Anna Drubich is a Russian-born composer of both concert and film music, and has studied across Europe and North America. A student at the illustrious Screen Scoring program at the University of Southern California, she began working in Hollywood film as an assistant to composer Marco Beltrami. In our conversation, we discussed her path to composition, her most recent film score, and selecting significant projects that have the power to affect positive change in the world.

You’ve studied music all across the world. You’ve studied music in Moscow, you’ve studied music in Germany, and you’ve been in the United States. How did you end up becoming such a world traveler?

I was born in Moscow and I studied piano performance from when I was a very little kid. I grew up in a very famous film family in Russia. My father, [Sergey Solovyov] who passed away two years ago, was a very famous film director, and my mom [Tatyana Drubich] is an actress and somehow, for me, growing up in Russia was a little bit difficult because as a teenager, I always felt like all my successes were somehow connected to my family’s famousness. I think it was subconscious, but I really wanted to try and study and work somewhere where basically nobody knew the names of my parents. So, when I was seventeen, I moved to Germany to study in Munich at the Academy of Music. It was a fresh start for me and I really loved it, being kind of a no-name person and starting everything from scratch and figuring out if I could actually do something. It was my teenage obsession, so I studied in Germany for classical piano performance and composition. I actually started studying composition earlier in Moscow; my father noticed me writing something all the time and performing some of my music. He asked his very old friend and great composer, Isaac Schwartz, who was a student of Shostakovich, to teach me a little bit of composition. When I was sixteen, I would go to his dacha near Saint Petersburg for the summer, and we would study scores and talk about music. It was mostly educational, like just introducing composition. We were comparing some recordings of Brahms symphonies, like, “Let’s compare recording of [Willem] Mengelberg conducting it to Bruno Walter,” or something. It was very, very inspiring and, you know, my first realization of what’s going on in this world.

When I was seventeen, I moved to Germany. There was a very good composer, Enjott Schneider, and somehow composition was really taking over. Basically, I was not really interested in classical performance and I really was headed into the composition world, and that’s how my first score happened. My father asked me to write a waltz for Anna Karenina with the movie he was shooting by that time, and that was my first composition in film. From then, I started more and more writing for film. While I was studying in Germany, I realized that I wanted to try to work for Hollywood movies, and I applied for the USC (University of Southern California) program, and I got in. I came [to Los Angeles] to study for one year and when I was studying in the program, I met Marco Beltrami, my dear friend and very famous film composer, who actually offered to me to work for him as an additional writer, and that’s how I started.

ANNA DRUBICH

Wow, that’s a fascinating career arc, to go from, “I’m going to be a pianist,” to. “I want to be a composer,” to, “I like composing, but maybe I’ll go do film,” and not just any films, but Hollywood films.

I’m still writing a lot for the concert world and stuff. I really enjoy writing for film, so I am managing to combine it and I’m very happy with it because me writing only for film would be a little bit frustrating. I feel [the concert] world differently, and they can still influence each other because in a film score, I try to find some parts where I can use all my possible contemporary compositional techniques versus in concert music, I still sometimes manage to have some real melodies.

Is there a lot of sharing of ideas between concert and film music? Do you use ideas in your concert music that maybe weren’t quite as appropriate in film music or vice versa?

Well, it’s not like I think about separating these worlds. When you have this skill of doing [film] music, then it transforms into concert music. In some ways, I use harmonies and I use melodies and they use patterns and all of [these techniques]. I actually had a conversation with Sofia Gubaidulina, the genius composer, and she told me that she was working in the Soviet film music quite a lot, and she wrote some iconic scores for animation films like The Adventures of Mowgli, and this is great music, but used in the film, and she said this is totally okay and great for composers to work in film to create a name and experiment with different stuff. In film music, you sometimes have a decent budget to have an orchestra to play with, so everything is building your skills and techniques and your knowledge about music. She said [scoring films] will always help you when you go to write a big concert music piece. I follow this advice. My other teacher in Germany, Enjott Schneider, told me that he also started writing a lot for film because in the concert world, you write a piece and then you try to figure out who’s going to perform it and if it’s an orchestra, it can take years until it will get its first performance versus in film, where it has a schedule, budget, and deadlines. This is all fast; you write the music and, “Boom,” in a couple weeks, you’re on stage with the orchestra and you hear it performed with great musicians. It’s really great fun for composers.

Do you have any particular influences on your music or is there anyone’s music that you admire, either concert or film?

I listen to a lot of music all the time. It depends on the project I’m working on. For example, now I’m working on a string quartet and I’m listening to different kinds of modern string quartets trying to figure out what can influence me and where I can get ideas from. It’s the same with film music. If I’m like on some sort of genre movie, like an action-thriller, I try to find some composers that always inspire me. I can’t listen to every film composer that exists, but there are some names that I really love their work. Trent Reznor, I love his work. I like the work of Johnny Greenwood. There are some other big-name composers that I really admire and I listen to.

GEORGINA CAMPBELL IN BARBARIAN. PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY OF 20TH CENTURY STUDIOS

American audiences are a little familiar with your music, particularly from the film Barbarian, which was a sleeper hit a couple years ago, even though it wasn’t very mainstream. What did you enjoy about scoring that type of film that left viewers with such a visceral reaction to so many scenes?

First of all, it was a very talented movie. Sometimes I just like when the director sends me a link to watch it. It was creepy as hell, and I really couldn’t finish watching it because I was like, “Oh my God, this is really scary,” but somehow you just watch it. It’s funny, in some moments, the energy is very lively. It always catches my attention when there is such a brilliant, talented work. I have to say, I was a replacement composer for this movie. They reached out to me when it was like three weeks until the dubs start, so it’s like literally two [weeks to compose], right? The whole score in three weeks was a challenge. I kind of like to have this challenge sometimes: “OK, we have three weeks, here we go,” and because it was the director’s big debut movie, he was really hands on, knowing what he wanted. We discussed every sound, every second where music should [start and] stop. It was very intense because, again, he was sitting with me in the studio for almost two weeks out of the three weeks trying to polish stuff.

It was an exciting project. I created a lot of custom-made sounds for it because the director told me that he really loves all kinds of wood blocks. I recorded and collected all kinds of really weird wooden instruments. I pitched them down, I processed them, and I created loops, like pulses and stuff. This is the stuff I really love doing in any score, but particularly, I think in horror movies, it allows you to create all these very interesting creepy sounds outside-of-the-box, versus a drama [score], which uses more conventional instruments and sounds. [Custom sounds are] what I love about working in horror movies.

I love the fact that you’re able to take some of those objects and manipulate them digitally to get just the right sound. That’s something that we couldn’t do 30 years ago.

No, of course, and I think this is the key nowadays, because I try to [create custom sounds] with every movie I’m on. In the beginning I just try to collect the sounds and mostly create them from scratch, where the sounds will then create the soundscape of this movie. Maybe I will still use violin and cello, but in the background, there will be this custom-made sound that creates a uniqueness to the movie. That’s my approach nowadays.

TILL FROM THE MASTER AND MARGARITA

The most recent film that you’ve scored that’s been released is The Master and Margarita, which is a Russian film based on the novel by Mikhail Bulgakov. What was your initial reaction to being asked to participate in this film?

I have to say that when [director] Michael [Lockshin] reached out to me about this movie, it was end of spring 2022, so the war [in Ukraine] was already there and I was tremendously shocked and I decided that I wouldn’t work for Russian projects. It’s not that I don’t want Russian projects, but all the projects that they offered me, like comedies and drama stories, it kind of felt like we are to do all these stories while this big tragedy is happening and nobody talks about it or writes about it. When Michael showed me this movie, this was ironically, the only movie I got to score that was really talking about regime repressions and the whole thing that is unfortunately happening now in Russia. I was blown away with this movie then. Of course, this is a Bulgakov story, which is an absolutely iconic piece for Russian culture, and it is a huge challenge because there have been so many attempts to adapt it in film and music and ballet. Schnittke was writing music for one of the adaptations! The whole context of the story and how the story played nowadays [seemed right].

I started working with Michael, but because of our position in the war and everything, the whole project was stuck a very long time in limbo. Nobody knew if it would be released or not because they ended shooting at the end of 2021 and then the war started [in February 2022] and when the movie had to go to post-production, nobody knew how to finish it and approach it. It took us a year and I was always asking Michael, “Is it actually happening?” We had time and I’m glad we did. I had time to figure out the whole construction of the score, and it’s a very big score. It’s almost two hours of music. It’s a lot of different character lines, a lot of themes. I actually created seven different themes for each of the main characters and storylines. During the film, they somehow develop and cross into each other. They’re always building something, so I always felt like Michael and I were building this huge country of music for the project. We recorded [the score] with a big orchestra, chamber orchestra, jazz band, and choir.

You had mentioned Schnittke since he had scored one of the adaptations of the film that was made in the 1990s, but not really released until almost 2011. Did you listen to that score at all, or did you listen to any of Morricone’s music from the Italian adaptation in the 1970s?

You know what? I did watch and listen to Schnittke’s stuff. I actually didn’t listen to Morricone’s stuff. When I started listening to all these things, I was sharing it with Michael, the director. He was like, “Please stop listening to all this stuff. Please, please stop. We’re doing a different story. Don’t even reread the book because the book is also different from this [movie].” I have to say that his temp score that was in the first draft he sent me was totally different and I could say totally wrong. It actually took me time to figure out what are our themes because there is a special theme for the time that is happening, and then there is a Master theme, and then there is a Love theme which then transforms into the big epic Flight theme.

TILL FROM THE MASTER AND MARGARITA

I actually read a lot of articles written by Bulgakov about music. It’s funny because Bulgakov was a very avant-garde writer, but as a music lover he was very, very conservative. He hated Stravinsky’s music and he really loved Charles Gounod, who wrote the Faust opera, which is very romantic, conventional music. Same with Berlioz and the Symphonie fantastique. So, I kind of researched on that level. For example, the majority of Falstaff [author’s note: the opera by Verdi] is based on a kind of operatic gestures and accompanying like we would hear in an opera. There are recitatives, if you know what I mean. But then it transfers to jazz; many people thought that jazz was the devil’s music. Right in the beginning everyone said okay, so we did this, whole intellectual research, which usually is never noticed by the audience. They just think there was some music playing underneath, but I did put some thought into it.

That actually leads me into two questions that I had ready for you. The first one is about the music for [the character of] Woland. He’s, of course, the Devil who comes to visit Moscow. You had mentioned that his theme, or at least his music, is very recitative-like for opera. How did you choose recitative for his style rather than something a bit more dissonant or something even a bit more melodic, since he’s this smooth talker who’s pulling all the strings?

There are several versions of his music. There is one that is a sort of ironic, sarcastic waltz that plays in some moments that this bass line developed from his main motive that is like four notes. When we started working on the movie, we had the major scenes. First, there was a Flight theme, there was a theme for Master meeting Margarita, and there was a conversation of Berlioz and all of them on the plaza. This took us, I don’t know, half a year to figure out just this? We were reinventing and then, like I said, the temp score was not working for Michael, it was not working for me. It was just there to somehow fill out the silence. We really thought what’s the balance from comedy going to sarcasm to insanity to them realizing it’s the Devil, and then going back to reality figuring out he’s not actually real––it’s just in Master’s imagination. It was a whole process and this whole cutting-off- Berlioz’s-head scene was placed to the side. I think it took three months just to do different versions and figure out that we will have this trumpet playing with jazzy improvisations on top of operatic gestures, and then the crazy trumpet plays. We had a very fun and interesting creative process of realizing it.

“When you work as a composer you have a right to choose between projects. I try to choose a project that has some meaning, some importance, some attempt to speak about stuff that is important to speak about.”

This is just for Woland, and then there is a whole development for Pilate’s music and there is a whole development for the Love theme, and the Master theme combines with the Time theme when he is in the hospital and we figure out that they treat him, or torture him, with an electroshock. This is, I have to say, my first complex score where you really work like a Wagner opera with so many Leitmotifs, then they somehow collaborate and evolve. This was the first project where I had this space and this scale of a project that I could try all these big forms.

The jazz band, as you said, the jazz music perhaps representing the devil, or perhaps something that is banned or forbidden in Russia, has a huge role, particularly in the restaurant. How did you decide on the jazz band? And how did you make it American jazz from that time?

Oh, I have to say the song was pre-produced before they started shooting so I didn’t deal with the song. I just did the score, you know? It was Michael’s idea [to include] “Hallelujah,” also based on some of Bulgakov’s work. I don’t really recall. There are so so many little details; Michael and his writer, they really did huge research on the book and there were so many versions of this book and it was unfinished and then the widow [of Bulgakov] finished the book, and were versions where, in the ending, Moscow was on fire and then the original ending where there’s no fire. They created the whole screenplay. It’s not a new story, it’s a much more complex story.

STILL FROM THE MASTER AND MARGARITA

The entrance to the Satanic Ball as Woland is hosting it and Margarita is there greeting everyone. I think this is, perhaps, my favorite part of the film, and my favorite cue as well. Could you talk a little bit about how you came up with the structure of that cue because it feels so different from everything else that’s happening, even though I know [musically] it’s not, but just harmonically and instrumentally it feels different.

We kind of switched back and forth between reality and book and [Master’s] ideas, how he’s going to write it, and this scene is our first integration or dive into the book as it is, so I tried to create this very expected sound of Satan’s Ball where I have choir singing some text in Latin and percussion doing some more marching stuff. I actually have to say this was just a fun cue to write. This is a very straightforward scene, so we don’t have many layers of context.

You’ve done a few other projects, of course. One of the biggest ones that you’ve been involved with was the documentary film on the life of Alexei Navalny, who just recently passed away, and the documentary itself won awards, both the Oscar and the BAFTA for Best Documentary Feature last year. Can you tell us a little bit about that particular project and the type of music that you wrote for that documentary?

Especially now it’s very devastating, this whole story and tragedy and death. Today he was buried in Moscow and so many people came to say goodbye to him. I was approached about this project like two weeks after he was arrested when he came back to Moscow and for many Americans, and I think for the majority of the world, this was a very new story and I noticed all my American friends who watched the documentary [are shocked by] the whole poisoning thing, but for me, being Russian and knowing him for many years as an opposition leader and knowing all his videos that he made about corruption, I totally knew his work and I think he was a real hero. He’s a very controversial person, but I think his last five years, he really became like a Biblical hero.

In the beginning of 2021, he was returning to Russia, so we started working on this documentary and I tried to figure out the theme for this inner force he has. How does it sound? He was always talking about this bright future Russia has, like a free Russia existing in the future, and I tried to imagine with music how it would sound. So, this was my goal. I ended up musically collaborating with an incredible composer, Marius De Vries, and he did a big part of the movie as well. Now, when you realize what happened to him, I don’t know how to describe it. I can’t formulate that.

STILL FROM DESERT ROAD

I’m sorry for surprising you with that [question], but it seemed important and I wanted to get your opinions and thoughts on that.

Yes. Somehow, it makes me happier when I think that I am a part of a collaboration. Some projects really mean something or maybe make a difference. I know it’s maybe stupid to say, “Oh, music can change this and political stuff.” When you work as a composer you have a right to choose between projects. I try to choose a project that has some meaning, some importance, some attempt to speak about stuff that is important to speak about.

For example, we can talk about a different project I just finished. I scored a play that was an off-Broadway show called Our Class. It was about the tragedy that happened during the Second World War, where Jewish and Catholic people were living together in a Polish village. When World War II started and the Germans came to this village, the Polish people burned the whole barn packed full of Jews, their neighbors. It’s a real story that happened in 1940-41. I wrote music for this project; these days, I would just really like to work on some meaningful sort of project.

You have a new film coming out that is set to be released within the next couple of weeks titled Desert Road. It’s a hybrid horror/thriller/sci-fi film. Did you get to use some of those horror techniques again, and how did you come up with the musical strategy [for the score]?

