Seats Two

for solo piano & fixed electronics

Spare Bedroom

for horn in F with Live & fixed electronics

(opt. Disklavier)

Spectator

for flute, bass clarinet, horn in F, trombone,

violin, & double bass

Visual Training

for flute, clarinet, horn in F, trumpet,

viola, 'cello, piano, & percussion 

WORKS FOR FILM |

PORTFOLIO

for Solo Piano

 & Fixed Electronics

In the film Seats Two (1970) two women, Zwartjes' regular actresses Moniek Toebosch and Trix Zwartjes, are sitting side by side on a couch, looking at a photo of a mountain landscape. The physical attraction between the two is clearly perceptible, but the two conceal their mutual craving. Sexuality is suggested through the odd cuts and splices of the film's editing and the tactile quality of the images.

All is suggested, but nothing happens. Fascinated by the highly rhythmic nature of the films, and the obscured narratives, Seats Two is George's 5th re-scoring of a silent film by Frans Zwartjes. Her other compositions include scores to Spare Bedroom, Spectator, Sorbet III, and A Fan which have been performed both by Ensemble Mise-en and The Curiosity Cabinet.

Seats Two (1970) | 2015

for Solo Horn

Live & Fixed Electronics

(opt. Disklavier)

The original score to Spare Bedroom (1970) seems to assume an attitude of distance towards the film's viscerally disturbing imagery. While not necessarily cheerful, its meandering jazz piano riffs are blissfully disinterested, amplifying the horror of what is depicted with such cavalier irony that, by the end, the work as a whole seems to require moral justification.

George's re-scoring embraces an opposing tradition of horror film music, matching the brutal tone of the visuals with cold sincerity. The piano remains prominent, but is now frozen within a single, stark musical idea. Here, a sense of horror is generated not from grotesque discord between sound and image, but rather from the sense of an inescapable environment. The events depicted are no less perplexing in terms of their narrative relation to each other, but George's music leaves no room for us to doubt that we are in the presence of something evil.

for Flute, Clarinet in Bb, Trumpet in Bb, Horn in F,

Viola, 'Cello, Piano, & Percussion

The film for which this music was written, Frans Zwartjes’s 1969 silent film Visual Training, is likely to remind many viewers of David Lynch at his most expressionist, with its highly sexualized images of appetite and bodily anxiety. The dominant presence in Zwartjes’s film, however, is the camera itself; the characters, stone-faced and wordless as they partake in a surreal, erotic feast, repeatedly stare into the camera as though fending off a judgmental but perversely interested gaze. Ms. George’s score dwells on the claustrophobia of this standoff between decadence and shame. The layering of instrumental activity functions to convey a general sense of alienation within a finite and inescapable space, and each instrument seems endlessly frustrated by an inability to derive an extended melodic idea from its sporadic utterances. The piano, in particular, wrestles grudgingly with the stifling effect of its percussive role, its driving rhythmic pulse, isolated trills, and chordal interjections all suggesting a kind of passive-aggressive restraint. It is perhaps helpful to imagine such anxiety as a byproduct of the imposition of sound on images so pointedly silent. The music shares with the voyeuristic camera a quality of intrusiveness, unapologetic for its interest.

for Flute, Clarinet in Bb, Violin, Violoncello,

Double Bass, Piano, & Percussion

The Fall of the House of Usher, directed by Melville Webber and J.S. Watson Jr., is a surrealist interpretation of Poe's famous short story of a brother and sister under a family curse. Released in 1928, this unsettling work was heavily inspired by Charles F. Klein's film version of The Tell-Tale Heart, released the same year. With no dialogue, the film's emphasis is entirely on image, employing stark color contrasting, layering, and optical distortion.  Much of the footage is shot through prisms to create these lush, dreamlike visual effects. This score, while engagingwith the gruesome sense of foreboding that is Poe's hallmark, is equally sensitive to the strangeness of the visual environment presented to us on the screen.  The richly varied timbre, registral extremes, and percussive effects all coalesce into a soundscape whose madness is both wildly dramatic and inescapably alluring.



for Flute, Clarinet in Bb, Oboe/English Horn

Electric Guitar, Violin, 'Cello, Piano, & Percussion

The Tell-Tale Heart (1929) | 2010

Part No. 1

Part No. 2

Part No. 3