the world is founded on the wing of an elf" (Scott Fitzgerald). Music is such a cry. Shakespeare's sonnets are such a cry. The madrigals and responsories of Gesualdo. Or I Will by Thom Yorke: the sound of emerging silence and muteness. Silencing. A hushed image. Meridian. Solar eclipse. In the song in the middle of the film, the singer describes the desperate will of a father to protect his child in this world, in today and tomorrow, with all its everyday inadequacies and unbearable devaluations, in the face of small and large catastrophes. At the end of the film, in the epilogue Sunrise, we see the lovers as parents united with their child, experiencing the sunrise, looking hopefully towards a future together. Possibility.
What is said is always the opposite of what is unsaid. Negative of what remains untouchable, unspeakable. It is the same with the visible and the invisible. The audible and the inaudible. The essential work of a composer to find sound for a silent film is to track down the invisible. The unrepresentable. To stage the inner movement on the walls. That is UrKino. Composing this is comparable to photographing the deposits on the inner walls of our souls. Mystical and mythological shadow sound plays.
In silent films, the eye rules over the ear. The composer imagines what the director communicates on the visual language level. In Murnau's silent films, it is largely internal processes, conflicts and tragedies. The material is close to ancient dramas and Shakespeare's tragedies and tragicomedies - timeless and valid as long as there are people. Murnau illustrates this inner tragedy by interweaving realistic film scenes with memory and dream sequences. Music is continued reporting on reality with the means of dreams - surveying the inner space, suspending time in the midst of strangeness. My music on Murnau's silent film follows, internalizing it, its own means, strategies, parallel existing laws, its own (kind of) dreams. SEVEN SONGS for Sunrise dream Murnau's silent film. Listening to this film language, we have the feeling of touching something significant in an indirect way. I see the heartbeat of the movie. I feel the melodramatic aura that seems to move from within an opera. As a composer, I grope for the meaning of the inner film landscape and listen for points of reference. In this space between film and music I also create: HÖRspiel, SEHmusik.   Helmut Oehring in October 2013