It’s a very interesting movie because it is a mix of horror, but also a psychological thriller and dramatic. Eventually we realize that there’s not a real danger there. Everything happens in the main character’s mind and her psychological fight with herself, trying to get out of an inner loop, trying to force herself [out]. I like the movie. I thought the main actress was fantastic. It is a little indie movie that I recently finished and I’m very happy it’s going to be premiered at the South by Southwest Festival on March 10th. For this movie, I had basically the same approach as I do these days: I create the sounds. The whole movie is in the desert, there were no other locations in it. I tried to record the stones and all the stuff that is possible to imagine with this kind of picture and create loops with it, but interestingly, not just shaker stuff, but weird sounds. And once I have this palette, I usually play it to the director and say, “Hey, these are the sounds. This is not the music, it’s just the sounds. What do you think?” I think that directors, even if they don’t have any ideas about music, they always love that something is custom-made for the movie. They just love this idea, like, “Oh, actually you’re really working and not using an existing thing.” I played it to Shannon [Triplett, the director] and she loved it and we started to work with these sounds plus some other musical elements on the score and it is a very talented movie. I think it’s not a straightforward horror or thriller, but it has this mix of elements which makes it interesting and unique.

Adam Janota Bzowski is a London-based composer and sound designer who has been working in film and television music composition for over a decade. He made his “breakthrough” with his score for Saint Maud, earning a British Independent Film Award (BIFA) nomination for Best Score in 2020. He followed that with well-received scores for Here Before and The Marsh King’s Daughter, the latter of which was featured in “The Best Scores of 2023” at OnTheScore.com. Adam’s music is featured in two upcoming and recent films, Out of Darkness, which premiered at the 2022 BFI London Film Festival, and earned another BIFA nomination for Best Score, and Femme, a film that challenges the notions of love, relationships, and masculinity. I had the opportunity to speak with the composer in mid-February via video call. Our topics ranged from music in those recent films, music education, and some of our most cherished music.

Before we really get into talking about your recent film scores, could you tell us a little bit about your background and what led you into music composition?

I was always really fascinated with sound from a young age and I think that’s really pretty much what I still define myself as to this day. I don’t really think of myself as a composer. I think of myself as more like a sound collagist, you know? I remember we had a piano at home, and I was very drawn to this instrument because it was very interesting as a sounding thing to experience.
So I learned how to play the piano kind of on my own. People taught me Boogie-Woogie blues and 12-bar blues. My mom tried to get me lessons, but I rejected the rigidity of music theory. I immediately connected with this instrument and then someone would be like, “OK, now play crotchets,” and I was like, “No, I feel nothing for this,” so I unfortunately rejected music education, but retained a love for exploring sound.

Later I went to University of Brighton and I studied something called Digital Music and Sound Arts, which was a kind of hippie version of music. I learned about Steve Reich there, audio installations, music as art; really cool stuff. [We also learned] music production coding and how to use DAWs and that was really important for me because it was a foundation into all that [sound creation]. But it was really difficult to make a living from music straight out the gate. In fact, at university, they were like, “Oh, don’t worry, with your degree you can become an accountant if you don’t become a musician,” and I thought, “Oh, I see.” I was massively disillusioned, but my root into [composition] was sound design. There were loads of composers, but not many sound designers, so obviously, me being interested in sound, I would make stuff for short films and animations and slowly that kind of melded with music. The bridge between the two became much more opaque and you couldn’t really tell what was music and what the sound design. That’s basically me.

ADAM JANOTA-BZOWSKI

You were talking about sound design in your background, so I’m sure you had an experience with Varèse and Poeme Electronique, the audio-video installation at the World’s Fair in 1958 I think it was. What sort of composers were you really drawn to at that point in your life?

For us, Iannis Xenakis was a main one. Steve Reich, like I said earlier. I remember so clearly and I don’t know if you have this, but in a piece of music you discover for the first time and you’re instantly transported to exactly where you were. We were in a dark room in Studio One in the university and they played 10 minutes of the first section of Music for 18 Musicians [by Steve Reich] and I was just utterly blown away. I’d never experienced something like this. This cascading like a feeling in my bones; I’m still getting chills just thinking about it. This idea of phasing, even in Come Out, which is that tape loop piece, is just incredible.

Obviously, the other [significant composer was] John Cage, the complete opposite [of Reich]. 4’33”, this idea of, “What is music,” because his whole thing was about sound. Sitting in a room and listening and these two things crystallized in me so much, this idea of, “What you can explore music to be?” Before that I was into Slipknot and metal and a big barrage of sound, but then I discovered music as art. Music has an exploration of thought, like being philosophical and academic at the same time whilst still being beautiful. It completely changed my life.

Going back to your point about being transported for the first time you hear something, my experience with that is hearing the Vaughan Williams Tallis Fantasia. I was in my bedroom in high school, 16 years old. My mom checked out this CD from the library and said, “Here, you have to listen to this” and I put it on and just sort of stood there. The other one I have is Sigur Rós. I was in London in November 1999 doing some research at the British Library and I never got adjusted at the time change, so I was up at 3:00 AM and flipped on MTV UK and there was their first single, “Svefn-g-englar,” and I just sort of stared at the TV for six minutes and went, “Oh my God, this is the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard.”

Hold on. Is that the one that starts with the “dum” [makes sound]?

Yeah, with the sonar ping.

Oh my God, that’s my funeral music! Literally, I’ve written it in my will. That band! I think I found that album later because I got brackets first [the album titled ( )]. Post-rock is another thing that just massively transformed my life and further to what you said regarding turning on the TV, especially late at night and finding music, is an incredibly important aspect of my personal musical upbringing, that sense of discovery because it’s very personal and it’s also unplanned so you’re just watching and then suddenly something stops you, right? I found so many bands that way and I don’t really know if we have that anymore because streaming doesn’t really permit that kind of discovery.

STILL FROM OUT OF DARKNESS

Right, MTV used to have “120 Minutes” on the weekends where you would find all the really cool stuff. I remember in the 1990s they would have all sorts of fascinating electronica like Photek. Photek is not dance music; it’s thoughtful drum and bass where you have to pay attention to it because it’s always changing and the rhythms are so intricate, and you’d get Future Sound of London and you’d be sitting there thinking, “This is incredible. Why don’t they play this during the day?”

Absolutely! But there’s something about the late-night aspect of it, where it’s this semi-hypnagogic where you’re half asleep, and there’s also a romanticized aspect of it, too. It’s like writing music at that time because you feel like the rest of the world is asleep and it’s just you and you’re in this little cocoon, right? And discovering music that way, it’s the same thing. This [music] is mine. This is my private little moment.

That was totally me with Sigur Rós. I got back to the US, and you couldn’t buy it in the US. I had to order import CDs and everyone’s like, “What the hell are you listening to?” I kept saying, “You don’t understand! This is amazing! I found it in London at 3:00 AM!” My friends would ask, “What were you doing up at 3:00 AM,” and I’d respond, “It doesn’t matter.”

Yeah, you’re missing the point, dude! [laughs] I absolutely love that band.

Let’s talk about a couple of your brand-new film scores. I guess they’re not “brand-new” since Out of Darkness premiered about 15 months ago at the BFI London Film Festival [in October 2022]. But the film was released in the US on February 9^th and it’s received a lot of critical acclaim over here. Critics really are enjoying it. As you were scoring this film, were you able to see the quality of the film as you were working through it?

Oh, I never know. I am a terrible judge. I am constantly amazed at films that ever get made. [laughs] When I’m getting the edit, it’s so scrappy and so rough and there are so many things still to do that I’m like, “What the hell am I working on? What is this?” Editing as a job is basically like alchemy. It’s like some kind of magic and you don’t know bad editing until you see it.
So at the beginning I didn’t. No idea if it’s good, but I’ve got a job, so I’ve got to make sure that I do a good job, but with this, I knew it was special because it was unlike anything that had been done before with the material. I like to call it like, a fictional nonfiction film; it’s not real, but there are historical accuracies. There are definitely anachronisms, but it could have happened exactly like this, and that is so cool. It seems like a weak word, but “cool” is the most important thing about this film. I just thought it was such a cool film to work on and I’m just so glad. This is my magnum opus. I feel like I could die happy because I’ve done this film.

STILL FROM OUT OF DARKNESS

Let’s talk about the instrumentation for your music, because we have so much electronic music, but then we have lots of acoustic percussion, and we have all sorts of other instruments that had to be created from found objects. What sort of acoustic instruments were you able to use for this score?

If we’re going to go 45,000 BC, we’ve got to try and make something that feels right, so I got very academic at the beginning, very philosophical, because we had a long time to welcome the film. I spent about a year on it, and I was asking myself these questions: What was the purpose of music? What was everyone doing for music back then? They sent me down a rabbit hole, but the only evidence I could find of music musical instruments was this Paleolithic bone flute that was found, which is made of the wing bone of a vulture. It had these crude holes drilled in it, and I met this guy, Barnaby Brown, who had a one-to-one recreation of this thing. He had this bone flute and I was thinking, “This is literally the instrument that they would have used,” so we had to use that. He is a Paleolithic expert on instruments and he had different things made out of wood––a duduk-type thing and an aulos, which I think is Greek. The aulos kind of has a drone pipe and another [pipe] you can play the melodies on, and he put a reed in this bone pipe because the reed would have decayed in time. We don’t know if it had a reed or not, but I swear to you, straight out the box, this thing sounded like an Irish jig, like, you just couldn’t not play Irish folk, kind of Gaelic mountain music. I said, “No, we can’t do that, it doesn’t work. It just sounds like we’re like on the Titanic or something.”

“The instruments just create an incredibly savage and brutal sound, which is exactly what the film does as well.”

I wanted to use things that would have been relevant to the time, so animal skin drums, things made out of bones, lots of wood, because that maybe made sense, wood blocks, claves, just wooden sticks, so it’s an incredibly percussive score. But then I also found this guy in Australia, who used conches and I thought, “That’s an incredibly natural object that straight out the gate makes a tone.” His name was Colin Offord, and he made these incredible noises and they ranged from a tritone which is quite small to huge but billowing things, and he also had things like the horn of a kudu. I got to use all these crazy wind instruments that just created incredible textures.

It’s really fascinating that you’re using these things because there are historical precedents for this, of course, like Jerry Goldsmith in Planet of the Apes, using Ram’s horn and all of these other found objects for percussion. We’re presumably on a planet that is so technologically unadvanced that that’s the sort of instrumentation that they would use. And your score falls into that realm of musical composition in that you’re following in the footsteps of someone who’s already done it. These characters, yes, they’re human, but they are as technologically unadvanced as we could possibly imagine. We don’t see any wheels anywhere, right?

Yeah.

Everything is on foot and they have a spear for hunting and the girl has a little knife carved out of flint or rock.

It’s like a plain blade, yeah.

There’s just no technology and it’s wildly foreign to what we’re experiencing now. I think it’s so fascinating that you’re able to connect that with the instrumentation.

The instruments just create an incredibly savage and brutal sound, which is exactly what the film does as well.

In contrast to all of that savage music, the opening and the conclusion of the film are both based on stories that the young boy is asking to hear and that music is very different. It has a lot more hope in it than the bulk of the film. What was it like composing that music?

Generally, the way I work with most films, if I have the time, is I will make sketches before I get a script or a pitch deck of images and stuff, and the penultimate cue before the credits roll, which is called “Like us,” it was actually a sketch. I’ve done these recordings with Barnaby, so that’s all the bone flute stuff. I generally tend to write naturally, very sad, miserable music, you know, which is why we like Sigur Rós. [laughs] And this was one of the pieces that I wrote as a sketch. It had a funeral vibe to it anyway, so it made sense when they did the edit. Andrew [Cummings], the director, just dropped it in and it worked perfectly. He loved how that fit.

Conversely, the first cue which is called “A Promised Land,” that was a lot of Viking horns and stuff that I had samples of. It took a really long time to build that first edit of that [cue] because people felt it was very sluggish. The edit changed so much in this film, and it’s this long arching piece that kind of takes over this fable that he’s telling us. I was really trying to boost this moment. Andrew said, ‘This is the most hopeful moment of the entire film, and you can actually hear in the cue where [the character] Odal says, “But it was barren,” and then the music is hard cut to, “Wow!”’

Well, it’s not subtle at all. [laughs]

Exactly! I remember it was quite a laborious process to get to that because it had to ebb and flow but it was nice to have this more peaceful moment, whereas the rest of the score is mostly doom and gloom.

STILL FROM FEMME

You have another film that you scored coming out very soon and that one is titled Femme and it hits Netflix in the UK on February 29th and hits theaters in the United States on March 22nd. This film is an outgrowth of a short film, is that correct?

Yes, that’s right. I think they won a BAFTA for it as well.

How did you get involved with this project?

That film came through my agent, Ollie, and he said that these guys were struggling. I think they’d gone through a few composers or something, like the music wasn’t quite landing. I only had three weeks to do this score, so they said the edit is locked. It was already a finished film, so
I went and I watched it. I thought it was amazing and went to this meeting with the execs, the producers, and the directors. It’s such a strange moment because you kind of have to sell yourself and sell your vision of what you think the film should sound like, whilst making them feel like you understood what was happening, so I remember just talking real nonsense about things like, “I should sound like a gay Blade Runner” or some other things and afterwards you leave the interview, and I thought, “Oh my God, what did I say?”, but obviously it worked.

The tension that’s present in this film, it never stops and there are so few moments where you actually get to take a breath and you can relax. How are you able to keep the tension going for that long?

I never really think about it. It’s funny actually, because I was trying to get pull quotes for all of my different scores to make press releases and across all films, the word that kept coming up was “dread.” And I’m thinking, “Right, okay, so I’m just the ‘dread’ guy.” I can naturally do dread or misery. The thing is, I’m a happy guy, but yeah, I have no idea how I kept up the dread. Like I said, I had three weeks, so I didn’t really have much option. Maybe there’s so much dread in me that it was naturally pouring into the music.

OK, you’re going to find this hilarious. I wrote out questions and I’m not asking them exactly as I wrote them. Here’s one as I wrote it: “How did your music contribute to the inexorable sense of dread?” [laughs]

Yeah, exactly. [laughs] I mean, that’s the thing. I’m not really making very conscious decisions, and it’s a collaboration, right? You deliver something to the director and if they’re a good director, they’ll rarely say, “Oh, needs to be more dread.” They’ll talk more about the highs and low points of the film, the scene, and where you need to peak and where you need to drop and what’s the underlying message.

STILL FROM FEMME

Much like Out of Darkness, there are very few moments of hope and very few moments of levity in Femme as well. There’s just that one cue that pops out, that’s really hopeful, “Warehouse Optimist” I think it’s called.

Yeah, it’s good. It’s in the name, right?

Yeah. And it’s that montage where we see both of them laughing, which is such a different moment because everything else is just so serious. When we actually get that special moment, was it nice for you to be able to do something that just shined?

Yes, it was lovely. I like that piece a lot because there’s loads and loads of swirling melodies. I’m always going back to that Steve Reich kind of stuff where you write a melody and then you loop it and then you write another one, and then you loop that and then you’ve got these converging overlapping textures, just becoming a swirling backdrop with the big synth on top. It’s really fun to get to write stuff like that because that gut punches in an emotional way that is really satisfying, and I don’t often get to write melodic pieces, or what I would call traditionally melodic pieces. I know we’ve been joking, but literally all I get asked to do is write dread, so it’s not like you don’t get melodic dread. Maybe that’s a new genre we can make. [laughs]

The end of this film is just an absolute gut punch, oh my gosh! Because I saw the titles of the cues as I’m watching this, I’m sitting there thinking, “Oh no,” because you see the car crash coming and there’s nothing you can do to stop it and you know what’s going to happen and you know he’s going to show up at the performance and Aphrodite is going to spill everything. Then, of course, the actual end of the film where you know the gift of the sweatshirt is the real thing. And it’s not just the fact that the sweatshirt was real, it’s the fact that the relationship was real. It’s just devastating how everything falls apart in five minutes and so as you’re scoring that, what are the sorts of things that you’re thinking about as you’re trying to create this sense of what we had was real, but it’s just gone in an instant?

