Sergi Casanelles
Program Manager for Screen Scoring, Faculty
Music and Performing Arts Professions
212-998-5764
Sergi Casanelles is a Catalan-American composer and scholar born in Barcelona. His research approach combines analysis of the praxis with theoretical models. It focuses on the intersection between postmodern philosophy, technology, screen music aesthetics, and film language. He defined the Hyperorchestra as a virtual ensemble that takes advantage of technological innovations to provide a customized sound palette that generates unique meanings for audiovisual narratives. The hyperorchestra incorporates a spectral approach to music, whose purpose is the generation of meaning for audiovisual narratives.
As a composer, he has written music for piano, chamber ensembles, orchestra, electronics, and music for the screen. He has also worked as an orchestrator. He won the COM Radio Tutto Award for his solo piano piece Postlude to Chopin’s F minor Fantasy and the III Orchestral Composition Competition Evaristo Fernández Blanco for his work From Hell: 4 scenes of Dante’s Divine Comedy. This premiere of this piece was awarded by the Spanish PRO SGAE as one of the top premieres of the year.
He holds a Ph.D. and an MM in Screen Music Composition from NYU, a BS in Computer Science (UPC, Barcelona), a BM in Composition (ESMuC, Barcelona), and a BM in Piano Performance (Liceu, Barcelona).
Currently teaching:
MPATC-UE 1049 / MPATC-GE 2049 - Contemporary Scoring
MPATC-UE 1500 - Film music: Historical and Aesthetic Perspectives
MPATC-UE 1248 - Composing for film and multimedia
MPATC-UE 1247 - Scoring Foundations: Harmony and Narrative
MPATC-GE 2043 Graduate Scoring Foundations
Courses Taught at NYU:
MPATC-GE 2550 Screen Music: History, Analysis, and Aesthetics
MPATC-UE 1021/ 2321 Private music composition lessons
MPATC-UE 1192 Music Composition Undergraduate Capstone
MPATC-GE 2024 Seminar in Composition: Advanced Scoring Toolkit
Selected Publications
[Forthcoming] The Hyperorchestra: Screen Music and Virtual Musical Ensembles. Palgrave MacMillan.
[Forthcoming] "Atmospheres, Synths, and Spectral Transformations in Scores for TV." In The Oxford Handbook of Music and Television (OHMTV), edited by James Deaville, Jessica Getman, and Ron Rodman. Oxford University Press.
Mixing as a Hyperorchestration tool (2016). Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media: Integrated Soundtracks (eds) Liz Greene & Danijela Kulezic-Wilson, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.
Ph.D. Thesis: The Hyperorchestra: A Study of a Virtual Ensemble in Film Music that Transcends Reality (2015)
Conference presentations
Virtual Instruments, Interfaces, and the distributed role of music creation in Screen Music. Music and the Moving Image Conference (MaMI), May 2024.
The horror within: using the diegetic voice as the Seed for the Score for Men (2022). Music and the Moving Image Conference (MaMI), May 2023.
Spectral transformations and Synthesizers: Examining Mac Quayle’s music for Mr. Robot (2015-19). Scoring Peak TV Conference, July 2022.
When the Dialog is just a transaction: The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) and the integrated Soundtrack . Music and the Moving Image Conference (MaMI) June 2022.
Scoring Determinism: the score for Garland’s Devs (2020). Music and the Moving Image Conference (MaMI) June 2021.
Spectral transformation in drones as a harmonic device in Mr. Robot’s score. Music and the Moving Image Conference (MaMI) June 2020.
Unfolding complex movie worlds: the score for Annihilation (2018). Music and the Moving Image Conference (MaMI) June 2019.
Deciphering Timbre: a framework for analyzing contemporary screen music. Music and the Moving Image Conference (MaMI) June 2017.
The Organ in Interstellar's Soundtrack: a case study for Analyzing the Role of Timbre in Contemporary screen music. Music and the Moving Image Conference 2016
Music in the Post-Narrative Film. Music and the Moving Image Conference 2015
Hyperorchestra, Hyperreality, and Inception. CUNY GS Conference 2014, Music and the Moving Image Conference 2014.
Beyond the Diegesis. Music and the Moving Image Conference 2013