Roel's entry for the 2023 World Soundtrack Awards, for the game 'Abzû' by Giant Squid Studios. As a fresh change of pace from the gloomy Nosferatu soundtrack a year before, it led Roel to pursue a more bright orchestration style, with composers such as Ravel and Debussy being his main influences for this piece.

1922 Silent film by Bram Stoker, orchestral score submitted to the World Soundtrack Awards 2022. The music is inspired by various classical composers such as Wagner, Stravinsky and Boulanger. The musical contents starts off aloof and on the verge of tonality, but will gradually disintegrate into total madness, in line with the scene.

During the time of his master years at the conservatory, Roel spent a great deal of time learning how to orchestrate. For this project, he was particularly interested in the fierce, lavish musical language of the 1940s, under such composers as Erich Korngold. To do the old Hollywood style justice, he wanted to fill it to the brim with music, themes and other orchestral pleasures. It should be said that it is some sort of pastiche to the old Hollywood genre of the first half of the 20th century.

​The film itself is still in private domain, so it can't be shown along with the music.

'Musica Retorica' is an ensemble piece written for flute, oboe, Bb clarinet, horn, percussion, piano, violin, viola and cello. As the title suggest, the piece explores the intricacies and similarities between music and rhetorics. The piece is construed according to the 5-step roadmap that is provided within the study of the classical orators. One of the earliest - and most famous – classical speeches was Cicero’s 1st Catilinian speech to Roman congress. The entire basis of classical rhetoric was born with this speech.

​Roel took note of the many similarities between the way a well-structured speech is written, and the way many composers might go about writing their music. The inception is often an idea in a sea of possibilities, upon which the artist keeps building until he reaches the stage where they feel comfortable presenting his words (or music) to an audience.

Inventio, Dispositio, Elocutio, Memoria, Actio

This work follows the creation of such a classical rhetorical structure, and tries to mold the music according to these five steps. The music will bring you from dense, cell-driven, non-tonal spheres to a more ‘traditional’ musical structure. In the end, you will have been provided with an auditory representation of the construction of a piece of music (and, by extension, also a rhetorical speech).

The inspiration for this cycle was taken from various psychological conditions and diseases, wanting to convey the condition of each illness in song-form, and paint a clearer picture of what a performance with a specific condition would entail.

Roel opted for a very broad, accessible and popular angle as the main musical language, wanting to underline the seriousness of the disease, and show that anyone can be affected by psychological illnesses. Thus he went for a mixture of classical, contemporary, pop, rock, jazz and musical as the main focus of the music.