It was an interesting one because you want to play to the sadness. I mean it! First off, he’s walking back [home] after just being, again, savagely beaten by the same guy, so there’s an inherent sadness to that. The relationship is falling apart but you also need to play to the complexities of what’s happening, for example, who do I feel sorry for? Obviously feel sorry for Jules, but he’s put himself in this ridiculous position, he’s forged this relationship. And then you also feel sorry for Preston because he’s crazy, in a ball [on the ground] crying because he needs to be loved, but he’s spent his whole life posturing as this toxic masculine character. There’s so many layers of complexity and I just love that scene when [Jules is] just holding that yellow jumper and we just hold onto that until we cut to black.

The whole score, I felt like I wanted to have this energetic club music vibe without it feeling like you could dance to it, right? It’s like a frenetic pulsing club, so you’ve got that raucous energy. But when you take away the drums, you’re left with this empty euphoria, and I think that’s kind of quite apt for what you get because you feel love and heartache simultaneously. And I think that’s what happens right at that pinch point. They did feel something for each other, but it was so bad, but we wanted it, but we don’t want it and I just love that push and pull. I think it’s such a great film too. I felt so much during it.

I hope that enough people see it, that it gets some attention somewhere and people catch on to it, because I think it’s a fascinating film with the idea of toxic masculinity and needing to be loved and all of these sorts of issues. How do we reconcile those things and how do we have empathy for either one? Should we have empathy for either one?

I think it’s a really important film because, you know we’ve had lots and lots of erotic thrillers in the 90s. Michael Douglas was in basically every single erotic thriller there ever was. The story in Femme is basically timeless. It just now happens to be an LGTBQ story and I think it’s long overdue and the performances of these two guys, it’s breathtaking, you know? And it was so funny when I watched these films over and over and over and over again because I know when [the film] is good because the scene hits me the same every time. I still feel that rush of emotion and that’s just testament to this. The directors who wrote it and the performances of the actors are just stellar.

Let’s shift gears a little bit. Can we talk about some of the equipment that you have in your studio and some of your favorite toys?

My studio is incredibly bare-bones. I’ve been saving for a synth, a hardware synth, for about ten years and every year I never buy one because I never know what synth to buy. Really, the only piece of equipment I have is my computer, my set of speakers, lots of guitar pedals, and my four-track tape player, and that has just been mainly my entire setup for the better part of 15 years.
I don’t like hardware. It just doesn’t seem to do it for me. I’ve got some guitars, as I learned guitar as a child, and but to be honest with you, my shelves are actually mostly board games.
That’s what most of my studio takes up, so people come into my studio expecting to see racks of synths and compressors, but you’re just going to find Catan, and that’s like, that’s it! Most of my work is done “in the box.”

That’s fantastic because that means you really understand how to use all that software.

Well, I know what to do and what I like, but I’m always trying to learn. I’m a very, very lazy student, but I used to do music for adverts before I did film and the turn-around for that kind of stuff was about 24 hours. It made me incredibly quick at making music, so I’ve gotten very quick at making stuff.

ADAM JANOTA-BZOWSKI

So you’ve done music for advertisements. You’ve done television and you’ve done films. What’s one of the most important things that you’ve learned throughout all this process?

I’ve never really thought about it like that. I know that I tried to release music back in the day under my own name and was very unsuccessful, but when I started collaborating with directors, my music had a greater sense of purpose and somehow seemed to improve massively, so I’ve learned that I clearly thrive on collaboration. When you write music for film, you are not the center of attention. You’re supporting the picture. I actually think that learning to not be the focus is actually incredibly beneficial to how good my music has become. I don’t think it’s wonderful. What I mean is I think my music has become better. I think it’s better music now that I’m writing music for films. I still think movies are magic. You watch how these things are created, and like I said earlier, I don’t know if it’s going to be a good film because there are so many people at play. There are so many craftsmen, such an incredible quantity of artisans that come together to make this thing happen, and I’m just a small piece of that puzzle. I happen to be one of the loudest pieces, but it’s by no means the most important. The most important thing it’s taught me is a newfound appreciation for films. I used to watch films and have an attitude, sat back, arms crossed, looking like, “Entertain me.” Now I’m just thinking, “Look at that shot. Look at that makeup. Look at the outfit. Look at that miniature in the background.”
I can see everything and I’m constantly amazed, even if I think it’s a shit film. You made something and it’s awesome!

I love that because you always get end-of-year best of lists and then there’s always some idiots that are listing the “10 worst” whatevers. I’m sitting here thinking, “You might think those are the 10 worst, but guess what? Someone created that and it didn’t exist last year and isn’t that awesome?”

I think we need to give everyone a bit more latitude and just be thankful for them making something. Thank you for making some art, because it nourishes us all. Even if you hate it, that’s awesome because at least you’re feeling something.

We’ve been talking a lot about dread and your ability to write dreadful music. Is there another genre of film that you would like to compose for that’s not dreadful and not incredibly intense?

Yes! Have you ever seen Dewey Cox?

Yes, the fake biopic?

That is some of the best music I’ve ever heard, and it’s just these incredible pastiche comedy songs. I love pop music and I would relish the opportunity to write pastiche pop music for a comedy film. I just did a TV show called Truelove, which was on BBC Channel 4 and I got to write a lot more melodic music. They even let me play piano for the first time! Hopefully, people will start to realize that I can make nice music and that I’m not just this miserable, bone-smashing, conch-blowing, doom machine.

After Out of Darkness and Femme, where can we hear your music in the future?

Well, I’ve finished a film called The Wasp, which is based on a play [by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm] which was crazy. Again, another film I had to do in three weeks, but I hired a contrabassoonist, so it’s got all these crazy honks in it. I’m just finishing up on a film called Animal, although it might change its title, but again I am the last person to know anything about what happens with these films. You know, it could just come out tomorrow for all I know. I couldn’t tell you if these will ever be released, with what’s happening to tax write-offs these days. Make the art then
just delete the art. It seems to be what people are doing.

Songs of Earth is Margreth Olin’s critically acclaimed nature documentary which is both an intimate and an eye-opening experience. The director’s own father takes us on a breathtaking existential journey through the seasons of the vast Norwegian landscapes.

Described as ‘The cinematic nature experience of the year.’ and ‘A magnificent existential journey.’ by CPH:DOX, the film is already collecting accolades and is Norway’s Oscar submission.

By employing a unique scoring process, Rebekka Karijord crafted a beautiful symbiotic relationship between the sounds of nature and those produced by instruments.

Let’s talk about Songs of Earth by Margreth Olin, with whom you have a long-standing collaboration. How did you get involved in this project?

Yeah, 15 years it is now actually. I think I’m one of the first people she tells her ideas to and it has been like that for many years. Before she starts running a manuscript and applying for funding and all that. I think she told me about this idea in 2019. It was funny because we had done a bunch of documentaries together and she was supposed to do this big fiction film in Norway and every time we talked about it, because I was going to work on it too, it was a lot of resistance like, ‘Oh, that’s a problem.’ ‘And that’s a problem.’ And then we were sitting, having this meeting about it and were like, ‘How are we going to solve that?’ She hadn’t started filming. But then she was like, ‘You know, I have another project I’m thinking about.’ and then she really lit up. And she told me about Songs of Earth. And I was like, ‘Well, now something’s happening in your eyes. This is what you should do.’

REBEKKA KARIJORD © KNUT BRY

And then she actually jumped off that other film and started working, not because of me, but because I think a lot of people said to her, ‘This is a really good idea.’ So she started developing Songs of Earth quite fast after that and then COVID happened. They were filming and I couldn’t go to Norway – I live in Sweden, but I’m Norwegian – and I couldn’t go there myself to record sounds so I was in very close touch with the amazing sound team who was up with hydrophones in the water and contact microphones trying to put them on the glacier surfaces. They had all these different techniques that we were exploring and then they sent them to me and we made this big library of sounds from the valley.

And then I started orchestrating those trying to figure out: How would the spruce sound? Which instrument is that? Is it a woodwind instrument? Is it a brass instrument? Is it a string instrument? Is it a voice? How would the glaciers sound?

How did you make these decisions? Did you look at technical aspects such as tuning or tonality, or more like the materials the instruments had to be made of?

Both, I would say. Definitely a tonal register thing too, but I think it was also more intuition, more like, ‘What could this be?’ Because I’d never heard it or worked like that before. And then I made quite a few scores, but then I took a break because I got this big American film, which was the opposite of this process. It was like five weeks and a 90-minute full orchestral score and Hollywood and super-fast and crazy and everything was like ‘Argh!’.

I was like, ‘How do I go back to this slow pace?’. They had started editing then and Margreth was like, ‘Maybe you should meditate for a month before you start writing.’ [laughing] So I started meditating, actually. I contacted a friend of mine who is a meditation teacher and I meditated probably for a month, six weeks, and then I was like, ‘Now I got to start working, I got to really get into this.’ When I opened it again, everything came really fast.

SONGS OF EARTH POSTER

Then I took in soloists and I let them look at the sounds. I had some string players in, I had some singers in, I had some woodwind players, and I let them look at the scores, listen to the sounds, and then they looked at the footage. And together we improvised around the scores and then a lot of things fell in place because the soloists came with their own interpretation, and their own feeling and meeting the material. They had totally new eyes and ears for it. So, for example, I thought that the glacier would be a viola, maybe, and I thought maybe it would be some sort of woodwind instrument. Nils Berg, the woodwind player, had like a big palette of woodwind instruments with him – everything from bass clarinets to different various flutes to different saxophones – and we tried everything, and I was like, ‘Nah, it’s not quite right.’. And then he said, ‘Oh, I have an idea!’. He took the Alto flute and took the mouthpiece off and he blew it like a bottle. And it had this super moaning kind of incontrollable tone. Which was perfect for the melting glacier like this almost human voice. It’s a wind sound and it’s out of pitch a bit – it has its own pitch.

The violinist, Hanna Ekström, has a folk background. I didn’t think I wanted to go folky because I’m very afraid of the national romantic aspect of this nature in Norway. I was like, ‘I don’t want to go there.’, but then she had this way of twisting a melody that I wrote in so they really helped me find it, and honestly, that’s a lot how I work. I have a few people that I really trust and take in and they make my music a thousand times better.

STILL FROM SONGS OF EARTH

Had you seen any visuals beforehand or did you just start working from the field recordings?

No, I started working from the field recordings, but then once I was done meditating and I sat down they had cuts, some excerpts of seasons. I think I had like a part of the glacier, a part of the summer, a part of the fall. But honestly, what was written in those two, three weeks, maybe, after the soloists had been here, it was basically what Margreth wanted to use. She didn’t want to change much. And so, it was very easy. But it’s always easy for me to work with her. It’s a lot of trust and I didn’t find this film hard to score. It was almost like I was collecting something that was already there, you know?

The film seems to be highly personal to the director. How did you manage to empathize on that level with Margreth in order to create the exact soundscape that she desired?

I know her very well. She’s a friend too and she has a way of reaching my heartstring when she talks about her films. It always kind of happens in the beginning when we talk about her projects, I can sit by the piano and she tells me her story and then stuff comes very fast to me. And usually, I write it down or I sketch something immediately, which is a result of a long work relationship and a friendship and wordless intuitive artistic connection, I would say. Once you find that with a director as a film composer, hold on to it, because those are the relationships that really build up your artistic life and your career, I think. I’m not saying that in a strategic way, I’m saying it in a very heartfelt way. They’re so precious, those relationships.

And then I think also for me it’s a very personal film too. I grew up in that landscape further North. I live in Sweden now. I have two small kids and I relate to, maybe not the father’s story so much, but the love story for nature.

STILL FROM SONGS OF EARTH

And I’ve worked a lot on climate projects in the last years. I’ve scored the film about Greta Thunberg and I have done a record called Complete Mountain Almanac with the Dessner siblings last year, which is also a cyclic work following a year: 12 songs, one per month, about climate change and sickness.

I felt very moved by the material and the whole idea. With some projects you can just feel, ‘Okay, this is going to be something really special.’. And, also, to get to do music to a film where there’s hardly any dialogue and the music is so important and it’s a small budget. It’s, I don’t know, a million euros budget film, but almost 10% is used on the music and just that. That’s a privilege and trust from the director to say, ‘Okay, which orchestra do you want to work with?’. And she was extremely respectful and so it’s been great.

How did you find the experience of working with the London Contemporary Orchestra?

They’re amazing. They’re so professional, oh my God! And working with Hugh Brunt was fantastic. He’s the conductor who also co-orchestrated with me and Thomas Eggensberger, who’s my assistant. They are just really intuitive and flexible, I would say, because it is a lot of that with film scoring. If you think about the film scoring orchestra compared to a classical orchestra, it’s way less flexible with the classical orchestra, of course. You have to prepare and the score actually has to be exactly like it’s written and it’s a different language but a lot of us film composers are not classical composers. We are some sort of a hybrid. I’ve studied composition and orchestration, but I’m not a classical composer in that regard. I know the language, but it’s a different kind of communication in the studio which can be challenging if the orchestra is a little rigid or the conductor is stiff.

But with LCO it just felt they’re so open to last-minute changes and we did some really beautiful things where I did a lot of extra recordings at the end of the day that I wanted to give to the sound designer. For example, the sound of stones underwater in the waterfall in the beginning of the film, where there is this very hollow kind of almost repetitive sound of a certain rock that the water goes into and it sounds like a loop. They did this plucking with that and then we spread it out so it became like a stereo thing with a Decca Tree miking and it became really beautiful, like it moves around and we were kind of in real time like, ‘Okay, go there.’, and then, ‘You go there.’, and then, “you take up the dynamic there.’, and, ‘What happens if you go closer there?’. It was really amazing, really fun.

Have you discovered any interesting techniques during this process that you hadn’t used before?

Oh God, yeah. It was like school for me. That was one of the big motivations I think for me with the score. I got a chance to refresh and investigate extended techniques, on strings especially. There were a lot of sounds around the double bass that I discovered. And there is the sound on the ice towards the end of the film where I went down with a zoom recorder – I lived by the ocean too – and I really filmed the ice when it’s breaking in the spring and it’s three dimensions. It’s like one is the water on the top sizzling, and then there’s the middle which is like a mid-range cracking, and then underneath there is this amazing sub sound and then we divided that up. So, the double basses did something where they switched the bow backwards and they ran the backside of the bow over the bridge. Also, a lot of bowing just on the wooden body of the double bass, toneless. So yeah, it was amazing. Super fun.

Have you discovered any interesting techniques during this process that you hadn’t used before?

I think the most challenging part with orchestral scores is always the transition from the demos to the finished pieces. The Dogma rule, if you can say that, that Margreth and I had with this film was that every sound should stem from nature. So, this should never be manmade music just coming out of nowhere. Everything has to really grow out of the nature sounds so there was a very close collaboration between me and the sound designer, Tormod Ringnes, where I sent him my sounds and he sent his sounds to me. And in the end, I can’t really tell what is instruments and what is field recordings because it’s become this sound poem.

