In Short Scores, Eye on Sound playfully pushes at the boundaries of film music. We asked a new generation of musicians and composers to create new mini film scores to accompany a short piece of film of their choice from Eye’s collection. Jacco Gardner chose Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race (1899).
By Thijs Havens19 August 2022
I am Jacco Gardner, multi-instrumentalist, producer and composer. Besides making music and images under my own name, I also play bass guitar in W.I.T.C.H. and I am one half of the electronic duo Bruxas. In addition to that, I also occasionally work on film soundtracks.
I love to see how much tension and energy there is in this fragment. The rowers who gain so much speed on the strength of their own bodies, and the powerful wind that can be seen in the same direction in the water and the flags. They make a very lively and exciting whole.
I'm not used to feeling such riveting energy in images as old as this one, so I found it very inspiring to drift away in this imagery while making the music. It really felt to me like the past suddenly magically came to life.
Coincidentally, just before I started this, I installed a hundred-year-old Kodascope rear-projection screen, and put the images on it during an improv session, which worked very nicely. The music was actually recorded live directly during this session. I use generative composition software from the 80s to compose interactively, creating a large performance element during the composition process. This has recently become my new method and I hadn't used it before for making a soundtrack, which made it a very nice experiment.
Every three weeks, we will add a new clip accompanied by fresh new music to the Short Scores collection, which will therefore keep growing.
