Name: Something Beautiful (Full Score) by Kathryn Henzler
Duration: 2 min 58 s
Description: This was the score I did earlier this year for a short film that was entered into the Digi60 film festival in Ottawa, ON. It was my first live action short to score for.

From Kait Dunton's first album, with drummer Ross Pederson and bassist Daniel Foose.

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Real & Imagined

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Jinora's Light

As a child, I remember asking my mother in frustration why all songs had to be love songs. Surely there were other things to sing about? I certainly thought so, and thus far I’ve largely avoided writing them outside dramatic contexts. Consider this, then, my first love song - of a sort. 

"as if my eyes were caught" uses a network of medieval intertextual refrains: shared segments of music and text that circulated between a wide variety of genres in the long 13th century. For medieval listeners, such refrains often “cued” other works in which they appeared, invoking their melodic, textual, and symbolic connotations. "as if my eyes were caught" plays with such cuing in various ways, including quoting a 13th-century tenor used under a number of the refrains, drawing in recordings made with audio and processes that relate to the texts of the refrains, and (when performed with vocal samples rather than a live singer) literally cuing the vocal samples via tracking the pitch of the flauto d’amore. Often the flauto d’amore articulates the medieval melody of the refrain while the voice delivers a (sometimes reimagined) English translation of its text with related melodic material, the two dancing around each other.  Lyrically, refrains are usually bound up with themes of courtly love, with the speaker admiring an exemplary but unattainable lover; however, medieval creators were masters of manipulating such messages through the layering of various voices and intertextual associations. Is the beloved a typical noble lady? Is she Robin’s Marion or the shepherdess of the pastourelle genre? Is she the Virgin Mary, turning romantic love into spiritual devotion? Is the love portrayed in fact satirical, signalling an apocalyptic mood at the turn of the 14th century? I am fascinated by the ways that medieval creators played with widely circulating, even generic “love song” material to effect their own distinct musical and textual goals. In many ways, "as if my eyes were caught" sits squarely in that tradition of playful manipulation of the identity and symbolic import of the lover and beloved.

Many thanks to Ginevra Petrucci of the Flauto d'Amore Project and singer Heather O'Donovan for their beautiful performance (only somewhat marred by the torrential rain that began just before they began!).

as if my eyes were caught

Cover of "Green Lantern: The Animated Series" Main Theme.
Original composed by Frederik Wiedmann.

Green Lantern The Animated Series Main Theme Cover

The last musical cue in the 'Legend of Korra'. Zhonghu and erhu performed by Hong Wang.

The Legend Of Korra

This is a sound that was electronically placed onboard the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft. 

Golden Record: Footsteps, Heartbeat, Laughter

Train Of Thought

This was the score I did earlier this year for a short film that was entered into the Digi60 film festival in Ottawa, ON. It was my first live action short to score for.

Something Beautiful (Full Score)

drama, hybrid orchestral contemporary soundtrack to the new exhibit "Heroes and Legends" at the Kennedy Space Center. Space, action, spacecraft malfunction, action, heroes

Heroes & Legends - Gemini 8

Music from the first act of the final episode of the Legend of Korra.

Inside / Mako's Sacrifice

Boreal is a work for clarinet, piano, violin, and cello that was composed for the 2019 Copland House CULTIVATE Institute and the musicians of Music from Copland House. 

The piece started with a melody I’ve had in my head for a quite a long time: the piobaireachd tune MacCrimmon’s Sweetheart.  I did some work on canntaireachd (the vocable system for highland piping tunes) a while ago, and this particular tune has stuck with me. Once I would have been resistant to letting a borrowed tune pervade and drive a work like this, but this melody felt like an old friend it was about time I invited in. In many ways this piece is the opposite of traditional canntaireachd: while canntaireachd is about singing the sound of an instrument, this piece aims to let instrumentalists “play” a voice. Along the way some long-remembered environmental sounds crept in alongside this long-remembered tune. These are mainly familiar sounds from my hometown in Minnesota, though I’m not aiming for any particular kind of veracity in evoking this landscape.

Something Beautiful (Full Score)

Kathryn Henzler

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