I think that was also a challenge, to find that balance. It was quite tricky. And he came at the very end when we were mixing and we got the recordings back from London, and of course, it’s at Air Studios, it’s a lot of players, almost 40 string players. And we were like, ‘Okay, how do we integrate this new sound into the intimacy?’ And so, what we ended up doing was keeping a lot of the initial soloist recordings, actually, because of that. And so, it was a little bit of, ‘Should we go that far and go really big and symphonic?’. ‘Yes, but we also have to keep some of this intimacy, to not lose the closeness.’ And, it is a documentary also, even if it’s big and spectacular. It also is a little poem about her mom and dad. So that was the trickiest part, I think, finding that balance.

What can people learn from this film?

I think it’s very simple. It’s reminding us that we’re a part of this greater body, that we’re attacking. And if we take down that body, we’re taking down ourselves. And it’s a love story. It’s like a reminder to listen not only to nature but to yourself, too, to your instinct and your intuition and I think our instinct and our intuition tells us to not attack our own body, our own system. I think we’re wiser than that, just like animals, you know? But I think it is a reminder of what we are, what we’re made of, what our DNA with our cells are made of. Like those images of her father’s skin and the glacier, we’re all made out of the same stardust. It’s the same atoms and molecules and so I think that’s the biggest lesson from it. Remember what you are.

What exciting projects do you have coming up?

I am just finishing a Netflix drama series called Deliver Me, which is going to be airing this February or March, which is a beautiful, kind of dark drama series. And then I am scoring a Finnish-Swedish fiction film, which is set in the 30s up in Northern Sweden.

And then I have two other fiction films that are starting next fall. So, right now it’s a little break from documentaries, but I will always come back to that because my heart is there too, but I’m focusing on fiction films now for a while.

And I also just mixed a record with Roomful of Teeth, which is an American really awesome voice ensemble, which will come out next year. So, there’s a lot of nice things brewing.

Canneseries-winning composer Giorgio Giampà dialled in all the way from Guatemala a few weeks back to talk to us about his latest project, the TV series The Good Mothers. He waxed lyrical about the brilliant team behind the project, his strategy in scoring the British/Italian production, as well as his process of writing music for a multimedia project.

Adapted from Alex Perry’s eponymous novel, The Good Mothers is based on the true story of three women born into one of the deadliest and wealthiest mafia families in Italy – the ‘Ndrangheta. Despite the enormous risk they’re taking, the fearless women work together with the newly appointed female prosecutor to bring down the organization. It is the first time the mafia is portrayed entirely from the women’s perspective and Giorgio made great use of his arsenal of creative techniques in order to achieve the perfect contrast between the enslaved and the subjugators; the unheard and the omnipresent; the conspicuous and the hidden.

Let’s chat about The Good Mothers. I just finished binge-watching the entire series. Great editing, directing, music. It’s so good!

The editors involved were really, really great. Julian Jarrold is one of my favourite directors. He’s very elegant also. The other things that he did in the past are so so beautiful; I was a fan of Becoming Jane. And Elisa Amoruso, the other director, she is very good too. I think it was a very good combination and the people that they put together…that was a very good productive strategy.

I loved how the series preserves this European flair to it.

Yeah, I think that is very interesting when TV series try to be like a longer feature film. There are some examples around like, I Know This Much Is True from Derek Cianfrance or Chernobyl. It’s a very great use of getting more time. I come from the arthouse film side and so sometimes it’s great to see TV series that take their time, not like give you the cliffhanger and all the things all the time, you know?

GIORGIO GIAMPÀ @ CANNESERIES BY OLIVIERVIGERIE

How did you get to work on this project?

Someone [suggested] my name because they always consider different composers […] – there’s this kind of competition. And so, we had interviews and I proposed to Julian – that was the interviewing director – my vision of what the music should do. Because I always try to understand, in terms of narrative, what music can do.

The first question that I always ask is, ‘What music should do? Should it like, be a character telling a story? Should it be another layer in the script?’. And I started thinking about these women, that they basically cannot talk. So, their voice is hidden, is whispered, is lost in the small roads of the small villages in Calabria. And so, I started to say to him, ‘Where is it, this voice? It’s lost somewhere.’. So maybe we should use a lot of reverb and try to find some narrative, some achievement that music could do, basically. And I guess he liked this and then they said, ’Yes, okay, you’re gonna do it.’

Only the key moments are underscored in the series and there’s a huge contrast between the cues that underscore the mafia bad guys which are very dissonant, menacing, on low frequencies. And then you have all this melodic, beautiful, and delicate music for the women. Please talk to me about this contrast.

Well, another inspiration was trying to feel for a second, one super tiny, tiny part of what women feel basically. As a man, I will never manage to do that because what women go through almost every day in their life, on a scale of very complicated situations to lighter but still very tough situations… that is impossible for us to understand. But I think it’s a very good in exercise to try a little bit. To do that, evoking in ourselves moments in which we felt uncomfortable, for example, […] knowing that it’s not possible to do that 100% because we don’t live in that world, the world in which women live.

So, you have these more narrative parts, but you have also the function of music and one of the functions of music, obviously, in a project like this, is to enhance the menace, the threat that these men are for the women. So that’s the other face, more simple face, you know, it was done like 10,000 times before to just enhance the feeling.

And something that I already thought in the past, when doing this work, is considering how the mafia people work. They work by hiding themselves. Their work is successful if they are not noticed. But they are felt. So, it’s like, the music comes from under the ground or behind this [curtain]. And so, that probably was the thing, enhancing these faces. Sometimes feeling they are in a good position, but they were like, shooting rage and horrible feelings all the time. Which is basically the world for the women, because there are nice faces that are very violent without saying anything.

THE GOOD MOTHERS BERLINALE FESTIVAL POSTER

What was the most difficult scene or cue for you to score?

For TV series, I try to use a different strategy from the feature films. I try to make most of the music before. So, I worked on the script basically. And watching the dailies, which is the collection of the shots of the day. They put them on a website and I’m always watching them, so I learned about the director and I saw how they shoot. And I could start to feel what’s the movement of the camera, which is the rhythm. I did I think 75-80% of the music before so that they can edit with the music. So, you avoid having temp tracks – which is the great scary thing of our job and always a problem. And I rely a lot on the editors. Now they want to use the music too. Especially when you have great editors like this time, Simona Paggi, that was the editor for the first two episodes and did these two feature films that won the Academy Awards. She’s quite famous for the use of music the way she does. It was great to give her the possibility to use the music.

And then there were very complicated scenes in which we had to talk a lot to understand how to put the things together, but it was more music editing. In episode 2, there is a moment in which there’s a tarantella they display live in a very long scene and that, yes, was complicated, because music sometimes goes below the tarantella and then we had to match everything.

It sounds like you had plenty of time. It wasn’t a rushed project with a tight deadline.

No, because I start immediately. When they tell me, ‘Yes, you are going to do it.’ and I have the script, I have the dailies, I do it. So, they can work with the music and then there’s time to make more. For me, it works like a strategy. Some other people like to wait for the editing to be done. It’s more interesting also to sometimes not be linked in such a tough way to the image and more to the story. It can be a very good combination.

THE GOOD MOTHERS, STILL BERLINALE

So, the part that inspires you the most on a project is the story.

I think when making an audio-visual project – films, TV series, documentaries, etc. – the thing is that we are part of a narration over the storytelling. It’s like when children play games and you have to choose your role, like some child will be the princess, the other one will like be the dragon. And then you can decide to be the walls of the castle or the cloud that is going through. That’s the interesting part of my job for me. And so, I like to connect to the story. Clearly, we are not doing music for ourselves. So, I always ask from the beginning, ‘How is the film going to look like?’, ‘What lenses did you use for the camera? Is it a hand-held camera or not?’. I watch the dailies, so I see what they’re doing. I see if the camera moves faster or moves slow.

Making a film is thinking about everything, basically. Sometimes you focus on something, sometimes you focus on something else. But you have to go along with the storytelling. And I’m polytheistic in this case, so you can change all the time the way you want to act or the way you are going to work and that’s good because if not, we would have gone to work in a bank doing the same thing basically – with respect to the bankers.

Did you write any specific music that you really loved but didn’t make it into the series?

You know, I think everything made it to the series. Actually, I fought a lot to try to not have one [cue] that I like very much but I didn’t feel that it was right for the TV series. So, it was the opposite. And I was always saying, ‘Come on, it’s not working! This one is better for something else.’, etc.

STILL FROM THE GOOD MOTHERS

So, they ended up using it.

[laughing] Unfortunately, yes. But it was used in just one scene, and I have to say that in that scene, it works. But when I was with them, I was saying, ‘No, but we should turn off this music. It’s better to go without music.’. And they were always saying to me, ‘What a strange kind of composer you are that are asking to turn off music.’. There are some projects that need a lot of music. In this case, I felt that like silence was very interesting. I proposed to not put music on the end credits on episode three, for example, because I felt that it was very interesting to have silence after what happens in the end.

I think if you feel that your work is not to make music for yourself but it’s being part of storytelling, then you can live in peace if a work is not full of music.

As I understand it, you come from the same area where the action takes place.

I have roots from the south of Italy, from the region in which the TV series takes place and I remember one thing that I told to Julian, that that region is really great. It’s very underrated but the region is full of history, and it was part of the Magna Graecia; a lot of scientists and philosophers from the Magna Graecia times lived there. It’s a place in which you have a mountain, you can see two different seas when looking right and looking left, etc. It’s a region that is full of magic.

“Men should try to do an exercise about trying to feel – even if it’s not possible – but trying to feel what women feel.”

And I really think that we have to look really carefully for the backstory of the music. I think that we have to build the narrative role or the character of the music, working as actors do. I read the Stanislavski method because I wanted to understand how – and I really love the book. But it’s important to find backstories, even find things that you will not use, and maybe they will show up at one point. I felt that maybe there are some cues that could be connected to some Greek tragedies in the end. It was good to explore that side too.

Do you think that because you are familiar with the area that helped you picture the local culture better?

Surely, yes, of course, it can help, but I also think that you have to be able – and that was what Stanislavski was actually saying – to create a character even from a place that is very far from you and you never visited. He was talking about Polynesia in the book, like there will be one day someone asking you to act a Polynesian person and you’ve never been to Polynesia, but you have to be able to. How will you do? You have to study, and you have to feel. I work a lot in Mexico and I’m not Mexican. But still, you can study, and you can try to understand and then you can find the right way. Clearly, I spent a lot of time there and it helped, yes. But someone from Milano could have done it. [laughing] Or someone from London could have done it too. It’s just about studying a lot.

Did you learn anything about yourself while working on the series?

Wow… I don’t think I learned something about myself but it’s interesting what I told you before: men should try to do an exercise about trying to feel – even if it’s not possible – but trying to feel what women feel. Because that is so important. And so, that’s something that you have to do by trying to recall moments in which you’ve felt uncomfortable. Or, in this case, in which you felt that you couldn’t talk. And remember how it feels. And then [multiply] it by 1 million times, basically. So, I don’t know if I learned something but it’s a process that was intense. It’s a deep project.

STILL FROM THE GOOD MOTHERS

Do you think there are enough projects that talk about these important topics these days?

I think the situation is getting better, but we are very far from being equal by all points of view. There’s not enough representation for all the human groups that should be represented, that is sure. For example, I held a free workshop for female composers for some years because the numbers are very low. So, work should be more equal. It’s getting a little bit better, but we are still under a very high fever. Let’s put it like this. We need more paracetamol. It’s slow and it’s not acceptable to be so slow.

Do you have any exciting projects coming out soon?

I did an Italian feature film that is very interesting about a single gay man – it’s a true story – that fights to adopt. And it’s the first guy that is a single parent adopting and even more, a single gay man adopting. I don’t know if it’s still the only case in Italy, but it’s the first case.

And we just completed these days a Swedish feature film that is very beautiful, from Mika Gustafson. It’s our first feature and it’s very, very, very beautiful. I really, I really love the film and the director, she’s really great.

Belgian composer Hannes De Maeyer discusses his newest projects, the soundtracks to psychological thriller Noise and season 2 of crime procedural Professor T, how he kept himself busy during the pandemic, as well as his upcoming projects.

It’s been almost three years since we had our last chat. It looks like you’ve been very busy. What’s new?

On the personal side, my daughter was born at the beginning of 2020. Three months after she was born, the lockdown was announced. So, for us, it was kind of like a present. We could spend so much time together with our little new family. We were kept in our bubble as everybody but we had a newborn so it was pretty special and precious.

Of course, professionally, the whole world was like, ‘What’s happening?’. Everything stopped for a minute, but I was lucky enough. I think in May I started working on an animation series called Ninja Express. The animators could just continue animating at home on their computers so that the project was not delayed. In the UK it’s on [CBBC]. That was a really nice project. Lots of work, obviously, it’s like 53 episodes of 10 minutes. Every week we had to deliver one. I think it took like a year and a half.

I also worked on the sequel of Immenhof [Immenhof – Das Abenteuer eines Sommers].

And also, on Rebel by Adil [El Arbi] and Bilall [Fallah]. Which is a big project. It’s pretty ambitious. It also needed songs to be composed before the shoot so it’s like a kind of a musical, but not really a musical. It has songs but it’s mostly rap or Arabic flavours. I worked together on the rap lyrics with the main actor, Aboubakr Bensaihi. For the more lyrical songs, I also worked together with Oum, who is a famous singer from Morocco who lives in France. And that was amazing. Her voice is so nice. And the way she approaches songs, the lyrics, it’s so poetic. I composed the songs for that movie and then they went on to do the shooting. And then after the movie was finished in the editing room I also had to make, of course, the other score. It’s also with choreography and stuff so it’s an amazing project.

STILL FROM PROFESSOR T

And then, Professor T, which is also pretty exciting because I worked on the Belgian version – I think sevenish years ago. It was really nice to revisit that world. But on the other hand, I couldn’t use the music I did for the first one, obviously. It’s a different director; a different actor; it’s in English; it’s not in Belgium, but in Cambridge. So, it had a little bit of a different vibe; a little bit more cinematic, I guess.

To start on Professor T was sometimes, in the beginning, a little bit daunting because I knew the world of Professor T, the Belgian version, so well. So, it was like a puzzle to solve: ‘How can I approach using the same fabric but adding something new to the table?’. And pretty soon I was really inspired by the talks with the director, Dries Vos. But also, when I saw the images coming from the shoots, I could follow the scenes that they recorded that day. I made like 10 or 11 themes. I sent them to the director just to try. And I think almost all those ideas have become a theme in the show. So that was really cool that I was pretty fast on the right track with those themes.

Season 2 came out recently. Professor Tempest is working more closely with the police, and he is taking steps towards growing. And so, he reluctantly goes to see a therapist. As he grows, how does the music evolve in this season?

The music in the second season is a little bit more serious, there’s a little bit more tension. And also, it’s a little darker. I think in the first season, there were lighter themes or lighter moods – there are still some lighter scenes, but in general, the music grew up a little bit, so to speak. It became a little bit more serious. And it was nice to revisit a lot of the themes that I’d created for the first season and adapt them, evolve them, let them grow up together with the series.

The one thing I noticed is that in the first season, I used the theme of the Professor – the main theme – a lot of times during the soundtrack, and I remember now when I listen to the soundtrack [of season 2] that there was less room for that. I tried to implement the theme, but it didn’t work with the images, it was mostly too much – which is not a bad thing, I think. It’s just something that happened.

Even though the professor can be quite serious and stiff, on the other hand, we have these more comical images, where he starts hallucinating, or the scenes with his mom and her little dog Kafka. How did you manage to marry the two styles and come up with such a harmonious soundtrack?

I don’t know how, but it felt mostly natural like in every project in that the images are dictating what you need to make and because the series switches between those light comical moments and then in the next scene you see the murder scene. But I think what glues it together is the instrumentation and the style of music. It has that retro feel but also those jazz elements in there and then the strings and the woodwinds which you can use in both atmospheres, in both moods.

And it works really well with the Italian songs selected for the movie.

