Marcel Castillo

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Abstract

Beautiful Life is a deeply personal and introspective piece that represents a year’s worth of hard work, growth, and education gained during my pursuit of a Masters in Scoring for Film, Television, and Video Games from Berklee Valencia. My aim with this project was to create something that represented me as an individual and drew from my perspective on life as well as included many of the feelings that we, as humans experience, in our life. The piece follows the journey of a woman’s life from birth to death and serves as a means through which we can observe life from a holistic perspective. Throughout this year I learned a lot about myself and experienced many of the same feelings of fear, doubt, happiness, and fulfillment as my protagonist faces in Beautiful Life. I arrived in Valencia with a background in Jazz having never written for orchestra before, unlike many of my classmates who came from the classical tradition. I was concerned that my background and approach might prove to become an obstacle so made sure to immerse myself in the world of orchestration and concert music during my time at Berklee. During the process of educating myself in orchestration and concert music, I learned how to merge my musical sensibilities with what I had learned at Berklee and develop on my foundation rather than change it. The process of creating the script, writing the piece, preparing a mockup, orchestrating it, printing the score and parts, and finally conducting the whole thing at Air Studios was truly instrumental in my development both musically and personally. Pausing to appreciate life is a core principle found in Beautiful Life so, in homage to this, the following paper aims to reflect on the process of my culminating experience and take time to document and appreciate the journey.

Publication Date

7-1-2023

Campus

Valencia (Spain) Campus

The Making of Beautiful Life

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