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Client: Tiffany & Co. · Partner: Director Claire Whittingham · Service: Penrose Audio — Davies Aguirre
This was not a commission. When Davies Aguirre encountered the original production for Tiffany & Co.'s holiday campaign "The Beauty of Possibility," something in it demanded a response — not a pitch, but a creative act. He reached out to director Claire Whittingham after seeing the film and, driven entirely by his own curiosity, composed an original score and sound design for it independently. The campaign follows Tiffany's iconic Bird on a Rock as it journeys through New York's snow-dusted streets, a figure of quiet elegance moving through a world it seems to have always belonged to.
The Bird on a Rock is still. That stillness — poised, unhurried, certain of itself — became the compositional starting point. Davies was drawn to the contrast between the crystalline precision of the Tiffany aesthetic and the softness of the snowy New York streets: two textures in balance, neither overcoming the other. The music needed to carry that same quality. It could not push. It had to hold.
There is something in a gift left unopened on a table — the weight of what might be inside, the way the ribbon catches light. The score was built around that anticipation: an opening that breathes and waits before it moves.
The piece opens with sustained strings — bows held long and slow, harmonic motion at a minimum. This was a deliberate choice to establish emotional depth before narrative arrives. The negative space in the opening bars creates room for the viewer to settle into the world of the film. As the Bird's journey unfolds, orchestral layers accumulate gradually: harmonics layering into warmth, mid-register voices entering with restraint. Nothing announces itself.
The harmonic language across the piece stays close to open, unhurried chords — intervals that feel unresolved in a way that reads as hopeful rather than tense. By the time the music reaches its fullest moment, it has arrived rather than arrived suddenly.
Against the sustained foundation, we wove in playful, rhythmic string figures — short, light bow strokes that follow the visual rhythm of the Bird's movements through the streets. These motifs carry the personality of the piece, its lightness and wit. They echo specific moments of visual delight in the film, picking up cues from the edit without ever feeling locked to them mechanically.
The bell-like voices of celesta and glockenspiel were threaded throughout as high-register texture — bright transients sitting above the string warmth, their decay shaped to suggest the kind of sound that follows you slightly after you've heard it. Rather than generic holiday sparkle, these instruments were voiced to feel like the reflective quality of Tiffany blue glass: clear, cool, precise.
Alongside the musical score, we developed a layer of subtle chime-like textures and airy sparkle elements — gentle high-frequency detail timed to visual transitions, giving the edit an additional tactile dimension. Particular attention went to the Tiffany Blue Box®: the sound design around the gift's appearance was shaped to carry weight — a sense of ceremony and delight that complements what the image already communicates.
The completed score and sound design demonstrate what is possible when compositional work is driven by genuine engagement with the source material rather than a brief. Every choice — the sustained string opening, the celesta's measured shimmer, the rhythmic motifs that track the Bird's movement — grew from close attention to the film itself.
Some of the most honest work we've made has been made for no one but the film.