"Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra"

I know just enough about music to be either dangerous or incoherent. Read music? check; notate it? check—I spent part of the night before we started shooting Hatboxes transcribing the beginning of Psalm 126 as it's sung in Hebrew....   

Birkat Ha-Mazon (Ps. 126)



But theory? vocabulary, even?  Not so much.

We met with a composer in early August, and he suggested creating tension through instrumentation (formal harp versus informal guitar) and lit up at my affection for the androgynous viola.

That was the easy part.

Being a lifelong writer and working in publishing, I can talk about writing in my sleep, and probably do. Thinking in pictures, I have no problem strongly expressing ideas about visuals.  But music? Sure, I'm passionate about it, but finding the idiom for expressing nuances, even simple "this rather than that, because..." beyond mere taste has me thinking in dimensions uncharted. It calls to mind the Star Trek: TNG episode where Captain Picard has to figure out how to communicate with an alien whose entire language is a recursive series of metaphors.

More Paris 1936, less St. Louis 1913.  Less minuet, more tango.

The music that originally caught my attention as expressive of some of the things going on in Hatboxes was "Pas du chat noir" by the Tunisian-French musician Anouar Brahem.  A moody, introspective piece featuring piano and oud (and, big surprise, accordion), its emotional tone eventually proved too dark and pensive (and let's not even talk about the cost of permissions).  The tune behind the Hatboxes pre-production trailer is lighter, but also lacks emotional range.  So now I've learned to say, "That stretch runs too sweet...the overtones at 1:15 are arresting, as are the quintuplets at :05," in addition to speaking Tamarian.

Susana Darwin