The Album Features Music Composed By Laura Karpman and Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum
Lakeshore Records will release the REGARDING SUSAN SONTAG – Original Soundtrack digitally on December 23, 2014, and on CD March 10, 2015. The film features original music written by spouses composers Laura Karpman and Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum.
“The director, Nancy Kates, loves music and wanted it to tell a large part of the story,” said Karpman. “She encouraged us to be bold, intellectual, sexy, dissonant and melodic.”
Kroll-Rosenbaum added, “Nancy commissioned Lewis Klahr to create film collages and left those with little or no narration. Kates often referred to these pieces as ‘putting the film in a blender,’ and we had fun with that idea. She also developed a rich, visual tapestry that dissected time metaphors and typography, and this gave us tremendous space to spread our musical wings.”
REGARDING SUSAN SONTAG is an intimate and nuanced investigation into the life of one of the most influential and provocative thinkers of the 20th century. Passionate and gracefully outspoken throughout her career, Susan Sontag became one of the most important literary, political and feminist icons of her generation. The documentary explores Sontag’s life through evocative experimental images, archival materials, accounts from friends, family, colleagues, and lovers, as well as her own words, read by actress Patricia Clarkson. From her early infatuation with books and her first experience in a gay bar; from her marriage in adolescence to her last lover, REGARDING SUSAN SONTAG is a fascinating look at a towering cultural critic and writer whose works on photography, war, illness, and terrorism still resonate today. More than any other thinker of her day, Sontag was watched, viewed, photographed and stared at. She was gazed at, and she looked back, very carefully, particularly at language and metaphor and at photography and what she called “the ecology of images.” REGARDING SUSAN SONTAG gives viewers the chance to watch Sontag while she examines the world.
To compose the music for this special HBO Documentary, director Kates turned to the married team of Juilliard-trained composers Laura Karpman and Nora Kroll-Rosenbam. Through a rigorous musical approach, coupled with conceptual and progressive uses of technology and recording, Laura Karpman’s music reflects the acoustic lens of a true 21st century American composer. With four Emmys and an additional seven nominations, an Annie nomination, and 2 GANG awards for her video game music, Karpman is one of a handful of female composers scoring visual media. She recently collaborated with Raphael Saadiq scoring the musical BLACK NATIVITY for Fox Searchlight. She was tapped by Steven Spielberg to create an epic score for his 20-hour miniseries, TAKEN. Karpman’s concert music is widely performed, and she has received recent commissions from the Pacific Symphony, The LA Opera, The Cabrillo Music Festival and clarinetist David Krakauer. Karpman is completing the recording of her multimedia opera ASK YOUR MAMA, a commission from Carnegie Hall for Jessye Norman, The Roots, jazz singer, and orchestra, on a text by Langston Hughes. Dr. Karpman is looking forward to composing a multimedia piece for the Pacific Symphony to premiere in June, 2015.
Composer Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum leads a vibrant musical life. Her film scores, appearing at Sundance, Tribeca, IDFA, Telluride, theatrically and on HBO, include STOCKHOLM, PENNSYLVANIA, REGARDING SUSAN SONTAG, POWERLESS/KATIYABAAZ, MONEY FOR NOTHING, STEALING SUMMERS, ON LIFE’S TERMS, THE SHATTERING, THE APOCALYPSE ACCORDING TO DORIS, JOBURG, MESMERIZE ME, FOREIGN LANGUAGE, BACK TO THE FRONT, AND TEMPORARY OBSESSION, among others. As a producer, she has worked on such titles as KINECT DISNEYLAND ADVENTURES, BLACK NATIVITY, THE GALAPAGOS AFFAIR, THE NAKED OPTION, CRAFT IN AMERICA, VITO, IN JUSTICE, AMERICAN MASTERS, ACE VENTURA PET DETECTIVE JR., GUARDIANS OF MIDDLE EARTH video game, KUNG FU PANDA 2 video game, and THE TOURNAMENT.
Said Karpman and Kroll-Rosenbaum:
“In composing the music of Regarding Susan Sontag, we built three distinct conceptual spectrums out of which we wrote music.
The first spectrum polarizes the mind and ideas on one side and the body and corporeal experience on the other. The music of ideas is insistent, percolating, filled with energetic bursts and echoes. The music of the body is lusty, sensual, jazzy and sexy.
The second spectrum explores pain, with war on one end and illness on the other. This music is more experimental, bending time and pitch, and unearthing an undulating suffering and sorrow. It is external, looking at the world in global combat, and very private, as Sontag endures cancer and scrutinizes the difficulty of being a patient.
The third spectrum is focused on family, examining Sontag’s personal narrative as a child and an adult on one side, and her relationship with loneliness on the other.
The instrumentation builds on these dualities, featuring two quartets – a modified string quartet (two violins, baritone violin and cello), and a saxophone quartet, plus double bass, piano, guitar and percussion.”
