Hello Markus, I think your music is great, and I found it already impressive when you had not yet replaced the noisy bassoon. You have, I think, exactly the know-how that the jury missed in my film music. I don't know if I'm too lazy, too stingy or too arrogant, but I've always believed that knowing the European music of the last 300 years very well, would be sufficient and I wouldn't have to visit any film music workshop in my old days.
If you'd ask me about American film music composers and Hollywood movies, you would notice that I am on another planet.
Okay, I actually don't believe that the simple and catchy melodies you recommend to me are missing in my music for "Happiness" (there's Viennese waltz feeling, ragtime, also reminiscences of Ravel (la valse), a Prokofieff like gavotte at the end, the opening chord of Lohengrin, trivial hurdy-gurdy melodies etc.), all based on a trivial central motif of 4 tones, which appears in various stylistic costumes, but it comes from a twelve-tone row. They are it's 4 opening or closing tones, since the row is symmetrical: f-eb-d-g-e-c-f#-a#-c#-g#-a-h. Though the series has major chords in the middle, it is the reason that the beginning of my film music (which is, of course, apparently not atonal/dokaphonic as a whole) sounds more modern than the last two thirds. But the row is almost always involved anyway. In the ragtime (during the car ride) it is present as a counterpoint. While the rat gets drunk, the trombone plays it with belching glissandi and Flatterzunge, while the unmistakable high flageolets of the A major chord from the Lohengrin overture are played. When the rat tries to catch the dollar bill, the row is the melody of a rokoko dance. (The symmetry of the row serves also as a sounding symbol for a vain circle race, always leading back to the start or to nowhere.. and the mouse trap finally). The whole piece is like this. I think the influences you recommend to me (Ravel, Stravinsky) are already present. What I lack is Hollywood opulence and the skill to achieve it. i confess, all my life I wasn't a friend of American cinema. But that's not least due to the annoying, exhilarated and mannered German dubbing style of US movies. If you want to know what I'm running away from, please google comedian "Käthe Lachmann" and e.g. "Synchronsprecherin" or "Kuchen backen". My film music was almost finished, when I first wanted to at least collecting some infos about who John Williams or Elmer Bernstein are. I don't know a single Star Wars film. I think my problem is to be much too much both: a piano player with romantic and Gershwinlike patterns in his hands, but also a polyphonic nutcracker in a tradition from Bach to Schoenberg and later. And an Adorno "fan". And before I made the film music, I had spent 17 months doing nothing but VSL based orchestral music minus one like stuff for all of Mahler's vocal music (https://www.uli-schauerte.de/mahler-minus-you-english/ ). And the transparency of the Kindertotenlieder or the subtlety of the Lied von der Erde, even the "military" power of some Wunderhornlieder might be a good teacher for orchestrators in general, but not for film composers. Too close to chamber music, right ? So if I'd ever again participate in a film music contest, I would first get a humble pupil of oversea's masters to get nearer to their skills and impressing fullness of sound. I think you, Markus, are a living proof, that those masters do not all live overseas. So I will take my time to devote to your works again and again when I find the needed leisure they deserve.