Definitely. That has nothing to do with me, obviously, but indeed with those Italian songs, you also have that fabric of that retro-jazzy feel. I love those songs. It’s a nice era. I wasn’t born then but my love for that kind of music I think comes through the music.

STILL FROM NOISE

Another project of yours which was released recently on Netflix, is the psychological thriller Noise. You have a bit in common with the main character, Matthias. He’s also a new dad.

Exactly. It was funny because when I started working on the movie, my daughter was, I think, not even two months old. So, sometimes it felt like Inception because I was working on a scene where there were baby cries and then I also heard them in another place, farther away. And then I was like, ‘Is it in the movie or not?’ [laughing] Then I placed pause, and, ‘Oh, no. it’s the real one.’.  It was immersive. So yeah, I felt indeed a lot of connection with him and a lot of times in the movie, I thought, ‘Yeah, I get you.’. Luckily for me, I didn’t lose my mind. [laughing] Or not up to the point that Mattias did. But yeah, that was a special thing to experience that me and Matthias were in the same phase in our lives so that was funny.

Was there a brief or did you have more freedom to play around?

There was quite some freedom involved. The director [Steffen Geypens] had some temps in the movie and we talked a little bit about the music, but it was more like, ‘You have to try to find the right music for the project.’. But you only see it when you put it under the images, and [either] it works or not.

It was a difficult one to start because finding the right tone and the right moods was in the beginning pretty hard. It needed to be subtle but not too subtle. Hints of the horror, but not too much. It was maybe also because of the sleep I didn’t have at the time so that didn’t help as well. But when we found the right direction, we were on the train and then it went better and better and easier like that.

STILL FROM NOISE

Did you start working directly after seeing the picture or did you start with the script?

For this project, it was after I saw the locked cut or one or two of the latest versions of the edit. It was not based on the scripts. Obviously, I did read the script, but I didn’t start before I saw the images. So, I read a script and I visited the set just to get the atmosphere.

I can hear some extended techniques in the soundtrack. Can you tell me more about that?

One of the things that I thought was fitting for the movie was to have a pretty small section so you could hear the separate musicians. So, we only had a group of 12 string players. And also, an idea for what I wanted to use is indeed extended techniques because we didn’t want a sound that was too clean and too polished. So, I worked a lot with quarter-tone bands or different bands where you have an uneasy tone. But also, a lot of cluster things [that create] tension, where some players do tremolo, others do thrills and then you combine those in a nice-sounding cluster chord. I also asked the soloists to play a little bit sul tasto and sometimes sul ponticello. The idea was to not have the perfect sound.

And that helps the mystery of the movie and the music.

And also, because of those techniques, it was the first time that I conducted the orchestra which was pretty nerve-wracking. In the beginning, I felt not really comfortable because I hadn’t been doing it, but pretty soon I became comfortable enough and I wanted to be there because of all those techniques so that I could explain to the musicians [what to do]. So, it was a really nice experience for me. I felt really connected with the musicians. Otherwise, you’re in the booth. It’s something different to be in front of the musicians directly.

While working on Noise, did you discover any interesting sounds or techniques that you’d like to reuse in the future?

 Yeah, I think all of them. Definitely the mysterious ones like the sul ponticello but also the quarter tone bands or the halftone bands. It’s really effective.

Also, I’ve used an instrument called a halldorophone. I was aware of the instruments because Hildur [Guðnadóttir] used it for Joker and Chernobyl, but I didn’t pay attention to it enough. I think I just love those soundtracks. But then when I started working on Noise, there was a guy who emailed me [and said], ‘I play the halldorophone. These are some examples. If you ever need something like this you can always contact me.’ and I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is perfect for this movie!’. So that’s also something I really want to use more in the future because it has so much character, it’s something you haven’t heard before – well, you have, but it’s not like it’s a clarinet or something – so it has a lot of atmosphere.

Is it versatile as an instrument?

Yeah, it’s versatile but it’s also really difficult because every take is different. You cannot recreate the same thing because it uses overtones and feedback. Which is interesting, but you better record it, otherwise… But yeah, you can do so much with it. But you need two persons to control it. The two musicians, Konstantinos Chinis and Ilias Pantelias, they live in Greece. I haven’t met them, so they recorded it at home, and we went back and forth. I didn’t have the pleasure to witness it in person, so hopefully, in the future, I will.

There are a couple of moments in the film where the cues are quite different in style from one another but the way they transition from one to the other into the next scene is seamless; the music travels with the story and the characters uninterrupted. How did you manage to create such a smooth transition?

Good question. We were always aware to make the music subtle enough. That was the key thing that the director wanted, to not make it too obvious. It’s mostly there in the background and gives a flavour to the scenes. I guess that’s maybe one of the tricks.

HANNES DE MAEYER AT WSA 2020. ©JEROEN WILLEMS

How was your collaboration with the director? Did you learn anything new while working with him?

It was a really nice collaboration. The funny thing is I already knew him for a lot of years and lately he did a lot of post-production supervision on a lot of the projects I did. So, I hadn’t worked with him as a director so it was nice to work with that hat.

I hadn’t done that sort of movie before, so it was really interesting to hear him teach me a bit about the genre and the music that he wanted. That was something I will take with me for the future.

Do you have any interesting projects coming up?

Yeah, definitely. It’s going to be a really fun year this year. Right now, I’m starting on a Dutch series. It’s called The Jewish Council and it’s a World War II movie about the Jewish Council in Amsterdam. It’s like a council that was created. The Germans wanted to collaborate with them, so they did that to prevent the worst from happening, but in the end, they have to choose in the Jewish community who is disposable and who is not. It’s a pretty strong theme. It’s a lot of emotions. And the crazy thing is that it really happened. That’s going to be a really interesting project. Also, music-wise, I think you can add a lot to that. It’s like five episodes.

And then the third season of Professor T which I’m also looking forward to. I’m really happy that there’s a third season so that’s amazing.

And also, a really exciting project for Channel 4 and Starz in the UK, it’s called The Couple Next Door. It’s a thrillerish series starring Sam Heughan from Outlander and Eleanor [Tomlinson] from Poldark. I’m really excited for that one. It’s going to be lots of fun.

Swedish composer duo Jon Ekstrand and Carl-Johan Sevedag have collaborated successfully together on several films and series over the years, including Borg vs. McEnroe, Horizon Line, Alex, and Top Dog.

The composers admitted having felt a special connection ever since their first collaboration and feeling very comfortable with one another. When the two of them are involved in a project, there is no room for egos. Their workflow is smooth, they complement each other in a really good way, have fun, and manage their stress levels better even when deadlines are tight.

One such example is Opponent, Milad Alami´s new feature film, for which they’ve only had three weeks to produce a score. The film is an intense psychological drama dealing with masculinity, intimacy, and violence, and the composers have done a great job of supporting the story.

Stella: Let’s chat about your newest project, Opponent. How did you get to work on this film?

Jon: We got contacted quite late in the process because they had already a composer on and unfortunately as it can be on some projects that didn’t work out. When we got approached, we had very little time, but I think both me and Carl-Johan felt that it was a really interesting project. We talked to Milad [Alami], the director, and we basically asked to see the movie without any temp music or what was done before. And we both kind of quickly saw what we wanted to do with it, and we told him that we had a lot of ideas. I think that made him really excited. So, we started directly almost after seeing the movie for the first time.

Carl-Johan: Yeah, we kind of had to. We had three weeks, I think, before the mixing final mix deadline. It was a short notice.

Jon: Yeah, we had to be patient. [laughing]

Carl-Johan: Yeah, super patient.

STILL FROM ‘OPPONENT’ (MOTSTÅNDAREN)

Stella: Did Milad give you any instructions or did he just let you guys do what you thought worked best?

Carl-Johan: Milad, pretty much from the get-go, was very open-minded. And instead of giving us a brief he kind of just wanted us to try some stuff out and present to him our vision for the general theme and soundscape of the movie. And luckily for us, he had landed very well. [laughs] He liked our vision.

Stella: Did you score directly to picture?

Jon: Directly to picture. We saw the movie, we called Milad, talked to him for half an hour or something, and then we just said, ‘Okay, where do we go?’.

Carl-Johan: But that’s the nice part of coming in so late into a project because usually the picture’s locked. You can just put your stamp on straightaway. Not so much back and forth.

Jon: The good thing about being two [composers] is also that you can make decisions throughout the process, you can work really fast instead of sitting and doubting for a day over a cue. It’s like, ‘is this right or not?’. Here, it’s so instant that you can tell, ‘No, this is not working.’ or ‘Okay, perfect. Let’s do something else.’.

STILL FROM ‘OPPONENT’ (MOTSTÅNDAREN)

Stella: It must have helped that you guys had collaborated before. You know each other’s pace and way of working.

Carl-Johan: For sure.

Jon: Yeah, I think we have a worked-in routine of how to work with each other. And especially on this project, we were here in my studio, and we basically just decided we shouldn’t bring in any other musicians and play all the instruments ourselves to make it also as quick as possible. Which was funny because we can play a lot of instruments but we’re not that good on playing them.

Carl-Johan: [laughing] Especially not these ones.

Jon: [laughing] Exactly. Especially not these ones we chose. We saw quite quickly that it actually added something to the feeling of the score, that there is a little bit of vulnerability when they’re not that super well-played some of the instruments. I think we really liked when we found that out and felt it when we saw the picture. It was great fun doing it that way also because it becomes so direct.

Stella: It’s raw.

Carl-Johan: Yeah.

Jon: Yeah, exactly – raw. And I really appreciate that.

Stella: I feel that it mirrors the main character’s indecisiveness and internal turmoil as well.

Jon and Carl-Johan: Exactly.

CARL-JOHAN SEVEDAG

Stella: What inspired you to select all these instruments and create such a unique combination?

Carl-Johan: We wanted to capture this Scandinavian feel. For example, with the nyckelharpa – the key fiddle. As soon as you play a note on that it’s like, ‘Okay, we’re up North.’. [laughing]

Jon: [laughing] Yeah.

Carl-Johan: And then we also had the Iranian ney flute.

Jon: We also had duduks and the Japanese shakuhachi which is a primitive flute in the way of playing. It’s really hard to get into if you’re not a master on playing it – which we’re not. And there was clarinet. Basically, we took all the instruments that we thought could really be interesting for the sound. I have a lot of instruments in my studio and Carl-Johan in his so we kind of collected everything together and went from there.

Stella: Was the idea to capture a bit of Iman’s world back home and a bit of his current life and situation?

Jon and Carl-Johan: Exactly.

Jon: I wouldn’t say it’s an Ethno score, but there’s a small fragrance of it in some cues.

JON EKSTRAND

Stella: What did your process look like daily? And how did you guys manage to pull this off so fast?

Carl-Johan: Did we say that we were trying to do five minutes of music a day to be able to pull it off?

Jon: Yeah, I think it was five or six minutes. We went to the studio, did six minutes and then we left. Or on some days we did more because we had a flow. But it was really meeting at my studio at 9 o’clock, and leaving when we felt we were done.

Carl-Johan: I think we started focusing on the fighting scenes first, as we felt that that was the trickiest to pull off.

Jon: When you see the movie, the wrestling scenes, in a way, they’re action-wrestling scenes, but they’re not really, and you can’t really do what you would do, maybe, in a normal sports movie. I think we’ve quite quickly understood that this probably was the hardest one to nail down because we didn’t want to go for the kind of heroic, macho stereotype, because it’s not that kind of movie, you know?

“I think it’s a luxury in this day and age to work on a movie where you’re not forced to put music in every scene, but you actually let the movie breathe a little bit by itself […].”

Carl-Johan: But also, since we did five, six minutes every day, once we came in the next day, we’d kind of marinated overnight in what we had done, and then maybe we had a bit of a better idea of what needed to be done the next day. I like that type of workflow. It’s very efficient and is very inspiring also.

Stella: Only the key scenes are scored and everything else is silent. Was it you or the director who made that creative decision?

Jon: It was both, actually. That I think helps the authenticity of it and really makes it a little bit more real and more like a documentary instead of underscoring everything and all the dialogue and putting everything in a package. And also, in this way, when the music comes, it means something instead of just following everything. It underlines a much heavier mood and feeling.

Carl-Johan: I think it’s a luxury in this day and age to work on a movie where you’re not forced to put music in every scene, but you actually let the movie breathe a little bit by itself and you let the audience land a bit in the scenery and in the scenes that actually need music instead of forcing music upon the audience all the time.

STILL FROM ‘OPPONENT’ (MOTSTÅNDAREN)

Stella: Did you guys disagree on things during this process – either between each other or with the director – or were you all on the same page all the time?

Jon: We were on the same page; I don’t know if it was because everybody knew it was just three weeks that we had, but yeah, everybody was surprisingly on the same thing. I think the producers, when they heard some of the key harp, they were like, ‘Maybe a little bit less of the key harp…’, because they thought it was just noise. [laughing] But Milad was loving the noise.

Carl-Johan: I don’t know if they did anything in the mix that we aren’t aware of, but it sounds good to me.

Jon: Yeah, me too.

Stella: During this process, have you discovered any new techniques or new sounds that made you think, ‘Ah, I love this! I’m going to use this again.’?

Carl-Johan: I really like the bass drum. It’s pretty much the same bass throughout the whole movie. I don’t remember exactly how we made it…

Jon: That’s the 808 Module, but it was through the Moog analog bucket-brigade delay. I really like that sound too.

Carl-Johan: That one I want to use. On every score.

Jon: And I like the flutes of the Mellotron that are irregular and really random, especially during the fight scenes. That was a sound that I really like and want to use more.

Carl-Johan: Yeah, it was an eye-opening experience when we realized that we could put an arpeggio on the Mellotron and get this.

Stella: If you had more time, what would you have done differently? If anything.

Carl-Johan: If we knew from the beginning, maybe we would have started thinking about taking in real instrumentalists.

Jon: Yeah, maybe. Or like an ensemble or something. I don’t know if that would have been the best way. It’s funny to think about but maybe we would’ve done a more overthought score, and maybe not that good and direct. Because now, when I listen back to it, I feel like there is something of the instant connection, there is no fussing around and trying to make it beautiful, or pretty, or anything like that. And maybe we would have killed that with more time, we would’ve made it more of a clean package. I don’t know. It’s hard to know.

Stella: There’s a school of thought that says having a deadline is freeing because it can be a torture to have all the time in the world as it will never feel good enough.

Jon: Totally. I don’t think I can write music for myself without deadlines. I need deadlines to actually finish projects. Otherwise, I would just sit and experiment all day just doing nonsense music.

Carl-Johan: I think the best stuff from what we’ve done together it’s been with the short deadlines. That’s when we’re just banging up. [laughing]

Jon: [laughing] Yeah.

STILL FROM ‘OPPONENT’ (MOTSTÅNDAREN)

Stella: There are two main predominant themes in the movie – the topic of refugees and that of repressed homosexuality. What are your thoughts on these matters, considering they’ve been hot topics over the past few years?

Jon: I think we both felt really strong about it because I think these are really important things that we’re talking about here. And for me, these are the movies I want to make. I want to do movies that mean something. I have done a lot of other movies, but those I would consider more like work. And doing the other films is actually helping me to do these films because then you can relax a little bit economically because usually for things like this, there aren’t that big budgets. As soon as we got pitched the synopsis by Milad, we basically said, ‘OK, this sounds really interesting. We want to see the movie.’. After that, we kind of looked at each other and said, directly, ‘Of course we’re going to do this; it’s important.’.

And what I think is really interesting also is how much more important the actual story has become since we finished the movie because then the new revolution in Iran with the women made it much, much more important. I think the ending in the movie also means a lot more in a way for the audience because now the audience understands what a big decision he actually makes in the end.

Stella: Do you have any exciting projects coming out?

