The Golden Walnuts

Abstract:

"The Golden Walnuts" explores the process and possibilities of composing an acousmatic storytelling for children, trying to fill in a gap of practice in the specific music genre. The story chosen for this project written by Christos Boulotis, a contemporary Greek writer of children’s fairy tales, has the original title: The three golden walnuts. It would be valuable for the purpose of this thesis to analyse the content of the story in terms of what the author intends to transmit through his story. "The Golden Walnuts" piece is not divided into different sections structurally, rather it should be perceived as a continuous storytelling process of simultaneity in narrative between the composed sonic world and the verbal narration. Among the issues to be considered was the creation of sounds that would reflect the minds or the ‘voices’ of the walnuts in an allegorical way. I considered the creation of leitmotifs reflecting each of the three characters of the walnuts rather, I created an intense sound world in order to drag and immerse the listener into the utopia of this fantastical story of walnuts that want to become children and then stars. The voice of the author/narrator carries on at almost the same pace modulated with some expressive inflections, while the composed sound world also carries on largely at the pace carrying various layers within it, creating an underlying rhythmic flow. This sonic character is potentially suggestive of being inside the bowl of the nuts as well as being part of a gathering around a fire.

The notion of 'character' dominates "The Golden Walnuts". The author/narrator is crucial but the central focus is on the three walnuts and the sound world escorting them. The role of a composer in a piece like that is like the one of a producer of an opera or a play who is facing the challenge of a given content and material, but who also has to invent a context around the characters in order to give depth to the story. The overall compositional approach is characterised by its simplicity because it is a work addressed

https://soundcloud.com/panosamelides/the-golden-walnuts

Source: Manual