The Hyperorchestra: Screen Music and Virtual Musical Ensembles

This book studies the ＂hyperorchestra＂ as used in music for the screen and draws from the intersection of practice and theory. The term hyperorchestra derives from hyperreality, a postmodern philosophical concept coined by Jean Baudrillard. The hyperorchestra is a virtual ensemble that inhabits hyperreality. It approaches music spectrally with the aim of becoming a more effective vessel for meaning generation. The book is informed by concepts from postmodern philosophy, such as hyperreality and Marshall McLuhan’s theory of media. The book is also informed by the author’s own compositional practice; it describes contemporary processes, current software tools, orchestration and instrumentation principles, and contemporary approaches to music composition (such as spectral music). In doing so, the book proposes a new perspective for analyzing contemporary film music that pinpoints the importance of the relationship between timbre, meaning, and the different narrative levels within an audiovisual piece.

Sergi Casanelles teaches composition at New York University. He has published several articles and chapters on screen music, and he has an active composition practice. He has written concert music for piano, chamber ensembles, orchestra, electronics, as well as music for the screen. He won the COM Radio Tutto Award for his solo piano piece Postlude to Chopin’s F minor Fantasy, and the III Orchestral Composition Competition Evaristo Fernández Blanco for his work From Hell: 4 scenes of Dante’s Divine Comedy.