Jon: Daniel Espinosa, who I’ve been working with a lot, has done a European feature film, very much independent compared to the other movies that we’ve done lately together. And that has been great fun. It’s called Madame Luna. We’re heading into final mix. Mid-April or something like that. I think they’re really hoping for getting it out on the festival circuit. It’s a very powerful and very beautiful film in many ways.

Stella: Can you share anything about the music you wrote for it?

Jon: I actually got a little bit inspired from Opponent. My instrument that I learned as a kid was the clarinet but I played it from when I was seven till maybe 12; I was never really good at it. But on Opponent we used it on a couple of cues and it works so well. So on Daniel’s movie, basically, it’s just me playing the clarinet on the whole score and a little bit synths, but I would say that the main instrument is clarinet.

Carl-Johan: I’m doing Bartosz M. Kowaltski‘a next film. I’m going to start working on it at the end of the summer. Can’t say too much about it quite yet. But it’s going to be cool.

This week, we sat down with the renowned Belgian composer Michelino Bisceglia to discuss his latest project, the soundtrack for ‘My Sailor, My Love, a powerful tale of a second chance at love and the power of redemption, directed by Golden Globe-nominated director Klaus Härö.

We had a look at some of the finer details that make a composer-director collaboration successful, the three main components that inspire Michelino when he is putting together a musical mood board for a film, as well as some of his past and upcoming projects.

Bisceglia has won several awards for his work in film music, including the World Soundtrack Award Public Choice in 2014 for his work on the film ‘Marina’ and a nomination for a World Soundtrack Award in 2022 for his soundtrack on the animation drama ‘Charlotte’, which starred Keira Knightly. Recently Bisceglia received another nomination, this time for “Breakthrough Composer of the Year” by the International Film Music Critics Association (IFMCA).

Let’s chat about your newest release, ‘My Sailor, My Love’. How did you get to work on this film?

The score had to be by a Belgian composer because it was a co-production with Belgium. Klaus Härö, the director, knew a friend of mine, John Engel, who is an American producer based here in Brussels. I think John mentioned my name to Klaus. Klaus then did some research. We have in Belgium a site called Belgian Screen Composers Guild but there are like 64 names on the site, and Klaus told me that he scrolled through all the names because he was looking for a specific profile of a composer.

Finally, I received a call from Klaus and the co-producer and asking me if I was interested to have a talk with the director. I said, ‘yeah, of course’ and then we took time to talk together. It was a great first contact which is also the most important. He sent me over the script, and I loved the script. I was travelling at the time, I was doing some scoring abroad, taking flights and reading the script in the check-in halls. Klaus said, ‘Michel, if you have an idea to try something out, to create something, some theme, or a motif, or whatever that you can present to me that would be great.’

STILL FROM ‘MY SAILOR, MY LOVE’

When I was reading the script, I thought it was a beautiful story between these two elderly people but it’s the sea that is the fundamental element in this whole story. And that really inspired me, and I started to hear the music – which I do very often in the sense that when I read a script, I feel what it means musically. I sat down and started to compose two themes. I sent them over and then Klaus contacted me and said he liked them very much and he wanted me for the job.

Did the director give you any instructions whatsoever or did you have complete freedom to come up with something?

In the beginning, he didn’t know. He just gave me the script and he was like, “just read it. Let me know if you like it”. Later on, he even came over to my place. We had a lot of conversations; we really took the time to talk. Not only about how the music should be but about how we’re going to work together. You don’t know me. I don’t know you. We are two strangers working intensively together on a project for a specific period of time. But this conversation we had was very fruitful. It was important to set out a base so that we gain some trust and know each other. And we also talked about other stuff, which has nothing to do with the project, just about life, you know? Two strange people, meeting each other and discovering our interests, our taste, our approaches, our way of working.

How much of the score had you written before you saw any shots?

Maybe like 12-13 cues were written before I even saw something. Of course, later I adapted to what it had to be. But we had this very special way of working because Klaus pointed out when we were talking that, ‘Michel, I do not have that much experience with big orchestra productions.’ He didn’t know how to approach that in our collaboration. But me neither. I didn’t know how to. I even said to him the most important words: ‘Listen, you have to give me this opportunity to make mistakes because for me, it’s important to go find the borders – until where can I go?’ If you have a friend and you ask him, ‘please let me make a mistake’, it means you’re asking, ‘please give me some trust, and I need to trust you also.’ It’s in two directions. I think it’s very important. And he understood that right away.

I was kind of creating a mood board, like a basket of music ideas that can be used within the process of editing where I can try some stuff out. And that’s what ended up happening at the end; after the editing process I started to compose additional music.

MY SAILOR, MY LOVE’ SCORING SESSION

‘My Sailor, My Love’ was shot at the same time and on the same island as ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’, but at the 10th of the budget. Has the budget affected at all the musical side? Would you have done things differently?

Well, every €1,000 I will have more, I will spend it on more strings. You will always go to the maximum I would say, but no, I think I could do what I wanted to do and I’m happy with what was available. Sometimes you have no budget, and you still have to be very creative. Of course, it will have an implication on the music. You will have a smaller orchestra, you will have less time to record, etc. But it was clear that there had to be orchestra music so you are speaking about a minimum budget, otherwise, you would never have an orchestra. And that was from day one clear also from his side for Klaus. And that’s also my profile as a composer. I do also some of the electronics, of course, we all get involved in that, but I’m trying to express myself more and I have more fun and joy and challenge working with the orchestra. And that’s maybe the reason why he ended up working with me.

It sounds like the orchestra was the best way to convey the emotions in the movie.

Yes. You know, the sea…it’s a big thing. But the sea can be big, the sea can be small, it can have all kinds of shapes, and that’s what the orchestra also has. It can have big moments, but it can be very intimate. It can be very small. It can be very lovely. It can be very imposing. Although we stayed away from the heaviness. I try to be sentient.

You mentioned you wrote about 12 cues just off the script. But once you saw the images of the landscapes and the people, did that change your musical direction at all?

No. You know what Klaus did? He sent me photos of the location, the sea, and the road where the car drives. So he ‘fed’ me with elements and the script was so clear. Everything was there. On some cues, we did minor changes. And of course, we had to record them, to orchestrate them, but we were very much on the right direction from the first note, which was wonderful. And it was great to have discovered that.

KLAUS HÄRÖ, MICHELINO BISCEGLIA, AND PATRICK LEMMENS AT ‘MY SAILOR, MY LOVE’ SCORING SESSION

It sounds like a healthy and fruitful collaboration.

Yeah, good communication. He directed and steered me in the right direction: which elements were important for him, where to be emotional but not too much, not to drag the emotion. It’s important to have it under control and I think when emotion is well-weighted, it has much more impact than when it’s completely out of control. I think it won’t work and it won’t be credible anymore.

What was the most difficult scene or cue to score?

Well, there was one cue that was the most difficult, but at the end he didn’t use it. [laughs] That was the moment after the little stress Annie and Howard had together when she gets back to Howard’s house and starts to work. He’s mowing the grass and there is a little game: she’s hiding behind the window and he’s crossing and they’re trying to see each other. I had music on that cue. And I was convinced that it could have been supported greatly with music, but we couldn’t find the colour that Klaus was convinced should be used. But he thought it would work without music also. And it works like that. After many tries, at the end, the decision was to do it without the music and I’m absolutely fine with that. And that is also interesting from my side as a composer to try to give you solutions. It’s better to choose from something that you have in your hands, something concrete, than to choose based on something abstract in your mind.

True. But silence can be just as important in a critical model.

Absolutely. And you don’t miss it. If you look at that, it works great. It’s a great play. For me, it was like a dance between Howard and Annie. But it works. It’s without music but it’s still a dance.

Did you find the characters relatable at all?

Yes, I did. Although it’s a story that starts from another story. So, it took time to get into them. But that part in the script was very well written. By reading it, you could really start to sense how they were, what the personalities were, and they were very inspiring also. People at that age are fragile, not only physically but also mentally and emotionally. Klaus was not trying to find elements but handle with care, very delicate.

You mentioned earlier that your biggest inspiration for the film was the sea. What does usually inspire you musically?

People, their character in the first place. What is the personality? Is it soft? Is it with secrets? Is it with strong character? Soft character? Is it the way they talk? The location is also very inspiring. Where is it played? That’s something that I try to catch also in film music because it sets out the environment where the music behaves. It also makes you as a listener or as a viewer get really into the film, on the location itself. Also, the timeline sometimes can be very inspiring. I remember I did a Netflix series some years ago and it [was set in] the 18th century. And it’s very inspiring because it’s a different setting and you have to try to find a sound that matches with that period, but not be old fashioned, not be grabbed too early with the instrument of that period. Because that wouldn’t work. So, I would say those three elements are, for me, where I try to catch my colours, and try to use that as a base.

What is your ideal process? Do you like to score from the beginning to the end or start with larger cues? Or start with the theme, and then develop it?

I don’t have a strict structure to work on, but I would say the queues that are speaking to me the most, where I’ve had an idea immediately, I would definitely start on those. The bigger queues, the longer queues, the queues which will have most of work. Although sometimes you can be wrong; some smaller cues can be very difficult to nail. But usually, I would start on the cues that appease me directly, where I get like a crush on in terms of ideas. I do write without any markup, just on the piano or paper and piano. I try to write my own mood board where this theme could be for this character. Then I write a couple of themes for that period, some couple of themes for that location, some themes for that situation. So have like many colours that I can play with. I’m creating the puzzle [pieces] so I can make the puzzle later on. I always start in the middle somewhere.

One of my favourite projects of yours is ‘Claude Monet: The Immersive Experience’. It also has a cinematic sound; it tells a story and guides you through the exhibition. How different was it to write music for that project as opposed to writing for a film?

It was difficult. It was strange because you don’t have a film. And the producer sent me I don’t remember how many paintings I had to work on. And he sent me the script of how the painting will evolve from one painting to the other one and how it will be set in the room in the exhibition. And that’s it. So, I remember I had Monet’s painting of London with the Thames. And I was trying to look in the painting trying to see something move but nothing moves, of course, it’s just a static painting. [laughs] Although, when you stare at it and you take your time, you kind of imagine it moving. But then also I tried to see, if this was film, what would it be? This is the location, it’s London. We see the Thames and the water is moving, so we have to make it move. And it’s British, so I need some British elements. I tried to invent from myself elements where I could come up with music that is horizontal on a timeframe of 5 minutes.

Another thing that was difficult was that I had to compose that in a very short time. I think this whole project has been scored in two months. I was really running out of time, and I had to really sit down and write. And in this case, again, there’s no film, so the music had to say it all. The development of harmonies and themes was much more complex because it’s only the music that speaks out. You couldn’t hang on one course for some time because it doesn’t work, there’s nothing happening. The music has to move, forward, forward, forward. That was difficult. But yeah, I’m very happy with the result and the exhibition is a huge success.

What would you say is the project you’re most proud of so far?

I love them all. They’re absolutely my babies. [laughs] I don’t want to choose. It’s like when you have three children: which one do you love most? Difficult to say, right? For me, when working on a project I try to go emotionally very far into it. I go to sleep with it, I stand up with it, I have those characters in my mind. It’s like I’m isolated within that. And sometimes I meet the actors at the festival. And I reach out to them, “Hey, how are you doing?” And they’re like, ‘Excuse me?’ [laughs] They don’t know me, but I’ve seen them for two months on my screen.

I’ve really enjoyed working on ‘My Sailor, My Love’. I’ve also loved working on ‘Charlotte’, this animation film where Keira Knightley played the voice for this Canadian-British animation film. That was a very emotional film because it’s a very strong story of a girl that just wanted to be an artist and ended up being stuck within the World War with the Nazis and they’re fighting. And at the end ended up being killed to this horrible situation. She was 26 years old. It really struck me.

Another film which I loved working very much on was ‘Marina’. It was awarded by the World Soundtrack Awards, where it won the Public Choice Award in 2014. It’s a young singer-artist character that wanted to be an artist then the father tried to block him and convince him to do other things. It’s emotional, it’s heartbreaking. Just let him go. Let him do it. Go for your dreams, make your dream come true. Which we all want to have in our life, you know?

And ‘Monet’ also. I’m honoured to have been asked to write score music for such an incredible big artist, which has such a big place in history. It’s wonderful.

Do you have any future projects that you’re excited about?

Yes. Now I’m working on a film called ‘Sleep’, from a Dutch director, Jan-Willem Van Ewijk. It’s an American-Dutch road movie. It’s also a heavy drama. It’s a story surrounded by this weapon abuse where innocent people die in the States due to this insane availability of weapons within the society and it’s just crazy. It’s a road movie so the music also evolves within the film, it travels with the character and the location. For that project I already started to compose music ahead. The director wanted to have it also on the set, which is great. And now they are in the editing phase and I think it’s going to be in August that I’m going to be on it to finalize the score. I really look forward to that. I’ve seen already some rushes and it looks great. It’s fantastic.

Will you be using the full orchestra once again?

No, it’s going to be smaller. There will be some string orchestra covering it, but you won’t feel it. And there is some jazz flavor in it because, after the conversation I had with the director, we tried to get this American society where you also feel it in the music and jazz is an important element of the American culture. But, of course, it’s not the exposed jazz. It’s sensible. Very, very delicate, but it’s there. I’m very much looking forward to it.

The ‘60s brought changes in culture and style that affected even the world of film music. The sound of the symphonic score established in the ‘30s by the likes of Max Steiner was going out of fashion, being instead replaced by experimental music, jazz- and rock-oriented rhythms, and pop tunes. Composers like John Barry, Ennio Morricone and Jerry Goldsmith were strongly influencing the cinematic sound of the decade and what the studios would request from their directors.

The following selection includes some of the most famous rejected scores of the ‘60s, underlining the strong creative differences between directors, composers and studios, which ultimately influenced the outcome of each production.

‘EL CID’ MOVIE POSTER

El Cid (1961)

Miklós Rózsa
Mario Nascimbene

Directed by Anthony Mann and produced by Samuel Bronston, El Cid is a 1961 epic historical drama film that is based on the life of the Castilian knight Don Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, called ‘El Cid’, who sets upon defending Christian Spain against the Moors.

Samuel Bronston had just finished his epic film King of Kings (1961), and decided to materialise his life-long dream of bringing the story of El Cid to the big screen. MGM had partially financed King of Kings, which meant they had a say in every major decision. Wanting more freedom and control over this new epic, Bronston produced El Cid with his own company, Samuel Bronston Productions, in association with the Italian company Dear Film Produzione. This meant that in order to receive financial assistance from the Italian government, certain compromises had to be made, such as Bronston having to employ a certain number of Italian artists and technicians to work on the project. As such, despite wanting to hire Miklós Rozsa, with whom he had worked on A King of Kings, Bronston went ahead and hired the Italian composer Mario Nascimbene. This collaboration, however, would be short-lived, as Bronston’s requirements would infuriate the composer. Nascimbene writes:

Bronston called me and asked me to score EL CID, which was being shot by Anthony Mann. I read the screenplay first, and they told me to write some dance themes only. The music had to accompany a kind of fighting dance for scenes taking place on the beach, so I wrote some cues for tympani, with a rather brutal, violent rhythm, without any real melody. Director Mann liked what I had written and shot his scenes, using the cues as background. Then, when shooting EL CID was about halfway, I was asked to come to Malaga to discuss the score itself. Samuel Bronston met me there when I arrived, showed me a pile of records of Massenet’s ‘El Cid’ and told me: “This is the music for the film”. Apparently I had to sort of “adapt” Massenet’s music for the film. Samuel Bronston behaved in an offensive way, and I told him that I am used to discussing the score with a director, and with him only. So I returned to Rome, where I tore up the contract already made.

This outcome worked wonderfully for Bronston, who managed to hire his first choice, Miklós Rózsa. It is speculated that the producer never intended for the score to be an adaptation of Jules Massenet’s opera to begin with, but it was merely a sure-fire plot to get Nascimbene to back out of the picture.

