My score for Nosferatu principally draws inspiration from two forces within F.W. Murnau's film: its basis on Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula, and the traumatic conditions in Weimar Germany in the aftermath of World War I. The trauma of war and disease, filtered through Murnau, makes a distinct mark on this presentation of the vampire myth.
The German imprint is strong on the music, particularly in the influence of the Second Viennese School - contemporaries of Murnau. Their expressionism was the musical equivalent of Murnau's work in film. Inspired by them, rigorous but expressive technique binds the musical fabric together. This fabric is studded with fragmentary or hidden quotations from earlier German composers J.S. Bach and Franz Schubert, while an extended parody of Richard Wagner actually quotes director Werner Herzog, whose own telling of the Nosferatu tale is a seminal work.
Rhythmically, each character's propensity for change influences different pieces of the musical texture, creating rifts in coordination. As Hutter races frantically around the house, preparing to travel to Transylvania, his wife Ellen slips into a catatonic state - musically depicted as the vibraphone races away from the accordion in the dying gasps of a deranged waltz.
Furthermore, Nosferatu clearly draws heavily upon Dracula, as did I in my initial forays into the composition. Much of the timbral material, that is, my palette of "sound colors," comes from auditory descriptions of events found in Stoker's novel:
". such a silvery, musical laugh, but as hard as though the sound never could have come through the softness of human lips. It was like the intolerable, tingling sweetness of water-glasses ... " (page 38)
"Somewhere high overhead, probably on the tower, I heard the voice of the Count calling in his harsh, metallic whisper." (page 47)
"... noises that used to frighten me out of my wits - the flapping against the windows, the distant voices which seemed so close to me, the harsh sounds that came from I know not where and commanded me..." (page 137)
These descriptions informed the creation of the electronic sounds, which surround the live musicians on their journey like an uncanny sonic fog.
- Paul Hembree