Budafulmusic

This Sunday afternoon (October 4) at BJU is the second of a series of sacred programs known as vespers. For this specific program, I was asked to composed 25+ minutes of music to accompany 6 video segments that will appear in between sections of live drama and choir music. If you are in the Greenville area and would like to attend, performance times are listed on the BJU calender of events.

The six video segments mentioned earlier are a telling of John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost. This is an ambitious thing to attempt in a 40 minute program! Obviously much had to be left out of the 2-inch+ thick book. Various actors narrated the different characters in the story while the drawings of Doré’s Paradise Lost are displayed on screen and played out as the narration progresses. My job was to score the music, most of which is synthetic. I scored primarily to the narration track after I read the script. I didn’t see the visual material until I was done writing the music, after which I made several edits! I used a friend of mine’s voice, DeLaura Talbert, for portions of the score and they are some of my favorite sections. I also used my own voice as a bass drone for the more devilish parts.

This program combines so many artistic elements and comes together so well which makes the message of the program all the more powerful. God takes bad things, evil, problems that we create because of our sin and turns that very evil into something good.

Here are some audio samples of the music sans narration:

PL segment 3

PL segment 5

PL6 redemption