Arts and Events Calendar

7 p.m. Video Presentation and Lecture

8 p.m. Concert

Modern filmmakers go to extreme lengths to provide a sense of historical accuracy in setting scenes of the past. Yet they often ignore the same detail in scoring their stories. Directors enlist composers who score movies about Queen Elizabeth to the strains of Mozart, or King Arthur’s court to the sounds of heavy metal. The results range from the sublime to the ridiculous, and every instance raises the same question: How should the past and music intersect in films?

Our own cinematic vocabulary can trace its origins to the era of the Renaissance. Composers like Monteverdi, Biber, Farina, Vivaldi and Bach all strove to capture nature in an increasingly codified vocabulary of recognizable musical gestures. They created musical soundscapes depicting such elements as the sounds of battle, the cries of animals and the final sighs of Jesus on the cross. These gestures are the direct ancestors of the kinds of modern cinematic conventions mastered by the likes of John Williams or USC’s own Elmer Bernstein.

In this concert, the USC Thornton Baroque Sinfonia will perform programmatic music by Monteverdi, Biber, Farina and Vivaldi that depicts scenes from everyday life as well as the grand themes of love and war. Several of the pieces will be juxtaposed with silent films and their corresponding cinematic scenes, highlighting how we see and hear the past. Ultimately, this performance will explore how the present hears the past, how the past remains present, and how the two intersect.