Music Composed for A Life’s Work

A Life’s Work is a film about four people engaged with projects they won’t complete in their lifetimes. It’s about devotion, mortality, and legacy.

LifeTIMES.

Time. What music says “time”? Church bells indicate time. And what is the most famous church bell tune? The Westminster Quarters.

So I decide I would use those eight notes and create four variations of the theme, one for each subject. The harmonies and instrumentation change throughout the film, but you’ll hear those variations in every piece of music in the film.

I used the melody in the last two measures as the film’s musical theme. That theme was one way for me to connect the subjects of the film, who did seemingly unrelated things. If you listen to the following, you will find variations on that theme repeated everywhere.

NOTE: these were mixed by me, and not the excellent mixer (Matt Rocker) I used for the final film. Also, the image quality is not that of the finished film either. It is used here as a reference only.

In the first three snippets you will hear the theme for each of the three characters. (For the forth character I used recorded gospel music, which fit with his project, The Black Gospel Music Restoration Project.) The instrumentation is different for each character.

Later in the film, I needed the music to reflect the images of redwood trees being felled and a man trekking through knee high snow to visit “his old friend,” a once spectacular elm tree that has succumbed to Dutch Elm Disease and the land owner’s greed and ignorance.

I think of this piece as an interlude. In the film, one segment ends with Paolo Soleri and the next segment begins with Soleri. In order to let the audience know we shifted to a new segment, I composed this piece.

This is the final bit of music composed for the film. We hear the theme we encountered during the first shot of the film (On a Dirt Road, above) but this time played on an acoustic piano, which we have not heard up until this moment. This is the climax of the film, and the dramatic change in instrumentation reflects what’s happening visually–a shot of the same dirt road that opened the film, but soaring and speeding from above, thanks to a drone, and what’s happening in the narrative–we are about find out that the leadership of one project has changed from master to apprentice, and the project continues.

If you have a project that requires music and you like what you hear, contact me.