simontonermusic.com @simontonermusic 2020: I am currently looking for opportunities to collaborate on film projects.I first experienced the world of film scoring when attending the recording session for Downton Abbey after being invited by John Lunn at the end of high school as part of the Young Talents Network at Edinburgh International Film Fes... Read More

simontonermusic.com @simontonermusic 2020: I am currently looking for opportunities to collaborate on film projects.I first experienced the world of film scoring when attending the recording session for Downton Abbey after being invited by John Lunn at the end of high school as part of the Young Talents Network at Edinburgh International Film Festival.I have always loved music so had applied to study Popular Music. There, my composition lecturer Haftor Medboe, as well as exposing us to new worlds of music and various compositional tools (orchestration, harmony and new methods) encouraged collaboration between schools: from volcanology to the college of art. Inherently, I became an enthusiastic collaborator. I studied music from Ligeti to Charles Mingus in order to implement it in 9 film scores while at university. I primarily used real musicians so I have first hand experience of multiple studio sessions and highly tuned organisational skills to make each one happen. Now my practice has encompassed electronic and production elements and I am as comfortable with sound design as composing for film with 10+ professional projects. I have continuously expanded my musicality, composed for a wide variety of media and had successful audience responses.My outgoing attitude to finding people to collaborate and make films with comes from a real enjoyment of the challenge of communicating with people to understand and establish ideas/intent and find how the music/sound can best serve the film. My success in music teaching exemplifies my aptitude for patiently communicating musical ideas in non-musical language, adapting to the needs of my interlocutor and creating variations on a repeated idea to find the variation which works for them.I would like to score fiction and documentary feature films and diversify in to games and podcasts.I intend to continue collaborations and forge new ones. With Niamh McKeown and her unique brand of dark scottish comedy, I hope shorts will lead to a feature some day. The style of the music I have written for her has had a strong retro aesthetic and sense of fun and ranges in influence from Alexandre Desplat’s restless ostinato score for Grand Budapest Hotel through Patsy Cline to Ennio Morricone’s big-sound-low-budget spaghetti western ensemble.In terms of other influences on my work I would cite Johnny Greenwood’s Ligeti-esque textural score for There Will Be Blood: I have employed a similar glissando textural polyphony of strings and colouristic effects in my textural scores.I have also been massively influenced by the approach of composers who take elements of electronic music and apply them to acoustic orchestral or jazz instrumentation. In film, my favourite example of this is Johann Johannsson’s score for Arrival which is almost entirely struck wood and the human voice post-produced into huge repetitive trance-like rotations. I continue to come back to music where layers of texture are built up to create an expressionist abstract.I want to make art that creates empathy through experience. I am drawn to the challenge of creating a tone to accompany documentary which treats the testimony of interview subjects with the gravitas it deserves while being compassionately subtle.i am enthusiastic about film and enjoy sharing this enthusiasm!Thanks for reading,Simon Read Less