AMERICAN SOLITAIRE
COMPOSER’S NOTE
As the composer for AMERICAN SOLITAIRE, my adventure was to give life to a profoundly healing journey through sound, time, and melody. I found inspiration in the film’s deliberate, almost minimalistic design, and the way it contrasts the concrete realities of life with the ethereal landscapes of inner experience. In composing, I sought to bridge these realms by weaving themes, patterns, and otherworldly sonic spaces with very tactile and dynamically sculpted sounds. During my process, I created a 17-minute piece entitled “The Way Through”, which allowed me to stretch out and express a subtle and incremental yet ultimately dramatic evolution.
In my score, the piano might feel both familiar and made new, even transformed, in its extended sonic treatment. Its melodies and patterns form the starting point for resonances and halos of harmony which have a life beyond the initial keys which triggered them. Mallet instruments, voices, guitars, and strings all enter a metamorphic space as their sounds create ripple effects beyond the obvious. The music creates the subjective world of the bardo, where our protagonist Slinger finds a deeper understanding of human nature, suffering and redemption. The score is also tasked with evoking the heaviness of sorrow, the friction of conflict, and the bright shoots of hope which bring unexpected life to the next chapters.
It was a pleasure to collaborate with director Aaron Davidman in creating the music for this remarkable film, which simultaneously holds moral clarity and psychological complexity in its compassionate lens. While its characters are built from grass-roots research and listening to the real lived stories of American veterans, the film also embraces the reality of the imagination, bringing poetic expression to an inner symbolic landscape. In this way, AMERICAN SOLITAIRE builds bridges and heals emotional, social, political, and aesthetic divisions to synthesize a new way forward.
CREDITS
Music composed, produced, arranged, performed, and programmed by Ronit Kirchman
Recorded, mixed and mastered by Ronit Kirchman
Album produced by Ronit Kirchman
Score Coordinator: Miranda Su