Be that as it may, Bronston did go to great lengths to get Rózsa to score his picture, even managing to get him out of a pre-existing contract with MGM to score Mutiny on the Bounty (1962). Mutiny would end up being scored by another MGM in-house composer, Bronislau Kaper. As a concession to their co-producers, another Italian composer’s name (Carlo Savina) appeared on the credits as co-composer on the picture, but only on the Italian prints.

Bronston flew Rózsa and his family to Madrid for the whole summer and offered him a lovely house for him to work from and the same weekly living expenses the producer himself was getting. Besides Spain itself being a huge inspiration for the score of El Cid, the composer set out to research the history of El Cid and the Spanish music in the Medieval Ages. He turned to ninety-two-year-old Dr Ramón Menéndez Pidal, a Spanish philologist, historian and expert in El Cid, who introduced him to the twelfth-century musical poems of ‘La Cantigas de Santa Maria’. Furthermore, Rózsa studied Felipe Pedrell’s collection of Spanish folksongs, which the musicologist had compiled throughout his life. The composer spent a month of intense study, analysing these two very different sources after which he began working on translating what he had learned into the new score.

Despite Rózsa’s seamless collaboration with Bronston, the composer was shocked to realize, during the premiere of El Cid, that the director and his sound editor had chopped and binned some of Rózsa’s cues in favour of the film’s sound design. As a result, Rózsa cancelled his publicity tour, stating that, ‘I could not talk about music which nobody was going to hear.’

The above issues notwithstanding, the film was a commercial success earning more than four times its production cost of $6.25 million and garnered three Academy Award nominations including Best Art Direction, Best Film Score and Best Song. El Cid would be Milós Rózsa’s last epic score.

‘HATARI!’ MOVIE POSTER

Hatari! (1962)

Henry Mancini
Hoagy Carmichael

Hatari! is a 1962 American adventure romantic comedy film directed by Howard Hawks. It portrays a group of professional game catchers in Africa who entrap wild animals and sell them to zoos before a female wildlife photographer disrupts their ways.

Hawks was planning on hiring his long-time collaborator, Dmitri Tiomkin, to write the score for the picture. The director’s only requirement was for Tiomkin to completely leave out the string and woodwind sections and instead use authentic African instruments. Thinking Hawks was joking, the conservative composer showed the director a score that included strings. This misunderstanding would lead to them parting ways and the pair would never work together again.

HOAGY CARMICHAEL’S SKECTH FOR ‘HATARI!’

The director then turned to prolific singer-songwriter Hoagy Carmichael who played Cricket in the director’s 1944 picture, To Have and Have Not, after Hawks had discovered the musician at a party. Hawks wanted to work with someone who had never scored a picture before and had no preconceived notions of what a score is supposed to sound like. And although the director was happy at first with Carmichael’s material, they ended up disagreeing on the direction of the music and Hawks had to turn to another composer yet again.

As it turned out, the third time was the charm as the director’s next choice, Henry Mancini, would go on to score Hatari!. Mancini did end up using violins in his music, however, he masterfully entwined them with tribal rhythms and an array of native instruments that Hawks had brought back with him from Africa. Mancini would use instruments such as the thumb piano, shell gourds and giant pea pods to score the animal scenes. Among the shot material was a scene that Hawks was contemplating on cutting out, but asked Mancini to have a look at it regardless. The scene featured Anna Maria D’Alessandro (Elsa Martinelli) taking three small elephants to a watering hole to bathe them. The composer loved the scene and immediately knew what to do with it. He superimposed an E-flat clarinet over an electric calliope (the only one in the world at that time), and the result would give birth to one of cinema’s most memorable themes, ‘Baby Elephant Walk’. The composer recalled:

[…] As the little elephants went down to the water, there was a shot of them from behind. Their little backsides were definitely in rhythm with something. […] it reminded me of something. I though, Yeah, they’re walking eight to the bar, and that brought something to mind, an old Will Bradley boogie-woogie number called “Down the Road a Piece”, a hit record in the old days, with Ray McKinley on drums and Freddie Slack on piano. Those little elephants were definitely walking boogie-woogie, eight to the bar. I wrote “Baby Elephant Walk” as a result.

Interestingly, the next track after ‘Baby Elephant Walk’ on the soundtrack recording is ‘Just for Tonight’, which was Hoagy Carmichael’s reworking of ‘A Perfect Paris Night’ and the only material retained from his work in the film. Luckily, all of Carmichael’s recorded music, as well as the written score were preserved and are archived at Indiana University.

‘TORN CURTAIN’ MOVIE POSTER

Torn Curtain (1966)

John Addison
Bernard Herrmann

Torn Curtain is a 1966 Cold War political thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock. …of an American scientist (Paul Newman) who is secretly a double agent who publicly defects to East Germany to discover Soviet nuclear secrets.

By that time, the celebrated director had enthralled audiences worldwide with masterpieces such as Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959) and Psycho (1960). However, following the box office failure of Marnie (1964), Hitchcock started to doubt himself as his cinema was beginning to show its age. Universal Studios saw Hitch’s hesitation as an opportunity to get their claws into the film’s post-production. Lew Wasserman, the head of Universal, instructed Hitchcock to bring in a new sound to the picture and go for a pop-oriented score more in tune with the times.

Having previously successfully collaborated with Bernard Herrmann on eight of his pictures which constituted one of the greatest director-composer partnerships in the history of cinema, Hitchcock turned to the composer once again, this time with precise instructions in tune with the studio’s demands:

I am particularly concerned with the need to break away from the old-fashioned cued-in type music that we have been using for so long. […] The audience is very different from the one to which we used to cater; it is young, vigorous and demanding. It is this fact that has been recognized by almost all of the European filmmakers where they have sought to introduce a beat and a rhythm that is more in tune with the requirements of the aforesaid audience.

Herrmann was not crazy about the film but agreed to score it as by that time Hitchcock was his only regular source of feature film work. The independent-minded composer went ahead with music he thought was appropriate for the film. Granted, Hitchcock had asked Herrmann to sketch the music ‘in advance because we have an urgent problem of meeting a tax date’, so the composer had to come up with the cues blindly. When Hitchcock arrived at the Goldwyn Studios on 24 March 1966 for the first recording session, he was shocked to realize that Herrmann had gone against his wishes and wrote bold, unusual symphonic music using atypical orchestrations and an unorthodox line-up of instruments consisting of twelve flutes – doubling on piccolos, alto flutes and bass flutes – sixteen French horns, nine trombones, two tubas, double timpani, eight cellos and eight basses. He also composed music for the murder scene, even though Hitchcock had expressly requested be left without music.

The orchestra musicians were ecstatic about Herrmann’s score and gave him a standing ovation right after the recording. Hitchcock, however, was furious and dismissed the composer in front of everyone. The two never spoke again, ending a twelve-year-old collaboration.

A few days later, British composer John Addison was hired and flown to Los Angeles. Ironically, Addison’s replacement music wasn’t pop-oriented either and neither did it manage to salvage the picture which flopped.

Bernard Herrman’s score for Torn Curtain remains one of the best known ‘might have beens’ in the history of film music. And although it never ended up in the film, his music was released on CD no less than three times over the years.

‘2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY’ MOVIE POSTER

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Classical compositions by various composers
Frank Cordell, Alex North

2001: A Space Odyssey is Stanley Kubrick’s magnum opus and is based on Arthur C. Clarke’s short story The Sentinel. Kubrick worked together with Clarke on writing the script, which they completed in January 1966, which would eventually prompt Clarke to publish his science fiction novel 2001: A Space Odyssey.

As was his custom, Kubrick used temporary music throughout his film in order to find the film’s pulse and to help carry the narrative. And thus, over the next two years, as the project was taking shape, he acquired multiple records of classical music, listened to countless hours of orchestral pieces and put together a temp track (temporary music used in a picture during production). Among his favourites were Felix Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard Strauss’ tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra (which became the movie’s signature track), a waltz by Frédéric Chopin, Johann Strauss’ The Blue Danube, Aram Khachaturian’s Gayene, and Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. Kubrick actually approached Orff and tried to persuade him to compose the score, however, Orff politely declined saying that this task was too large for his advanced age (the composer was seventy-one at the time).

Kubrick became convinced that his film didn’t need an original score as his carefully-curated selection of classical oeuvres would do the film justice. The MGM bosses, however, disagreed. They were adamant that a movie of such magnitude required an equally-great composer. And so, at the end of 1967, the director approached two composers – English composer Frank Cordell and well-established Hollywood composer Alex North (with whom Kubrick had worked on Spartacus (1960).

The collaboration with Cordell was stillborn, as at that time, Kubrick wasn’t very clear about what he wanted and instructed the composer to adapt Mahler’s Third Symphony. Cordell’s score got rejected and Kubrick then turned to Alex North.

Alex North recalls:

I was living in the Chelsea Hotel in New York (where Arthur Clarke was living) and got a phone call from Kubrick from London asking me of my availability to come over and do a score for 2001. He told me that I was the film composer he most respected, and he looked forward to working together. I was ecstatic at the idea of working with Kubrick again (Spartacus was an extremely exciting experience for me), as I regard Kubrick as the most gifted of the younger-generation directors, and that goes for the older as well. And to do a film score where there were about twenty-five minutes of dialogue and no sound effects! What a dreamy assignment, after Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, loaded with dialogue.

 I flew over to London for two days in early December to discuss music with Kubrick. He was direct and honest with me concerning his desire to retain some of the “temporary” music tracks which he had been using for the past years. I realized that he liked these tracks, but I couldn’t accept the idea of composing part of the score interpolated with other composers. I felt I could compose music that had the ingredients and essence of what Kubrick wanted and give it a consistency and homogeneity and contemporary feel. In any case, I returned to London December 24th [1967] to start work for recording on January 1, after having seen and discussed the first hour of film for scoring. Kubrick arranged a magnificent apartment for me on the Chelsea Embankment, and furnished me with all the things to make me happy: record player, tape machine, good records, etc. I worked day and night to meet the first recording date, but with the stress and strain, I came down with muscle spasms and back trouble. I had to go to the recording in an ambulance, and the man who helped me with the orchestration, Henry Brant, conducted while I was in the control room. Kubrick was present, in and out; he was pressured for time as well. He made very good suggestions, musically. I had written two sequences for the opening, and he was definitely favorable to one, which was my favorite as well. So I assumed all was going well, what with his participation and interest in the recording. But somehow I had the hunch that whatever I wrote to supplant Strauss’ Zarathustra would not satisfy Kubrick, even though I used the same structure but brought it up to date in idiom and dramatic punch. Also, how could I compete with Mendelssohn’s Scherzo from Midsummer Night’s Dream? Well, I thought I did pretty damned well in that respect.

In any case, after having composed and recorded over forty minutes of music in those two weeks, I waited around for the opportunity to look at the balance of the film, spot the music, etc. During that period I was rewriting some of the stuff that I was not completely satisfied with, and Kubrick even suggested over the phone certain changes that I could make in the subsequent recording. After eleven tense days of waiting to see more film in order to record in early February, I received word from Kubrick that no more score was necessary, that he was going to use breathing effects for the remainder of the film. It was all very strange, and I thought perhaps I would still be called upon to compose more music; I even suggested to Kubrick that I could do whatever necessary back in L.A. at the M-G-M studios. Nothing happened. I went to a screening in New York, and there were most of the “temporary” tracks.

In an interesting twist, North found out that his score had been rejected only during the film’s premiere in New York, an experience that, according to author Michael Benson, left him ‘shocked and humiliated’.

Thankfully, Alex North’s original score was brought to life in 1993 via a full recording conducted by Jerry Goldsmith.

In the second part of this series, we continue to explore the history behind some of the film scores that were replaced during Hollywood’s Golden Age. This particular selection features the work created by some of the brightest musical minds of the era that would nonetheless get rejected due to creative differences and clashes of egos.

‘COMMANDOS STRIKE AT DAWN’ FILM POSTER

Commandos Strike at Dawn (1942)

Louis Gruenberg
Igor Stravinsky

Commandos Strike at Dawn is a 1942 Second World War propaganda film directed by John Farrow and adapted by Irwin Shaw from a short story entitled The Commandos by C.S. Forester that appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine in June 1942. The film tells the story of a Norwegian fisherman who is outraged by the atrocities committed by the Nazis against his peaceful, bucolic village and escapes to Britain to form a resistance force.

Toward the end of 1941, Morris Stoloff, musical director at Columbia Pictures Corporation, met with Russian composer Igor Stravinsky to discuss the possibility of his composing the score for Commandos Strike at Dawn. Stravinsky had been living in the United States since 1939, following the deaths of his wife and daughter from tuberculosis. Just before emigrating, Stravinsky himself had spent five months in hospital, during which time his mother died.

IGOR STRAVINSKY

Alexandre Tansman was appointed as Stravinsky’s assistant and Hollywood advisor on the score due to the latter’s lack of experience with the Hollywood scoring system, and they both sought out Miklós Rózsa’s advice on the technicalities of scoring a film.

In the end, the negotiations didn’t pan out. Similar to Arnold Schoenberg’s attempt to score The Good Earth, Stravinsky began working on the score long before signing a contract. His approach was to create a pastoral atmosphere with his score by basing the music on Norwegian folk songs. This was an unusual perspective, considering that war films at the time had a very specific sound and featured heroic marches and fanfares.

Stravinsky ended up salvaging the material he had written and turned it into a four-movement concert suite entitled Four Norwegian Moods, premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra on 13 January, 1944. Stravinsky had based his compositions on pieces found in The Norway Music Album, three of which were arrangements by Edvard Grieg. Stravinsky vehemently denied to have drawn inspiration from Edvard Grieg’s music, stating, ‘All the themes in my Norwegian Moods were taken from a collection of Norwegian folk music my wife found in a secondhand bookstore in Los Angeles – and not from Grieg, as some writers on my music have stated!’

‘FOUR NORWEGIAN MOODS’ ALBUM COVER

The replacement composer for the project was another composer of Russian descent, Louis Gruenberg, who not only delivered the score quickly but was exactly what Columbia was looking for. His work earned him an Oscar nomination in the Best Original Score category in 1944.

As for Stravinsky, during the 28 years he lived in the United States, he tried his hand at scoring two more times, but to no avail, on both occasions due to clashes with producer Darryl F. Zanuck. In 1943, he was informally approached to compose the music for Song of Bernadette (1943). He managed to compose music for the ‘Apparition of the Virgin’ scene, however, the project ended up going to Alfred Newman, who won an Oscar. Stravinsky recycled his music which made its way into the second movement of his Symphony in Three Movements. Similarly, in February 1943, upon the personal request of Orson Welles, Stravinsky began composing music for 20th Century Fox’s Jane Eyre (1943). After Bernard Herrmann replaced him, Stravinsky ended up turning the music he had composed for a hunting scene into ‘Eclogue’ to his Ode for orchestra, which premiered in 1943.

Despite never making it as a film composer in Hollywood, Stravinsky remained in Los Angeles until 1969 and his stay in Southern California triggered fresh approaches to his compositional techniques.

‘SINCE YOU WENT AWAY’ FILM POSTER

Since You Went Away (1944)

Max Steiner
Alexandre Tansman

Since You Went Away is a 1944 American drama film directed by John Cromwell for Selznick International Pictures. The movie was adapted and produced by the legendary producer David O. Selznick from the 1943 novel Since You Went Away: Letters to a Soldier from His Wife by Margaret Buell Wilder. The film tells the story of a housewife who is left home alone to take care of her two daughters and a pair of lodgers while her husband is away to fight in World War II.

Selznick wanted his Oscar bait to demonstrate his patriotic support for the war effort but did not want to make another traditional war movie. As was typical with his productions, he personally wanted to oversee all aspects of the production, including the music. However, finding the right composer for the picture turned out to be quite the challenge.

