Overture from Dancer in the Dark

For Brass Choir and Timpani
Duration: 4 min

Winner of Cannes Film Festival’s Palm d’Or in 2000, Dancer in the Dark is a genre-defying cinematic creation, incorporating elements of melodrama, documentary, musical, and experimental film, shot in the manner of cinema vérité. The audience is made to feel as though they are a participant, rather than an observer, in the tumultuous and descending trajectory of the main character, Selma.

The Overture from Dancer in the Dark begins by rising from the stasis of the opening pedal. As the music develops, layers of the brass chorale establish a haunting, shimmering, melancholic mood upon which a main theme emerges. This motif, indicative of Selma, is restated and elaborated, each time becoming simultaneously more urgent and inexorably entwined in the darkening complexity of the work’s underlying harmonic web. As quickly as the work crests, it dissolves back to a more stable form of the stasis from which it grew.

- Program Note from University of Georgia Hodgson Wind Symphony concert program, 22 March 2017

This arrangement of the overture models the well-known version from the movie soundtrack Selmasongs: Music from the Motion Picture Soundtrack 'Dancer in the Dark. It was written for and premiered by the St. Olaf Band.