LIBRARY NOTES
Leonard Lionnet
Library Staff Member wins Academy Award
Sunday, June 1, 1997
Leonard Lionnet, a composer and staff member of the Library (going on four years), was recently recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his musical score to the film Erosion, which won the prestigious Academy Award for Student Films. Directed by Robert Gelber of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, Erosion is a narrative puzzle, told through visual images and orchestral music, depicting a man's inner journey to recollect his past loves.
Growing up in New Orleans, Lionnnet didn't begin to study music until he enrolled in the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA), a special high school that has produced many musicians, including Wynton Marsalis and Harry Tanglewood. At seventeen, he began composing, and his first orchestral work was performed the next year at Tanglewood. After receiving a B.M. from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, he moved to New York and is now a Ph.D. candidate in music composition at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Trained in classical music and orchestration, Lionnet has branched out beyond the concert hall into other types of composition. Through Everett Aison, a writer and professor at the School of Visual Arts he met while working at the Library, Lionnet began writing music for films. "It's totally unlike concert composing," he says. "It's a subversive form where you are really creating an emotion without the knowledge of the audience. The score has to dance with the film."
Lionnet has composed for film, TV, concert stage, modern dance, and ballet, and his works have been played and performed throughout North America and Europe. His next project, after he finishes his Ph.D. dissertation next year, may be a score for an upcoming Broadway musical, and he will continue to experiment with various kinds of musical mediums.
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