From Nevada Symphony orchestral creator, Tom Bruner
There is a rather overused cliché that states music is the universal language. Obviously if one listens to the lyrics to a song that’s being sung (or a translation of it), similar emotions of a story are not only widespread, but generally universal. But what about instrumental music? What I have found out after writing all styles and genres of music over the last five or six decades is that instrumental music can precipitate emotions on an even much grander scale. This has not only been proven by legendary composers many times over the centuries, but most notably a few years ago by a psychologist. This man went into the deepest part of the jungles the Republic of Camerron and found a tribe who had NO contact with western culture or modern-day life. The researcher had photos of people showing different emotions, such as sadness, happiness, fright, congeniality, etc. He brought different tribal members (of various sexes and ages) to his tent and played specific recorded music, asking each person to point to the photo that best described the way it made them feel when they heard music examples. To the person, each of these African Rainforest Hunter-Gatherers – who had never been exposed to western music… or any form of western culture from the outside world – all individually pointed to the exact photo images which each musical piece depicted! Music IS the universal language. It can precipitate emotions of excitement, beauty, fear, sadness, love, and joy to people… people who had never heard any form of music from outside of their jungle habitat. The reason I wrote the NEVADA SYMPHONY was to try to capture imagery… through the emotions of hearing music… that would exemplify the beauty, history, character and spirit of the State of Nevada. I attempted to do this with the elements of melody, harmony, rhythms, tempos variations, as well as with dynamics of “loudness and softness” of the music performance. And, just as important, as I told my story throughout the four movements of the symphony, I used orchestral timbre to help further bring about emotional and mental imagery. Orchestral timbre refers to the musical colors created by combining different instruments and groups of instruments - not unlike how an artist with a multi-colored palette combines a “little blue, a smidgen of red, some yellow hues, and a conservative amount of orange” to create the colors of a breathtaking sunset over a calm ocean. And now, Heather Caputo is producing and directing a film, uniquely using the musical imagery of my symphony as a “shooting script”! Her videography will synchronize beautiful visual imagery to the array of emotional imagery I envisioned as a composer when I wrote the music. Her cinematic vision, along with the musical descriptions I tried to create, will come together to distinctively tell the story of Nevada through the beauty and narrative of collaborative art! There will be little “spoken” narration in the NEVADA SYMPHONY FILM, only narration created by the marriage of music and visuals. I am so thrilled to be a part of this extremely unique and exciting production and feel audiences will not only appreciate and relate to the combining of the two artforms, but even moreso, recognize the beauty, history, and spirit of the State of Nevada!
Tom Bruner