About this work:
I began Crowd Scene in 1996 as music to accompany a ten-minute section of Robert Wiene's German Expressionist silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). The project was discontinued after a short time, and in 2004 I again picked up the score to complete the bulk of it, making further revisions in 2010.
No longer constrained by the film’s parameters, I refreshed my perspective, mostly abandoning the original programmatic component while musically maintaining a sense of urgency. I think that the result—a work of only about four minutes instead of the originally intended ten—nonetheless captures the spirit of the film quite effectively.
Crowd Scene is chromatically saturated, while frequently maintaining pitch centers. Ostinati are plentiful, and counterpoint is generally polyphonic with multi-texture stratification occurring between various instrument groupings. Syncopated rhythm recalls the jazz idiom, though the mood is, by and large, too anxious to swing. Melodies are often exchanged or overlapped between instruments, varied with registral displacement, and fragmented into smaller motivic cells. The piece’s form—A-B-A followed by an extended development and then a coda— eschews balance, seeking instead a parallel to the trajectory of emotional disintegration.
The listener is catapulted helter-skelter, jostled and ricocheted about, possibly by an unruly carnival throng, like a pinball in a pinball machine. Without introduction, the first theme enters with industrious insistence, quickly transitioning into the second theme’s circus-like grandstanding. After a hesitant reentry, the first theme quickly terminates, and both themes then spend the remainder of the composition dissolving and recombining inexhaustibly. The frenetic music is at turns bustling, sinister, desperate, and disorienting. It is a relentless, often hyper-exaggerated, soundscape of bewildering confrontations and psychological discomposure.
This 2011 recording of Crowd Scene was released by Darling's Acoustical Delight, a division of Darling Publications Cologne. The name of the CD is "...ohne zu wissen warum!?" ("...without knowing why") and is performed by the following members of Ensemble Soli fan tutti, of the Staatsorchester, Darmstadt.
Daniell Schwarz, flute
Michael Schmidt, clarinet
Saskia Hiersche, violin
Alev Akcos, cello
Björn Lehmann, piano
This was funded in part by the Composer Assistance Program of the American Music Center, to whom I am extremely grateful!