Why am I a Composer?: Farts in a Baked Bean Can?

AFX Industrial (film scores)

I haven't blogged in a while (and I can only apologise for that) but today I want to share with you some of the daily tasks involved when preparing ideas for a new film score ...

The Theme

One of the first things you need to get right as a score composer is the theme for each film, it's always helpful if the director has a set idea of the kind of score they want, as this can take a lot of the guesswork out of the task! Believe it or not, when I first started doing this, the more amateur the director was then the more I would be asked to 'guess' what sort of music they required! If I failed to guess then I didn't get the job!?

This is a bit like me thinking of a colour and asking you to guess what it is ... Pointless and combative, but thankfully I'm dealing with more and more professional directors who have a definite idea of the score they want. If it's farts in a baked bean can that you want as your score then let me know, I can do that! Just ask! Although I'd probably find a synthetic way to generate an approximation of that sound ...

Anyway, my point is it's better to tell the composer what's on your mind rather than letting them come up with all these wonderful, musical ideas for your new film: 'Farts in a Baked Bean Can II', when all you really wanted was farts. The Terrence and Phillip song in the South Park movie utilised farts in an incredibly creative way - it's one of my faves! But just think how dull South Park would be if the composer hadn't been asked to incorporate farts into that score.

I sat down with visionary director Antony Lane recently (I'm currently scoring his Invasion of the Not Quite Dead) and he played me all of his fave monster movie scores ... He did tell me later that he was worried about my reaction! My reaction was I loved it! I love music and especially classic movie scores, how could I not? It's totally my thing, even the most primitive low budget films can often have amazingly deep scores. I would have been more disappointed if he hadn't shared his passion with me!

This kind of breaks the ice a bit too, especially for directors who don't have a lot of experience in dealing with the idea of musically thematic material for their film.

The Nucleus of an Idea

So I will assimilate what the director wants and that will help generate the nucleus of an idea and at the very heart of that idea will be a simple choice of musical interval (3rds, 5ths, Tritones, minor, Major etc). For the non-musical among you these are simply distances between notes on an instrument, I would say that prior to any melody being written it's fundamental that a composer decides on the basic intervals they will use. No note exists in isolation and it is that simple relationship with the next note that decides the interval. Using the wrong interval at the wrong time can impact negatively on the feel of a score - this is the nucleus, it's even more important than the melody.

Once you have mapped out your intervals then the next major task is deciding on instrumentation - of course there are a huge amount of instruments to choose from! To simplify the process we can often think of instrumentation as a palette of 'colours' from the darkest, deepest Celli and Contrabasses to the sparkling highs of Violins and Piccolos in their upper registers these are just some of the colours we can use. But what about more esoteric instruments like the guitar or ethnic percussion? Well, of course these do have a place but you need to be careful as such strong 'colours' can overpower a score and lead the audience in a direction that may not have been intended! It's best to tread lightly when stepping outside the orchestral palette otherwise the score can become too dominant - large orchestras (although this sounds paradoxical) actually tend to 'disappear' behind the scene more than a solo instrument like a guitar would. I think the reason for this (apart from the audience expecting to hear an orchestra) is simply that many voices (instruments) are harder to hear than one voice individually.

The Physicality

If you follow me on Twitter then you'll hear me talk about a piece of software called Sibelius a lot - it's simply a way of writing musical notes on virtual manuscript paper. A bit like MS Word but for music. If you have even a passing interest in music then you will have heard of a 'sequencer' like Garage Band, Pro Tools, Logic, Cubase, Digital Performer ... The list is pretty long and as the years go by the format and usefulness of each platform tends to change, usually dictated by current trends. The reason I always go back to using Sibelius is that its fundamental structure is based on an idea that is around five hundred years old (traditional music notation).

So the physical, day to day aspect of what I do is inexorably linked to Sibelius, for some it is often hard to believe that the most compelling music I have ever written comes from what looks like a very dull word processing package! Take a look below:

That's pretty much it, but writing music isn't about funky graphics and anything that swerves your attention from those black notes on a white page is a no no. I'm sorry it's not more exciting for you to look at but I spend most of my time in this one piece of software ... I've now been using Sibelius for over ten years and after a while certain technical aspects just become second nature. In fact with a piece of scoring software like this you are only limited by the conventions of music notation themselves, that may sound constrictive but I can assure you that conventional music notation is infinitely flexible. Probably much more so than you'd ever imagined.

What goes through my head when scoring?

I know this is going to sound dull and un-artistic but, as I score I'm constantly comparing the intervallic relations of one note to another (which I touched on earlier), so it really is a question of mathematics. I'm constantly crunching numbers while I write music - I guess if you want to be a composer you really have to like mathematics, luckily I do!

Of course, there is an emotional aspect to any score and the goal is to make your audience feel the intended emotion especially when they hear the score for the first time! Without getting too bogged down in the mechanics of music notation itself, the emotional aspect of a score is like another layer that you build over the mathematical base. This layer can consist of dynamics (ff,pp), accents (emphasis on certain notes), articulations (pizzicato, arco) and playing techniques (such as legato and staccato). There are many more tools we can utilise to evoke emotion but I won't get into that here.

I think that a lot of the above, and more, goes through my head while I score and juggling that amount of mental data can be extremely fatiguing - and also time consuming. I'll often start to score at 09:00 and, before I realise, it's 18:30 and dark outside! I guess there is a certain amount of job satisfaction involved, I realised this when I discovered that I was an inverse clock watcher ... Rather than looking at the clock and saying 'oh no, is it only 14:25?' I find myself looking at the clock and saying 'oh no, it's already 14:25!' And I have soooo much to get through!

Until next time - peace to you all - David.