interview

The Charles Ives Music Festival launches a nearly year-long season with a concert by cellist Julian Schwarz, pianist Marika Bournaki and friends on Saturday, November 2 in Ridgefield, Conn.

Kate Remington talks with Festival Music Director Paul Frucht about how the new festival continues Ives' legacy of musical curiosity and innovation. 

Bungie's latest Desiny 2 expansion, Shadowkeep, brings Guardians back to the Moon, only to discover that it's plagued by terrifying living nightmares, and long-vanquished enemies that need to be conquered again. Composers Mike Salvatori and Skye Lewin told me that not only did they write some of the most terrifying music ever for Destiny, but they blended in subtle hints of sorrow and brash heroic moments as well.

In The Long Return, created by Max Nielsen, a young orphaned lion cub is retracing the last journey he made with his mother. Dale North composed the soundtrack, and he told me it was some of the most emotionally satisfying music he's written in a long time. 

Dale says the opportunity to write the score for The Long Return came at a busy time, but he was so taken by the story of the young cub, and the emotions he felt thinking about how the cub's mother is with him in spirit, that writing the music became a kind of refuge for his spirit.

As soon as composer Petri Alanko heard about Remedy Entertainment's paranormal thriller, Control, he knew he had to write the music for it! Petri was intrigued by the story of a seemingly-normal woman, Jesse Faden, who arrives at the well-hidden Federal Bureau of Control, looking for answers to her brother's disappearence. All is not as it seems, and Petri created a soundtrack that also isn't what it seems, including samples of his espresso machine and a friend's screeching brakes.   

The first time Tom Salta heard a synthesizer in the early 1980s he was hooked on the sound, so composing music for Wolfenstein: Youngblood by Machine Games was a dream project with a chance to recreate that vibe. Tom only used sounds and samples that were available in the 1980s to to create a pitch-perfect accompaniment to a story that follows the twin daughters of William Blazkowicz as they try to find out how he disappeared.