Creativity Cache - Inception
The inception of something is its starting point. A musical composition can have many different starting points, and to begin this series, we’re going to explore the score of the 2010 movie Inception by Hans Zimmer as the starting point for a composition.
Music as the inspiration for other music is a time-honored tradition. The inspiration can be stylistic, as in Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 1 (Classical Symphony), or particular musical content can be the inspiration. For example, Chopin and Paganini both wrote Variations on a theme by Rossini.
Unlike the composers who use musical material and announce it in their titles, Zimmer didn’t let on, but waited for his audience to discover the integral connection between the score ofInception and the concept of dreams within dreams and shifting between dreams and reality that are an essential element of the plot of. The key to the puzzle is Édith Piaf's “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” ("No, I Don't Regret Anything"), a song in 12/8 composed by Charles Dumont, with words by Michel Vaucaire. The original recording of this song is used in the movie as a signal to the characters to wake from a dream. But how does this connect to Zimmer's score?
After camiam321 posted a video on YouTube showing how the music accompanying characters' movements between levels of dreaming and/or reality is related to the Piaf song, Zimmer was interviewed by the New York Times. In the phone interview, he said that rather than taking a section of the song, as the video suggests, he worked from one beat that he manipulated in multiple ways. Starting with 12/8—which has natural divisions of 2, 3, and 4—Zimmer used “subdivisions and multiplications” of the original meter to represent levels. Zimmer also changed this beat in a number of other ways, altering pitches, instrumentation, tempo, and dynamics.
1. Your task is to create variations on a single beat and use them in a composition.
2. The score is set up for Piano and has no time or key signature. Click I to change instruments, T to add a time signature, and K to add a key signature.
3. Open the Ideas Hub by clicking on Window > Ideas (Sibelius Users). Click and hold on ideas to make them play repeatedly. Choose an idea to work with and paste it into the score or create your own starting beat.
4. You may want to begin by playing with the beat and creating variations. You can save your alterations using Edit > Capture Idea (Sibelius Users).
5. Besides the techniques that Zimmer used to alter his chosen beat, you could try layering, antiphony, or creating a sequence of changes, as in a chord pattern.
