A New Sonic Palette

We’ve already teased our upcoming new collection (🎉) - but how did we get here?

Joe and I have been writing music together for about 15 years. When we started Rosefinch, we decided to do some analysis, both anecdotal and logical, of our successes and failures as songwriters over the last 15 years together and more than a decade independently before that. What we realized was that there are some key milestones in our process that help us take a song from idea to reality.

As Rosefinch begins its fourth year of composing, we’re excited to start to distill this process into a cohesive blueprint that all composers and songwriters can use. More on that later…

For now, we’ll focus on how we decided to write a second cinematic collection. Short answer: we love writing in the genre! Long answer: mood matters, and we believe modern cinematic music (more broadly put, orchestral) is a color that every story needs to have in their sonic palette. So, before we begin any collection, we do some research.

First, we unpacked the genre a little bit more. Like how there are millions of shades of the color blue, we know that every genre has nuance, so we went about creating a simple one-sentence overview of the collection that would help guide the writing. Here’s what we came up with:

Juxtaposed classical melodies & instruments (traditional strings, woodwinds, brass) meet warm, and sometimes gritty synths, textures, and pads.

Then, we looked for some artists in the space who exemplify this style but are also pushing the envelope. Here are the artists that we identified, as well as a composition of theirs that spoke to us:

• Hans Zimmer: Blade Runner 2049 (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) - exemplifies the combination of traditional instruments and synth textures.
• James Newton Howard: The Village (Score from the Motion Picture) - this film came to mind because of its use of traditional instruments with rich modern harmonic expression. The very movie itself is about the collision of ancient vs. modern and the fear that can often come when traditions begin to break.
• Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 in C-Sharp Minor: An iconic piece. We love the dark, futuristic tonality, and particularly, the use of the trumpet.
• Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring: Another iconic piece, this pushed the boundaries of what was possible with an orchestra in 1913, and the harsh rhythms can still be heard emulated in many modern film scores today, particularly from John Williams. P.S. This may or may not be why the bassoon is featured in the teaser above 🤫.

After researching and listening, we then collected some visual media references that could help guide the composition; the moodboard often influences the collection title, artwork, and track names.

As I (Pat) listened to the references above, I was reminded of Paris. I spent time there in 2011 and loved the marriage of traditional architecture with modern LED lighting, the ubiquitous café culture now with laptops and modern tech, and the modern metro stations next to the traditional Haussman-style buildings. It’s inspiring to reach back into history while still moving forward with innovative ideas. It often inspires me to a state of wonder.

So, that’s where we’re at. A modern cinematic collection is ready for the next phase of composition. What’s that, you ask?

More articles and music coming soon!