Norman McLaren

Early Scottish-Canadian filmmaker Norman McLaren (1914-1987) was once described by composer, music theorist, and mathematician Milton Babbitt as “the first electronic musician.” In addition to his pioneering work in animation, the electronic soundtracks McLaren created for his own films employ astonishing foresight and a characteristically precise methodology. They also crystallise boundless creativity, wit and whimsy, and illuminative brilliance into a unique insight to his remarkable mind, with or without visual accompaniment.

As an animator, McLaren was renowned for utilising or inventing techniques at their very vanguard and shaping to his needs the rudimentary technology of the era. Many of these techniques and technological adaptations, developed at the National Film Board of Canada over the 1940’s and 50’s, would eventually become adopted into standard practice for animation. He also blazed new trails for soundtrack composition: having heard the glue of spliced film reel produce sound as it passed through his equipment, he began meticulously applying his own cuts and notches to the tape and measuring the frequency values of the tones these striations would emit. Over years of refinement, he created a series of cards to correspond to eight octaves of musical notes, frequency by frequency, and to recruit these cards to compose his soundtracks.

Despite his acclaim and recognition within the world of film and animation - he won an Oscar, a Palme d’Or, is a favourite of George Lucas’, and is recorded in UNESCO’s cultural heritage archives (none of which interested him) - Norman McLaren is no Walt Disney. His work is unflinchingly outré. Seeking out experimental, innovative, and unconventional modes of storytelling, his creative expression went even deeper than pioneering methodology and a prolific output, becoming part of the man himself as his working hours in the studio became longer and longer as his career blossomed. Even his straightest films - and their soundtracks - are decidedly odd at their core, revealing not only a playful and joyously childlike sense of humour, but also the perpetual pursuit of perfection that fuelled his creative output throughout his life.