Overture by Bjork Brass Quintet - Digital Sheet Music

SKU: A0.1840067

Dancer in the Dark tells the story of Selma Jezkova (played by Björk), a Czech immigrant to the United States in 1964. She has a congenital disease that is making her go blind, so she is working as hard as she can (at the local factory) with the limited sight she has left to provide for her 12-year-old son, who will eventually develop the same condition unless she can raise the money for an expensive medical procedure for him. Her only diversion is her love for musicals: she lapses into daydreams involving musical numbers at several points throughout the film, often to her detriment. Nothing goes as Selma plans, yet she does her utmost to protect her son as her vision fades.

- Program Note from Wind Band Literature


Winner of Cannes Film Festival’s Palm d’Or in 2000, Dancer in the Dark is a genre-defying cinematic creation, incorporating elements of melodrama, documentary, musical, and experimental film, shot in the manner of cinema vérité. The audience is made to feel as though they are a participant, rather than an observer, in the tumultuous and descending trajectory of the main character, Selma.

The “Overture from Dancer in the Dark” begins by rising from the stasis of the opening pedal. As the music develops, layers of the brass chorale establish a haunting, shimmering, melancholic mood upon which a main theme emerges. This motif, indicative of Selma, is restated and elaborated, each time becoming simultaneously more urgent and inexorably entwined in the darkening complexity of the work’s underlying harmonic web. As quickly as the work crests, it dissolves back to a more stable form of the stasis from which it grew.

- Program Note from University of Georgia Hodgson Wind Symphony concert program, 24 February 2026.