30 April 2009
IMM studio A 2.24
Matthias Hornschuh on film scoring
Film score composing could be celebrating its 100th birthday - but nobody would know! This is somehow symptomatic for the reception of the maybe most emotionally-fueled, yet misunderstood of all cinematographical tools. Culturally, we never learned to listen carefully or allow ourselves to feel the goosebumps, shivers, tears and emotions. Nonetheless: Inside the movie theatre, we're experiencing the effects of film sound and score. Everybody has turned off the sound (!) of the TV (!) at least once, because the sound produced a creeping scare deep in the bones...
As early as in the 1920s, people used to say music in films can only be good when not recognized at all. Generally spoken, people noticed music in films often once it stopped playing. And than, even after it stopped, most contemporaries were extremely critical on the music: Music no one could hear couldn't be any good. Yet these observations are smart and psychologically substantiated of everyday life, multimodal apperception - thus, the only association known to humankind to truly administer the multi-medium film. Film is no visual art, but an audio-visual art form. Talking about film scoring maybe difficult, because problems are caused by fundamental problems in bad, partly dogmatic theory. After 100 years of film scoring it is about time to listen to it with a fresh ear, talk about it with new words. Nobody wants music in films to die due to contempt. We would talk about film scoring if we only knew how to.
Matthias Hornschuh is living as a film score composer in Cologne. He is the head of the union mediamusic:nrw and a leading member of the European forum for music in the media SoundTrack_Cologne.
Films, radio plays and other productions with music and acoustic art by Matthias Hornschuh and his brother and artistic partner Andreas were shown at countless national and international festivals and won about 40 awards worldwide.