This score was composed for the Pixar Animation and Walt Disney Studios Film Short, Piper. Piper is an award winning film short that shows a flock of sea birds who are searching for food on the shore. Among them is baby Piper being encouraged to join the group. The baby piper was willing to join, but failed due to fear of the waves. Because the baby piper was terrified by her last experience, she refuses to leave the nest. After that, she begins to notice small crabs digging for food and decides to follow them out of curiosity. When the waves crash onto the shore, she retreats quickly but, then, decides to explore. She realizes the beauty below the surface of the water and, shortly after, becomes an expert in finding food. This short film serves as a lesson in confidence and independence. The film won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 2017.
The original Piper score uses light woodwind instruments to create the melody combined with sound bites from nature, like trickling water in a river, and staccato strings. Additionally, there is use of simple harmony with strings and guitar, which builds a very quiet harmonic environment for the opening. The motive changes with the emergence of a long string melody and highlights Piper’s fellow birds hunting for food. High frequency piano notes accompany this melody following the contour of the plot. The mallet instrument combined with the woodwind’s quick rhythm spurs the movement of the plot and carries the audience along with it and contrasting Piper’s reluctance to keep up with the action. The string’s tremolo personifies the effect of the water and creates a more cinematic mood for the transitional period of the film. Lively guitar chords with high range legato strings passages and woodwinds conclude this score and lays the plot to a content rest as it resolves.
“Jimmy Johnson approached Laura Olsher with an additional script. ‘I’ve been thinking about something’, he said. ‘Wouldn’t it be fun if we made a Halloween sound effects record?’ ‘Sounds like fun’, Olsher agreed, ‘but not at this time of the night!’ Johnson handed her the script and insisted, since everything was set up to record.”
(Hollis & Ehrbar 2006)
According to this quote, sound effect is important to cinematic film because the film would be dull without music. Using Zhang’s own version of her film score composition in Piper, she talks about the importance of why it is important for her to write and enjoy the film score composition. Zhang said that it “emphasizes [the] director’s idea o[f] the film and makes the plot more interesting.” When the music connects with the audience, it helps them imagine an stories. From Zhang’s own score of Piper, she wants to create her own voice so that she can express her own thoughts about this wonderful short animated film.
“In some types of films, the importance – and foregrounding – of sound is obvious, but sound design is important to all movies. As film music scholar Robynn Stilwell wrote, ‘In the film industry, sound seems to be of greatest concern to those who produce big movies; we have come to expect teeth-rattling explosions and bombastic scores in modern blockbusters. In some respects, music stands in a special place within sound design. We tend to take speech and effects sounds.'”
(Buhler & Neumeyer 2010)
In the cinematic literature, it is imperative to catch the attention of the audience. With music, it drives through the plot and help composers to get an idea of how the film should be sound and done. With Zhang’s creative idea in Piper, she wants to use her own language to tell the audience of how she expresses towards the film. Any soundtrack is important to a film because it needs to be connected to a plot. When Zhang saw this film, she used her own composition score to tell the audience of how she felt about the film.
The use of sound effects in the musical score of a film is a popular application among composers of film music. Kevin Donelly (2013) claims that the combination of digital images and sound effects can enhance animation. This convergence, in the classical case, could be described as a crescendo of cymbals being emblematic of laughter of a soldier. These two elements compliment one another, thus creating a more poignant experience for the audience. (Buhler et al, 2010) Disney has utilized this technique in various ways. An example of this would be the Disney classic, The Old Mill (1937), which gained success even though it was a film without dialogue. It uses only creative orchestra to guide the narrative.(Goldmark, 2002) Frozen (2014) is a more contemporary example of the increased use of creative orchestration and use of sound effects in the score. In a particular instance, the music changes meter, from 4/4 to 6/4 to 2/4 and modulates through F major, E flat, g minor and f minor all in a matter of minutes. These techniques require professional performing level musicians to play them, which gives Disney an advantage, thus making them a unique company in this field. These innovations have grown to include culturally representative sounds like in The Lion King (1994)and Mulan (1998). (Anderson, 2014)
Zhang’s compositional decisions were influenced, in part, by her study of scholarship surrounding Disney film score and the like. Her idea with Piper (Re-score) was to create an accompaniment to the film that focused on the orchestra and percussion. Her goal was to juxtapose the Disney style by creating melodies that were less obvious but still synchronous with the animation. A major point of contrast between the original Piper score and Zhang’s re-score is that the re-score does not use guitar. The gentle timbre of this instrument serves as a transitional motif that maintains a lovely and leisurely tone throughout the short. Zhang omitted this in the re-score to adhere to strictly classical instrumentation. She chose to create the same lovely and leisurely tone with woodwinds. When asked about this in an interview with a peer, she said “classical orchestration sounds more coherent… [they] make the score more like a narrative” (see a transcript of this interview at https://friedheim.pressbooks.com/chapter/oral-history-3/)
The Piper re-score features full orchestra. Glissando scales on the harp are used to “vividly depict the character” in the words of Zhang. The composer chose to use woodwind instruments like flute, oboe, clarinet, and bassoon, in addition to the strings used in the original score to play staccato passages to add depth to the figures. To emphasize the emotional points in the plot, rather than piano, Zhang uses percussion. The strings tremolo mentioned in the detailing of the original score is replaced with woodwinds tremolo as a method of intensifying the emotional plot. Zhang insisted that adding more instruments and layering timbres adds dimension to the score and accentuates the plot.
