By Sarah McMillin, Assistant Living & Arts Editor
For the entire fall 2019 semester, the music department’s orchestration class has been preparing for their pinnacle event: “Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror,” that took place at 7:30 p.m. in Stretansky Hall on Nov. 5.
At the event, the silent film “Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror,” more commonly referred to as, “Nosferatu,” was shown via a projector while the students’ orchestrations were played to accompany the scenes.
Students in the class include Johnny Bentz, Lena Costello, Emily Hendershot, Ali Hordeski, Kirby Leitz, Aaron Lichtel, Joseph Martin, Spencer Ostrowsky, Kathleen Owens and Rebecca Reeder. Their class is taught by professor of music Patrick Long
Each student in the class both composed music to go along with the film and performed another student’s music. In total, each student arranged and/or composed five or six scenes.
During the performance, the students performed on stage underneath the projected movie. They also had two screens facing them so that they could see where they were in the movie without having to turn back. These screens also had cues and status bars so that students would see where in the film the music would come in. Seeing as “Nosferatu” is a silent film, students had no words to cue their music, so these screens put in place by Long were useful to them.
Most of the music was performed live by the class. There were, however, a handful of scenes that used synthesized instrument sounds. These computer-generated string and brass sounds were also composed by the students of the orchestration class.
Hordeski is a student in the class and a senior piano performance major. She was excited to see and hear her works come to life. “Composing has recently become more intriguing to me and I find it to be a great creative outlet,” she said.
“Hearing everything come together was awesome,” Hordeski said about the dress rehearsal. “We only hear it bit by bit before that, and not always attached to the scene itself.”
“Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror” is a German expressionist silent film from 1922. The film is an unauthorized retelling of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” with the names of the characters changed. For example, “Dracula” becomes “Count Orlock.”
The timing of the orchestration class’s “Nosferatu” performance happens right between Halloween and the theatre department’s production of “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” adapted by Liz Lochhead. This coincidence was incidental. However, the orchestration class put their own eerie twist on the film. Even the dress rehearsal was spooky, according to Hordeski.
“In one of the final scenes, when it’s super tense and scary, and Nosferatu is about to turn into dust and dirt because he stayed until the morning…the power went out all of a sudden. It was spooky. Very on brand. And we were in Stretansky so it gets quite pitch dark in there,” she said.
The orchestration class’s performance of “Nosferatu” was only one opportunity for student composers to shine. On Nov. 19, the music department will host the “Student Composers Concert” in which original works by students of the music department will be premiered.