Soon, undergraduate dissertations and essays will flood my desktop screens. Thus, the imperative, during the next few days, is to finalise production of ‘Image & Inscription’ in readiness for the sound engineers at the record company, and to begin assembling material for a public lecture-cum-article on the project. But to begin, I needed to remedy the sound file insertion/manipulation impasse that I encountered yesterday. The solution: turn the sound-clip editor back on. I must have switched it off accidentally while flailing around with my cursor.
The first part of the morning was devoted to establishing past precedents for musical, or otherwise sonic, interpretations Moses and the Israelites at Mount Sinai. Rossini’s Mosè in Egitto (1818) doesn’t deal with the Exodus narrative beyond the parting of the Red Sea. Cecile B De Mille’s original The Ten Commandments (1923) is a silent film, without a definite musical score (it would appear). Visually, De Mille’s conception of the events on the mount is sometimes magisterial and, at others, absurd:
The director’s remake, in 1956, features a dramatic orchestral accompaniment by Elmer Bernstein. Unbeknown to me, the jazz composer and pianist Dave Brubeck wrote an oratorio entitled The Commandments (2005). Beside Jewish cantillation of the text (which is reminiscent of plain song) — and to which I should return, for reasons besides — there’s also a musical based on the Ten Commandments, first staged in 2006, starring Val Kilmer. (I cannot bring myself to listen to it.)
After lunch, I returned to the sound studio with my observations/auditions on the ten sections. I perceived a slight imbalance towards the left-hand channel of the stereo field. (To me, this sounds like a titling picture looks.) Perhaps our ears have a natural proclivity towards one side or the other:
By the close of the evening, and my fifth pass over the set (which makes me sound like the angel of death), I’d arrived at a resolution. During the final edit, I managed to restore dynamic emphases that had been lost in the process of levelling. It remains for me to master the tonal profile of the final mixdown before closing the book of this part of the project:
