person. They know what they want the emotion to be, sometimes the film directors are nice enough to put a temp track over the film, which is already made music put over the film. Actually, [for] the Space Odyssey movie, the entire score for the movie was scored by someone, and they decided to drop it last minute and use the temp track, so some times it can be nice and sometimes it can be bad. Overall film composers have to realize that film directors do not know as much as they do about music and a lot of times I’ve found from other people and from my own experience, film directors just kind of let you loose. This project I worked on for a friend at UWMilwaukee, Kyle Probst, this movie’s called Sidnaw, this is a film I did for him. The overall start of the composition like the Emerson project, is just a bunch of little sequences. [Shows Program] This program’s called Digital Performer and it’s really really good for -its hard to use- but its very very good for film composition. [Motion] These little things are markers that I hit certain cues that I feel are important in the movie. The instrumentation I used: clarinet, bassoon, horn, piano, and some strings. But overall he just kind of let me go on it. So it was really nice to just be able to work on my own on this film and just kind of create my ideas. But the problem was that afterwards my film director that I was working with, he didn’t give me any sort of direction, and there were some parts he didn’t like, there were parts that he did like, but that’s just like, that’s the frustrating part of being a film composer and the difficult part about working with a director. Its that they don’t know what they want and you give them a product you’re very proud of but then all of a sudden they start knowing what they want and then they start knowing that they don’t want something that you already did and have already finished. It’s hard sometimes as the film composer to taint your music to what the director wants, but, you have to remember its their product overall. You are putting your name on it but you’re being hired by the film director so you have to do what they want.
So for that example, what did Kyle say to you when he asked for music?
All he said was that he wanted a ‘minimalist approach to the score.’ Like most film directors they don’t want the music getting in the way of the film, but it’s just a misunderstanding sometimes because they’ve been watching this film so long with no music in it, and its kind of their baby, they can’t imagine it with music in it, they can’t imagine the possibility because they’re focusing so much on what’s being seen, and what’s on the screen, and the sound effects- they’re not really thinking too much about the music. I really tried to stick to his minimalist approach, [and] I really tried not to use more than 2 or 3 instruments simultaneously. Mostly because the story line is kind of skewed but the character is a very simple character out in the middle of Sidnaw, Michigan, just chilling in a cabin by himse
lf. So you don’t want to over complicate things with too many instruments and too many things going on when the movie is not the same. When the movie is simple you want to stick with simple instrumentation and simple composition.
Can we focus on one piece you’re currently working on? Whats the name of the piece?
A piece that I’m working on for this film, I’m kind of-well the film composer wants it to sound like Eternal Sunshine for the Spotless Mind- and here’s a little clip. [plays Eternal Sunshine score] So, after listening to this and understanding the overall mood of what the film director wants- simple instrumentation, some electronic sounds, but very simple- in this composition there’s just a bass and some electronic strings over it and a piano. Its’ an upright plucked bass. The piece I’m working on, I didn’t like the swing feel, because for the palindrome effect the swing won’t translate very well through the sad parts, so I just kept it with a straight eighth note feel. You can kind of hear how I took the ‘temp’ track that my director gave me and tried to create something off of that. It’s very helpful when the director gives a temp track. It leaves a lot of questions out of the way like what instrumentation, what feel, how fast, how slow, when a film director gives you an idea it just makes the process go along a lot faster.
What would you say the difference is between and orchestrator and an arranger?
The main difference between an orchestrator and an arranger is that an arranger is more closely related to a composer than an orchestrator is. An arranger will usually be given a piece by a group that wants to play it. Like an orchestra, acapella group, men’s choir, like for Glee, Glee is a great example of arranging. Say next week they wanted to do a Queen song, the arranger for them will arrange all the parts going on there. You get to choose the instrumentation, and choose where it modulates etcetera. But an orchestrator, what they do is a lot of times on a really big project like a John Williams score. He’ll have an orchestrator, he’ll write a piano reduction score which is just one line of piano, but it has all of the parts for the composition written in concert key and above it he writes what kinds of instruments he would like played there. The orchestrator takes the reduced score and from there takes the parts and copies and pastes them into the music. Because a film composer, like John Williams, doesn’t really have the time to orchestrate the music for an hour and half film, that’s why you hire an orchestrator; somebody who literally organizes the composers ideas into actual physical composition.
Part IV: ANALYSIS: Undulations of a Snake
Undualtions of a Snake is a musical piece composed by Cristie Munoz. It is an atonal piece written for pia
no, cello, violin, and clarinet. The work is structured around repeating rhythmic and melodic motifs. It is comprised almost entirely of ascending motions and two note stepwise rises and falls divided by sections of whole notes. The four instruments will play similar motifs at the same time or after one another. The low notes of the piano play long descending harmonies providing a full sound to the piece, occasionally playing a motif held up by the right hand or another instrument.
Dynamically there are a few things going on, mainly on the violin’s part. Crescendos and decrescendos like the ones seen in m.3-m.5 are used a few times during the song. A major crescendo appears across m.24 - m.25, followed by a sharp drop to piano and another rise across a single measure then a two measure crescendo.
One of the most heavily repeated phrases appears at first being played by the violin at m.15. This motif is used throughout the piece starting on different notes and is punctuated by a diminished fourth or perfect fourth at the end of each phrase. Another phrase that is repeated throughout is an ascension of seven eighth notes ended by the descent of the eighth eighth note of the measure. This is repeated with inexact intervals. This motif begins appearing in m.5 and comes up again and again and is played by the piano and cello during the large crescendo across m.24 and m.25 being played along with the violin motif from m.15 by both the violin and clarinet. Also at m.24 there is an accelerando with a return to the original tempo at m.26.
F# and G# have a strong presence in the piece giving vague hints of a C lydian augmented scale amongst the atonality. Most of the instrument plays a trill, the clarinet at m.6 and m.11, the violin at m.14 and the piano at m.39. The cello and violin play pizzicato in unison rhythmic patterns with dissonant intervals occurring between the two instruments at m.8 and m.40. M.40 is where the piece begins its return to the motifs that were introduced within the first 10 measures of the piece and after cycling through them, it ends on the opening ascension.
