Philip Van Horne

vanhornep@gmail.com

Symphonic Pieces

Inspired by composer Murray Gold, whose work I know mainly from Doctor Who, I decided to write a group of themes for specific characters. I had an AI art program create inages for four characters: a heroine, a sidekick, a love interest, and a villain.

I then developed a theme for each character, and I wrote a suite that comprises all four themes. It starts out with a movement that is reminiscent of a marching band or drum corps opener, followed by a a mixture of waltzes and ballad pieces. All are tonally and thematically similar, sticking mostly to the key of D major.

This piece attempts to tell a story through only music. It's a love story, and I was pretty happy with how it came out. Two themes, represented most often by specific instruments, fall in love, grow together, grow apart, and ultimately reconcile. The themes weave together and perform calls-and-responses as they interact to tell the story.

The idea itself is I guess, sort of inspired by, or at least derived from Peter and the Wolf. Pieces like Peter and the Wolf and Holst's The Planets suite are most often referred to as program music or programmatic music. They are also occasionally known as symphonic poems.

However, Holst described The Planets as a "series of mood pictures," which is the description I think I like best.

Jazz and Swing

This is a swing-style jazz piece that's been bopping around in my head for a while now. It's written mostly using the F blues scale.

Honestly, I was in Jazz Band as a kid, and every so often I get into a Jazz/Swing mood and follow the Miles/Coltrane/Dizzy/Duke/et al. rabbit hole down a ways. This is the result of my most recent foray.

Scene Scoring

This scene is from an episode of the Knifepoint Horror podcast, used with permission from (as well as my eternal gratitude to) the incomparable Soren Narnia--the author, creator, and main voice actor of Knifepoint Horror.

The scene is freshly scored with original music throughout. The original release of this scene had no backing track to it, as is the original author's typical style.

In addition to the musical composition, some minor cleaning of the original vocal track was done in order to match the qualities of both the music and the narration.

The original scene can be found here in the episode "Circles" as well as on most podcast apps and services.

This is a scene from The Cosmonaut, a film released under a Creative Commons license. Visually, the scene was kept as originally released. Musically, the scene has been entirely re-scored, using some of the original spoken dialogue as well as public domain sounds from NASA.

All of the film's original footage and sound, as well as the launch sounds taken from NASA, are available on archive.org.

The scene as originally scored can be seen here.

Sintel is the third “open movie” made by Blender and released under Creative Commons. I’ve kept the original voice over, sound effects and voice acting, but I’ve written my own score for this scene.

The original scene can be viewed along with the rest of the movie here (link goes directly to this scene).

More info about Sintel can be found at sintel.org.

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