When Mark Watters arrived in Rochester in 2017, he clocked the festivals right away.
He’d relocated after a decades-long career in Los Angeles scoring films, television programs and video games for Disney and MGM. A new job called to him: leading the Eastman School of Music’s Beal Institute for Film Music and Contemporary Media.
To do it, he’d have to plunge into a new kind of seasonal rhythm.
“We close up everything during the winter, and then when spring comes, we burst out and we want to just celebrate everything,” Watters said of Rochester. “It just struck me that every weekend there was a garden festival, a wine festival, a barbecue festival, a whiskey festival, a banjo festival.”
It gave Watters an idea. He met with Mark Bocko, the director of the University of Rochester’s Audio and Music Engineering program, to run it by him. The plan? Another festival, of course — this one dedicated entirely to film music.
The home of both Kodak and Eastman, Watters thought, was the right launching pad.
“I thought, considering the history of film and music and sound in this city, this would be the perfect place to do a festival,” Watters said.
Bocko agreed.
“My contribution was, I think I know how to go out and get some funding to get this thing started,” he said. “It’s a combination of having the thought and the inspiration to do it, and then turning that into reality is always the hard part.”
But not impossible. More than five years after their initial conversation, the Soundtrax Film Music Festival — billed as the first of its kind in North America — will run October 16-18, featuring a murderer’s row of visiting performers, lecturers and emerging ideas.
Marquee guests include Terence Blanchard, Spike Lee’s preferred composer; Carter Burwell, best known for scoring nearly every Coen brothers film; John Corigliano, whose work has landed him both a Pulitzer Prize and an Academy Award; and Roger Sayer, whose thunderous organ playing invigorated Hans Zimmer’s score to Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar.”
Some — like Blanchard, Corigliano and Sayer — will come to perform. Others like Burwell, composers Conrad Pope and Nan Schwartz and rare instruments expert Bruno Price will speak about their experiences in the industry. Watters and Bocko, who co-direct the festival, said these free sessions with composers help demystify the process for music students as well as film fans with keen ears.
“I can hear five seconds of a score and know that that’s Carter Burwell. Why is that?” Watters said. “So much of the fascination is, what was the discussion like between you and the director that led to that music? What did he tell you that made you then pick those notes and those colors? These are things that are never discussed.”
At least, not in North America.
Europe is a different story, boasting many celebrations of film music, Watters said. It’s not hard to get a composer on a plane to Poland or Belgium for a festival that celebrates their music. But to sell the same for Rochester, the Soundtrax team talked up the natural beauty of the area as well as the city’s continued love and support of the arts.
It paid off. Blanchard’s performance is made up of excerpts of several of his film scores, performed by him and his band, The E-Collective, along with the local Gateways Festival Orchestra. (His recent work on Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman” and “Da 5 Bloods” earned him an Oscar nod for each.) This presentation is unique, Watters said, and shows how a festival allows Eastman to program special events that go deeper than traditional concerts.
For example, Jeff Beal, the namesake of the school’s Beal Institute, composed music for Ed Harris’ Jackson Pollock biopic as well as the HBO shows “Carnivàle” and “Rome” and the Netflix series “House of Cards.” He also happens to be good friends with Corigliano, Bocko said.
In that case, why not screen “The Red Violin,” the 1998 film that landed Corigliano his Oscar, with a live score? The music is much more complex than a typical production, but the pull of Eastman faculty — and the sheer talent of both instructors and students — allowed them to arrange such a special show.
“It’s not performed that often because the violin part is so darn hard,” he continued. “We have a wonderful violinist here on the faculty, YooJin Jang, who’s the soloist for that. We had all these pieces that just lined up. If you’re looking for a good reason for doing [the festival] in Rochester, that’s a really good example.”
The demands of a changing industry also necessitate that Soundtrax reckon with them. Watters and Bocko have programmed panels on video-game composition, emerging immersive audio technologies from giants like Dolby and Apple and even a session dedicated to artificial intelligence in music production.
It is an academic institution, after all. But Bocko said the goal is to keep the message digestible.
“I’ve been to my share of mind-numbing technical conferences,” he said, “and so one of our rules right from the start was, if anyone tries to put up a slide that shows an equation, we’re going to boo them off the stage.”
The Soundtrax finale, fittingly, is a live-to-picture performance of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 2” by the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. It further cements the collaborative nature of the fest, Watters said, and highlights not just the art itself but also the robust arts community in Rochester.
On top of that, he said, there is nothing quite like forming an emotional bond with a film. That relationship often begins with the music.
“I think that’s what’s fun about going to a film music concert: it reminds you of when you saw it,” Watters said. “Music is the best way to bring you back into that initial experience.”
Soundtrax Film Music Festival runs October 16-18 with events at Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre, Kilbourn Hall, Hatch Recital Hall and Third Presbyterian Church. Ticket information and full schedule available at soundtrax.org.
