In the months leading up to graduating from Linfield University this week, senior Élana Gatien composed an original musical score for a film.

Spring is about a magical rite in an ethereal forest that dispels winter and initiates the season associated with rebirth. It was one of five, 3-minute animated shorts scored by students in a unique course at the private, liberal arts school in McMinnville that provided personalized instruction by an accomplished, professional film score composer on how to write music that accompanies another art form.

The project culminated with a recent screening attended by fellow students, faculty, and the public.

“Composing for film or TV has been a dream of mine, basically since I can remember” said Gatien, a music and creative writing major from Corvallis who grew up listening to scores by industry giants such as John Williams and Hans Zimmer. John Powell’s score for the 2010 animated version of How to Train Your Dragon was also a favorite. “I would love to keep doing that.”

The project was part of the Lacroute Composer Readings and Chamber Music Mentorship Program and was presided over by Associate Professor William Campbell, who landed at Linfield upon returning to Oregon after teaching 18 years at St. Ambrose University in Iowa. He commutes from Portland, where he and his wife live so they’re close to family, and also because of the proximity to a thriving music community.

“I’ve been going to concerts, just strictly new-music concerts, in Portland for months,” he told me when I met him over tea in January. “It’s awesome, it’s a great scene there. Right now, to be living in Portland with the new-music scene is incredibly exciting.”

Williams’ electro-acoustic scores provide the aural backdrop for documentaries taking on some grim material. As far back as 2009, he scored a feature-length film about acid attacks against women in Cambodia, Finding Face. He’s also scored two about refugees, 50 Feet From Syria in 2015 and 2018’s Lifeboat, which won several “best of” awards at film festivals. Most recently, he scored the 2020 Oscar-nominated short Hunger Ward, which documents the work of two female health care workers in Yemen.

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His music for the latter, particularly, recalls the adjectives employed on his website to describe his style: emotive, atmospheric, prismatic. While a Williams or Zimmer score sweeps the viewer through scenes of cascading action, Campbell’s music is meditative, but urgent, pulling you into a zone with a distinct “attention must be paid” vibe.

The dark stuff notwithstanding, Campbell in conversation and in class exudes cheerful, calm enthusiasm.

“I’m a positive guy, I think I come off as optimistic as well, but I really like listening to the dark, forbidding music, and I’ve written that kind of thing for a number of documentaries,” he said. “I’m always trying to find new ways of saying things. People keep asking me to write for difficult subjects.”

Another thing one learns upon visiting Campbell’s website is that he is “gifted” with a condition called synesthesia, a neurological condition in which the stimulation of one sense triggers another sense. He’s the second artist I’ve met in the past six months whose art is shaped by this unique mode of perception. Campbell perceives and hears musical notes as colors and geometric shapes, which he then manipulates at the piano and in the recording studio.

On occasion, that leads him to music that might conflict with collaborators on a film, in which a film composer is a contract employee. That brings him to an important lesson he imparts to students: “In film composing,” he said, “we really answer to the director and often the editor. They’re the ones who are putting the film together.”

“There’s a lot of back and forth. Some are just edits, just revisions, but some were, ‘Scrap that one and go back to the beginning,’” he told me in January, recalling past gigs. “That’s the process my students are going to go through, and I don’t know if they know that. So I’m going to upset them, and they’re going to find new curse words that have me involved in them. I know this to be true.”

This spring, I sat in on a couple of Campbell’s seminars with the five students in a windowless room in the university art building, across a grassy plaza from the music building. The far end of the room was packed with electronic equipment, computers, large screens, and a white board.

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On the first day in late April, Campbell had just completed a 60-second score that was used at the Ashland Independent Film Festival this year. It took a lot longer to compose and mix than he’d thought. As students took turns squeezing a stress ball, he described this real-world experience of frustration to remind the young musicians that hitting a wall is something that happens to everyone, but has to be worked through.

“It took me a little while to figure it out, I’m not going to lie,” he said, dwarfed by the equipment behind him. “It took 90 minutes to come up with something, and it was frustrating. ‘This is a 30-second thing, I should be done with this in like 30 minutes, or 45 minutes, that should be fine! Come on, man, are you a pro or what?’ I mean, that’s what started going through my mind, I started thinking, ‘Am I a bad composer?’ It happens almost every time.

“I wish that that struggle of an artist, doubting one’s self, wasn’t there,” he continued. “Sometimes it’s not. And once you’re in the flow and you let go of all that, sorry, bullshit, once you let go of that, then you can really start flowing. Do what the voice in your head is telling you to do.”

For the first assignment in the class, students were asked to score the same 60 seconds of film. Interestingly, on their own, each opted for silence during roughly the same stretch.

That was followed by the big assignment: scoring a 3-minute animated film made by a British company, The Cue Tube. The completed films include sound effects, but musically speaking, they’re blank slates. At the time Campbell acquired the license for the sampling of films students were to choose from (they each had to pick a different one), Linfield was one of just three schools in the nation using the resource, the other two being Cal State at Fullerton and The Juilliard School.

Over seven weeks, students created hybrid scores — parts synthesized and parts for acoustic instruments that would be recorded later. Linfield, Campbell said, has a “pretty healthy number of student composers” for the school’s size. One, Rain Émile Santiago, a 21-year-old from Washington who will be a senior next year, has been playing the piano since he was 5.

“My plans for post-university involve scoring for TV, film, and video games,” he said. “Though this was the first time I’ve written music for film, I felt the most in my element.”

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In the short Santiago chose, Wing It!, a playful, overly confident dog commandeers a makeshift spaceship built by a cat before it’s ready to fly — or at least to fly safely. Once in the air, chaos ensues, and Santiago’s score tears along breathlessly with the action, sounding not unlike what you might hear in one of those old, manic Saturday morning cartoons or a classic Disney short.

“I think when you are composing this sort of thing, there’s a certain amount of fun you have to put into it,” he said when the film was screened weeks later. “This is a cartoon, and there’s something in film composition called ‘Mickey Mouse it,’” and it’s just like scoring to the exact actions a character is doing.”

For another film, Charge, Avery Shankland, citing the score for Blade Runner as an inspiration, used synthesized music in a dystopian tale about a man trying to recharge his robot companion. Only at the very end, for the emotional payoff scene, does he bring in music played on a real violin.

Campbell conducted the acoustic halves of the scores, which were played by Linfield’s Collaborative Music Ensemble. The instrumentalists didn’t have the films in front of them; they just played the music, so it was a real treat for them to see the finished product at the screening.

Back in the lab, the synthesized and acoustic pieces were mixed. On the second morning I visited, in mid-May, I watched as Gatien listened to the score of Spring, this time incorporating real instruments with the film for the first time. It was clearly an emotional moment.

“I hadn’t gone into the studio since Wednesday [when it was recorded], so that was the first time I’d heard all of that on the good speakers in there, and it was just such a massive difference,” Gatien said. “The whole semester, I’d just been listening to the electronic version, so hearing the live instruments took it to such a whole new level. It was incredible. It was like it was suddenly breathing. It was alive.”

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All of the students’ films can be seen on the Linfield University Composers Studio channel. Campbell’s music is available on a number of platforms including Bandcamp.