Horror Film Music Cue [2'00"]

‘The Appearance of the Pale Child’ is a wonderfully creative orchestration of a diverse wealth of dark and varied colors and textures. The piece opens with glissando-ing harmonics in the violins and violas against percussion, dissonant clusters in the woodwinds, and transfers to the glissandos in harmonics in basses and cellos. Low glissandos in trombone harmon mutes, clusters in the extreme highs and lows of the piano, and unusual wood solos such as low flute and high bass clarinet in unisons paint unusual orchestrations that are rarely if ever heard. A contrasting section then emerges in a 6/8 time, with strings doing ½-step trills in 3/4 while trumpets and French horns play in 6/8. Flourishes in the woodwinds, snap pizzicatos, and low brass clusters then paint a strikingly eerie scene, complete with bell tree, sul ponticello cello lines, and aleatoric string pizzicatos. Thick globs of sound are then orchestrated across a vast swath of divided strings and then French horns in fiber mutes. Bass clarinets playing fast passage-work over mid-range, glissando-ing strings, then move the music forward to a climax that moves from p to fff giving timpani, harp, vibraphone, and suspended cymbal the needed final touch that adds pressure and intensity to give the exciting conclusion of the music a full, dense, and aggressive assertive push.