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Ask Michael Whalen about film scoring — and specifically about improvising scores to silent films — and you'll find that he's in the dark.
In fact, so is his audience, whenever he delivers another of his Music In The Dark concerts. Nobody – neither the Emmy-winning composer/keyboardist nor his listeners – has any idea what he's going to play as the lights dim. But when the movie screen brightens up and the program of modern silent films begins to run, Whalen finds a way to invent a musical accompaniment on the spot.
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"I've always been fascinated by spontaneous composition," Whalen explains. "And I've been composing for television and film for 17 years, so the marriage of these two disciplines seems obvious."
His first Music In The Dark performance, in February 2004 at the Anthology Film Archives in New York, persuaded him that this marriage was even tighter than he had imagined. "There is in fact no difference between improvising and composing," he says. "Jerry Goldsmith once said that a great film score isn't separate cues, it's one piece of music with silences in the middle. That's something I never forget as I write a film score: For all the complexities, a single psychological structure is what governs the music. And that is the exact same process I bring to Music In The Dark."
Whalen gave his second performance in this series last November at Yamaha Artist Services, Inc. in Manhattan. "I played the first one on a Yamaha S90, which we ran through a PA," he says. "The second time I played totally acoustic on a Yamaha CFIIIS concert grand, one of the best nine-foot pianos ever made, in a room fitted with Yamaha Active Field Control (AFC) — an amazing reverberation system. They have transducers built into the ceilings and the walls, so I can create any kind of acoustic space I want electronically, without miking the piano at all."
Whalen's schedule overflows with assignments, including most recently music for films on PBS and Discovery and ad spots for Duracell, Optix, and Verizon. But he's leaving room for approximately two Music In The Dark shows each year; dates are already set for Boston and London. "I want to be known not only for the work I've done in television and film," he insists. "I want people to point at me and say, 'Hey, you're the Music In The Dark guy!' too."
