Have you ever looked up in the sky on a crisp winter morning and observed a rainbow-like halo encircling the sun? If so, you’ve seen a “sun dog,” a special phenomenon caused by the refraction of sunlight through ice crystals in the atmosphere. Inspired by this imagery, Minneapolis-St. Paul based producer Liquid Music launched their Sun Dogs collaboration with the Cincinnati Symphony and FotoFocus for the 2022 biennial. The project sought to align composers and filmmakers on equal creative footing as they partnered to produce new short-format films with original music that would be performed by a live ensemble.
A second iteration of this program will take shape this month as a touring concert performed by Alarm Will Sound, New York’s eminent new music orchestra. The three works that premiered in 2022 have been arranged by their composers – Arooj Aftab & Daniel Wohl, Rafiq Bhatia, and Devonté Hynes – to accommodate Alarm Will Sound’s chamber orchestra configuration, and will accompany their three original films, directed by Josephine Decker, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Mati Diop & Manon Lutanie, respectively. The concerts will be performed November 16 at the Scheidegger Center for the Arts in Saint Charles, MO, November 18-19 at Brooklyn Academy of Music, November 21 at the University of Minnesota’s Northrop auditorium, and November 23 at The Nimoy in Los Angeles.
Kate Nordstrum, Artistic Director of Liquid Music, explained to me in our recent conversation, “[Sun Dogs] was born out of conversations I had with composers who worked with filmmakers and loved film. Filmmakers admired their work and chose them to score their films, but there was always a bit of a lament like, ‘I wish we could collaborate a little more…’ it’s so much of a hand-off of material. The same sentiment exists in reverse, when composers or musicians are looking for music videos, but that’s also a hand-off.”
Kate Nordstrum — Photo by Cameron Wittig
She continued, “To combine both a filmmaker with a composer commission and a production budget for each film; it’s quite a tall order. You really need to find partners for each commission to make it happen. So, that’s the groundwork, and the hope is for Sun Dogs to be a series and do this on an ongoing basis.”
Composer Daniel Wohl played a key role in developing the concept for Sun Dogs with Nordstrom. Currently working in film and television, Wohl told me, “[Sun Dogs] was more of an opportunity to treat composition and directing like a composer-choreographer relationship, in a way that develops the narrative and the music in tandem, rather than responding to one another once something is pretty much done.”
Wohl teamed up with co-composer Arooj Aftab and filmmaker Josephine Decker to create Rise, Again. The film is the story of a mother who finds out that the money she’s paid for rent has been stolen by the person she’s subletting from. Forced to leave her apartment, she works to hold down a job and pay for childcare while living in her car. The trio employed an iterative process to create the music, with Aftab and Wohl working largely independently and sending various demos back and forth, which Decker subsequently played on set for the actors during production. At the core of the composers’ collaborative language are fragments of violin and solo vocals performed by Aftab, which Wohl expanded upon with broader orchestrations, mirroring the themes of both isolation and community in the film.
Film still from “Rise, Again,” by Josephine Decker, music by Arooj Aftab and Daniel Wohl
For the performance of Sun Dogs in Minneapolis, Wohl was additionally commissioned to compose a special prelude, entitled Old Friend, for pipe organ, voice, and electronics. “The title comes from one of the lines that Arooj sings in our collaborative piece,” Wohl explained. “I borrowed some of the lines and harmonies, and the idea of the pipe organ being like this homage to the silent era of film, when the pipe organ was accompanying these films a lot of times.”
Prior to participating in Sun Dogs in 2022, composer Rafiq Bhatia had just wrapped his first major (Oscar-nominated) film score with his band Son Lux for Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Bhatia explained to me, “We were really empowered and emboldened to be ourselves in the process of making that film, and I realized over time that that’s just a very rare directive. They really wanted us to do our thing, but to do crazier versions of our thing, and also be different versions of the people that we actually are, but that we haven’t necessarily been in music.” He went on to relate, “As much freedom as we did have in the process of making Everything Everywhere All at Once, you’re still serving the vision of a filmmaker, and there’s a lot more to think about than what you want the music to be like.
“When Kate [Nordstrum] explained the concept of Sun Dogs to me and this idea of filmmaker and composer being able to collaborate on equal footing, it didn’t take having been through the opposite experience so many times to understand just how different that was.”
Film still from “On Blue” by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, music by Rafiq Bhatia
Bhatia teamed up with Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul to create On Blue. Of the project, Weerasethakul said, “I reflect on the past years as we appear to have slept through the pandemic. Perhaps we are ready to wake up. On Blue was inspired by the moments of awakening, of sunrise.”
For Bhatia, this dreamlike quality and slow-paced visual language offered a compelling challenge, where music and a more sculptural approach to sound design might intersect; both are prominent dimensions to Bhatia’s work. He said, “I love that there’s almost no music in any of his films, yet the way that he works with environmental sound feels so sculptural and masterful and primary to the storytelling; this was someone who seemed very deeply attuned to and in love with sound, and that absolutely turned out to be the case.”
The third film, Naked Blue, is a collaboration between co-directors Mati Diop & Manon Lutanie and composer Devonté Hynes. An experienced composer working in contemporary music, film, television and pop, there is a transformational arc to much of Hynes’ music that moves in and out of various textures, often incorporating found sound and delicate, melodic structures.
Naked Blue’s documentary-style aesthetic, which follows an animated young dancer across an empty stage, seems a perfect backdrop for Hynes’ malleable, introspective language. Diop and Lutanie said, “Oumy is thirteen and the daughter of Valeria, a close friend of ours. Her dance training, particularly in ballet, is intensive, and we have long wanted to film her. The dramatic intensity of Dev’s musical composition accompanies Oumy’s movements, mirroring their magnetism, cohesion, and radical autonomy.”
Film still from “Naked Blue” by Mati Diop and Manon Lutanie, music by Devonté Hynes
Sun Dogs offers a beautiful, collaborative format for filmmakers and composers alike to sharpen their respective craft and think with new dimensionality in their creative process. These new works are art objects that ultimately flatten the separation between the movie theater, the concert hall, and the art gallery, offering a new space in which to create and consume.
As Nordstrum told me, “For each artist to surrender a little control is a good exercise. On this even playing field with a collaborator to tell a story together, you really have to release control. You’re still saying what you like and don’t like, but you’re not the only one in the driver’s seat. It can’t help but stretch you in a way that you learn from.”
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