DAVID O. SELZNICK

Selznick’s initial choice was MGM’s in-house composer Herbert Stothart, with whom he had collaborated a few times before. However, Stothart was already attached to four other films. The producer then reached out to Bernard Herrmann, but Herrmann declined, as the project was of no interest to him.

Selznick then asked for a list of all the available composers in Hollywood and their credits and thus ended up hiring freelance composer Alexandre Tansman to score the picture. A prolific concert composer, Tansman was an émigré from Poland who moved to Paris in his twenties and had only worked on one Hollywood film, Flesh and Fantasy (1943). He was unattached to any of the big studios, a position Selznick found to his liking. Hiring Tansman, an established composer of symphonies, operas, and ballets, would carry ‘a certain little extra distinction’ and would help with publicity. Selznick then hired Charles Previn, a music director at Universal, to oversee Tansman’s work and Louis Forbes as Associate Music Director.

ALEXANDRE TANSMAN WITH HIS FIRST WIFE ANNA ELEONORA BROCINER

Tansman was an unknown to the producer, and Selznick was anxious about entrusting a production of such proportions to a composer relatively new to Hollywood. So he requested that Tansman record only a couple of reels of music – or as he put it, ‘the minimum required from a cost standpoint’ – so that the producer could decide early on, before losing too much time and money, if the music worked.

Tansman was then asked to arrange a few versions of ‘Together’, a 1928 song that was the centrepiece of the film’s music, and was only given the length and the overall mood of the scene – he was not informed as to the application of his music to the scenes. This temporary recording was to be produced using a chamber ensemble, so Tansman had to reorchestrate his score for his reduced resources. Naturally, the music did not sound as good as it would have employing the power of a full orchestra, and needless to say, Selznick was less than impressed.

In other words, Tansman had fallen into a trap by agreeing to compose to script, without final footage. This was Selznick’s typical requirement, as he wanted composition to take place before the picture was edited in order to allow composers more time and avoid time crunches during post-production. Max Steiner and Alfred Newman had refused to work like this, being aware of how much a picture could change between script and locked picture. Tansman, however, did not, so when Selznick viewed the synchronised footage and musical mockup, the composer’s fate was sealed.

‘SINCE YOU WENT AWAY’ SOUNDTRACK ALBUM COVER

With little time left and a very long film in need of music, Selznick’s reached out to Warner Bros. music director Leo Forbestein and asked to borrow Max Steiner. Forbestein agreed but warned Selznick that hiring Steiner on such short notice would not be cheap. Desperate, Selznick agreed to pay Warner Bros. an astounding $3,300 a week for Steiner’s services. Steiner took the assignment with a bit of anxiety, as he was well aware of Selznick’s habit to micro-manage the scoring process. Ironically, Selznick had considered replacing Steiner during the postproduction of Gone with the Wind, when the composer stated he was unable to deliver the score before the set deadline.

Selznick was very grateful to the composer, considering the time constraints and the fact that at the time, Steiner was going through a rough time in his personal life, as his father was dying and had been hospitalized, his marriage to Louise Klos was falling apart and Steiner himself was suffering from a back tumour that required surgery. ‘Thank heavens for Maxie.’, the producer is said to have affirmed.

Steiner’s score features an astonishing number of themes, several popular songs of the era and traditional works, as well an infusion of several of Steiner’s themes from earlier Selznick pictures. A recording of ‘Together’ from Tansman’s score was retained. 

Since You Went Away would mark David O. Selznick and Max Steiner’s final collaboration and was both a commercial and critical success, earning nine Academy Award nominations, winning one for Best Score. This was the first time Selznick’s company would receive the award for best music.

‘CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA’ FILM POSTER

Caesar and Cleopatra (1945)

Georges Auric
Arthur Bliss

Caesar and Cleopatra is a 1945 British Technicolor film directed by Gabriel Pascal and is based on the play by George Bernard Shaw and was the most expensive film ever produced in Britain at the time. Gabriel Pascal was the only director Shaw trusted to film his plays after successfully delivering Pygmalion (1938) and Major Barbara (1941). Shaw praised Pascal by saying, ‘Pascal is doing for films what Diaghilev did for ballet.’

The story focuses around a middle-aged Julius Caesar, who, at the height of the Roman Civil War, takes possession of the Egyptian capital city of Alexandria, where he meets a young Cleopatra and teaches her how to rule Egypt.

Shaw himself recommended Sir Arthur Bliss to score the picture, and so, on 6 June 1944, the British composer signed the contract. However, the deal was with the author rather than the director. Bliss, who in 1953 would become Master of the Queen’s Music, was a well-established composer of classical concert music and had only a few movies to his name, including the most expensive film of its time, H.G. Well’s Things to Come. Bliss’ score for Things to Come would have been a pillar in British film scoring had it not been ruined by the perpetual re-editing of the picture and the poor quality of contemporary dubbing technology.

‘THE FILM MUSIC OF SIR ARTHUR BLISS’ ALBUM COVER

Shaw, who was a former music critic, was in charge of all the communication regarding the music of Caesar and Cleopatra and provided Bliss with some helpful suggestions, including to write music in his own style and not to compose a clichéd imitation of Egyptian music. ‘In Heaven’s name, no Egyptian music!’, the author pleaded. Shaw also sent Bliss a letter offering him serious advice before the contract was signed:

“Be careful not to let yourself be placed in the position of an employee of Pascal or of the film company, as anything you compose for them in that capacity will belong to them and not to you. If I were a composer writing for a film I should make a skeleton piano score of an orchestral suite consisting of overture, nocturne, barcarole, intermezzo and finale. I should copyright this in my own name in England and America. Then, being in an impregnable position as sole owner of the music, I should license the film people to use the material as an accompaniment to their film for a stated period on stated terms, giving them no rights whatever. . . Remember that an orchestral suite by you will long survive Pascal’s film and become a standard concert piece quite independently of my play, like Grieg’s Peer Gynt. Let no parasite fasten on it.”

‘THE FILM MUSIC OF GEORGES AURIC’ ALBUM COVER

Following Shaw’s advice, Bliss started work on a score, writing 100 pages of music in his signature style, sketching out cues such as ‘Memphis at Night’, ‘Ftatateeta’, ‘Soldiers’ Chorus’ and ‘Barcarolle’. His instrumentation did call for a buccina, an ancient Roman wind instrument, which was the only exotic instrument Bliss used in the entire score.

However, the project came to a halt after Bliss had met Gabriel Pascal. Pascal was known to be tough and uncompromising in all departments of production, especially in music. Bliss later recalled, ‘I have had unforgettable experiences with one director who, where music was concerned, was a certified lunatic, and I had to discontinue collaboration.’ In his autobiography, Bliss explains, ‘One look at him made it self-evident that he would never be a sympathetic collaborator, and I withdrew from the assignment.’

The director wanted a ‘French-sounding’ score, so Bliss was replaced by Georges Auric, who was a member of the celebrated rebellious group of Parisian composers known as Les Six. The prolific composer took a different approach and composed the music using very colourful orchestrations and employing instruments such as strings, piano, celeste, xylophone, bells, harp, saxophone, tuba, and woodwinds. His music ended up being one of the highlights of an otherwise messy production.

A nine-minute suite containing ‘Main Titles’, ‘At the Sphinx’, and ‘The Battle’ was later recorded and published on a compilation album by Chandos Records. Similarly, Bliss’ rejected score was also turned into a suite consisting of eight short movements lasting 17 minutes, which was edited by Giles Easterbrook and Malcolm Binney. It was published several decades later also by Chandos Records.

‘THE NAKED CITY’ FILM POSTER

The Naked City (1948)

Miklós Rózsa, Frank Skinner
George Bassman

The Naked City is a 1948 American film noir directed by Jules Dassin and produced by Mark Hellinger. With a story written by Malvin Wald, the film marks the birth of the modern police procedural. The movie portrays the police investigation that follows the murder of a young girl and places the criminal underbelly of New York City under the microscope.

Hallinger was known for granting his directors a lot of artistic freedom, however, he only had one request for Dessin, that he use Miklós Rózsa to write the film’s score. Hallinger had worked with Rózsa before, the composer having scored two of the producer’s previous movies, The Killers (1946) and Brute Force (1947). Dessin, however, insisted that they hire George Bassman to score the picture. Bassman was a famed MGM arranger and composer who had scored three earlier Dessin films: Young Ideas (1943), A Letter for Evie (1946), and Two Smart People (1946). Both Dessin and Bossman had worked at MGM but were asked to leave; Dessin on account of his political views, and Bossman ‘for a different reason’.

The pressures of the film’s production took their toll on Hellinger, who suffered a heart attack while working in New York. Disregarding his doctor’s pleads for him to rest, Hellinger continued with the production. He even attended the recording sessions of the musical score, conducted by Bassman. Hellinger, however, felt that Bassman’s music was too similar to an Aaron Copland composition. Knowing Bassman’s background as an arranger, he feared that the composer might simply have reworked pre-existing music, a situation that could have serious legal repercussions. Outraged, Bassman insisted that his music was completely original and told Hellinger what he thought of him and his musical tastes. As a result, Hellinger immediately called Miklós Rózsa and asked him to replace Bassman as soon as possible. According to Rózsa, upon hearing Bassman’s score, Hellinger ‘nearly had another heart attack.’ As it happens, Hellinger did in fact die of another heart attack that very night.

The producer’s death did not slow down production and Rózsa immediately began spotting The Naked City, as he was given only two weeks to do the work on his own. The picture’s Music Supervisor and the head of Universal’s music department, Milton Schwarzwald, offered to bring in Universal in-house composer Frank Skinner to help shoulder the burden. Finding that time frame untenable, Rózsa agreed to score the chase sequence at the end and leave the first part of the film to Skinner, which featured less music-dependent dialogue scenes. Rózsa’s score went on to become a classic.

Interestingly, both Jules Dassin and George Bassman would soon be blacklisted for their Communist associations.

A Hollywood maxim states that one can’t truly call themselves a film composer until they’ve had at least one entire score thrown out. Accurate or not, what is certain is that even the biggest names in the industry have had their work tossed aside in favour of another colleague’s work for one reason or another. The dreaded R-word spares – almost – no one.

In the first two parts of this series, we explore a select number of film scores that have been replaced during Hollywood’s Golden Age. Granted, replacements didn’t happen back then as often as they do in our times, however, historically, film scores have been substituted fairly regularly be it due to studio politics, personality clashes between the creators, desperate last-minute attempts to salvage an otherwise poor picture or simply because the composers brought in were concert composers who weren’t part of the studio system and didn’t really ‘get it’.

With the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927, the first feature-length motion picture to use a synchronized recorded score, the importance of the film soundtrack became apparent and thus studios started to commission original music. The next few years were spent experimenting and researching the best way to go about scoring a film. Legendary composer Max Steiner has stated that ‘background’ music was, for the most part, disapproved of before 1932 due to the fact that people were uncomfortable not being able to see where the sound was coming from.

‘THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME’ FILM POSTER

The Most Dangerous Game (1932)

Max Steiner
W. Franke Harling

The Most Dangerous Game is a thriller adapted from a 1924 short story by Richard Connell, in which a deranged Russian Cossack hunter makes sure ships are wrecked on his island so that he can hunt the survivors for sport.

Producer Merian C. Cooper took charge at RKO Pictures during the Great Depression and was entrusted to go over all the projects that had accumulated with a fine-tooth comb and to greenlight the suitable ones. During that time, Cooper had two jungle adventures on his plate: King Kong (1933) – which required a large budget – and The Most Dangerous Game.

With a great reputation for delivering quality while being mindful of budgets, Cooper decided to test the feasibility of a jungle movie and went ahead with the production of The Most Dangerous Game. One of his ingenious ideas was to build film sets that were reserved for King Kong during the day and could be used for The Most Dangerous Game during the night.

MAX STEINER

Composer Max Steiner, who was Director of Music at RKO at that time, persuaded RKO’s bosses, who initially wanted to use ‘library music’ (old tracks), to go with original scores for these two movies. Steiner agreed to score King Kong at a reduced fee and Cooper said he would pay for the orchestra. Steiner already had a large workload on his shoulders, so W. Franke Harling was assigned to score The Most Dangerous Game.

Harling was well-known for having composed the music for A Light from St. Agnes, a popular jazz-oriented opera. Cooper, however, wasn’t pleased with his approach, complaining that his score was too ‘Broadway-light’ and unsuited for an adventure thriller.

Max Steiner was then begged to write a replacement score in only two weeks. Due to the very tight deadline on The Most Dangerous Game, Steiner had to work on this score almost in parallel with King Kong. And although it is often said that King Kong is the first great original film score of the ‘sound era’, some argue that this honour actually goes to The Most Dangerous Game, as it premiered sooner.

‘THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME’ AND ‘THE SON OF KONG’ SOUNDTRACK COVER

The music Max Steiner wrote for The Most Dangerous Game might sound all-too-familiar to most of us today, for it has been imitated countless times ever since. Steiner incorporated the leitmotif (Count Zaroff’s theme) he used throughout the film into ‘Russian Waltz’, a tune played by Count Zaroff at his piano in the film. This piece of diegetic music (AKA source music) was written by the composer himself. This ground-breaking technique of marrying the underscore with the source music would be used from then on in numerous films as a storytelling method. Furthermore, his music for the final chase scene is a masterclass in action and suspense scoring, employing techniques that are still used in sci-fi, thrillers, and horror movies today.

One of the problems faced by Steiner during this time was the small size of the orchestra that he had to work with. And while the players were some of the best in the business, the reduced number of the performers meant that the orchestra simply wasn’t able to convey the music penned by the composer in all its complexity so concessions had to be made. The recordings that exist today, performed by Moscow Symphony Orchestra and conducted by William Stromberg, are accurate reconstructions made by John W. Morgan for a full symphonic orchestra and are based on Steiner’s original handwritten sketches, thus reflecting the composer’s true musical intentions.

‘DON QUIXOTE’ FILM POSTER

Don Quixote (1933)

Jacques Ibert
Maurice Ravel

In 1932, Austrian film director Georg Wilhelm Pabst embarked on the task of adapting Miguel de Cervantes’ celebrated novel, Don Quixote, a tale about an elderly man who goes mad from reading too many books on chivalry. He filmed three separate versions of the film, in English, French, and German. The legendary Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin would go on to play the title role in all three languages. Chaliapin was already familiar with the character, having portrayed him in Jules Massenet’s opera Don Quichotte in 1910.

The producers had reached out to five composers to write songs for this film, including Maurice Ravel, Marcel Delannoy, Manuel de Falla, Jacques Ibert, and Darius Milhaud. Little did the composers know that this was, in fact, a contest. Each of them was certain that their music would be featured in the film.

The contract signed in June 1932 specified a heroic song, a serenade, and a comic tune, with the deadline set for August and a warning that Chaliapin preferred not to have too many high Cs, Ds or E flats.

The winner was the great composer and master orchestrator, Maurice Ravel, who was asked to compose four pieces. The producers were happy with the choice, for Ravel was one of Europe’s most prominent composers and they were hoping that with his name attached to the project, together with French author’s Paul Morand – who provided the lyrics – the project would attract investors. Furthermore, Ravel had a proven affinity for Spanish music which is what the project required.

Ravel, however, had suffered health problems since 1919 and at this time his health was in decline, specifically after having suffered a head injury in a car accident which prevented him from putting the music that he heard in his head on paper. This, in turn, slowed his progress in delivering the music and Ravel was eventually fired as a composer, having completed only three songs. These would become the three-part song cycle Don Quichotte à Dulcinée and would cover other facets of the story than Ibert’s work. Chanson romanesque portrays the noble lunatic as a lover, Chanson épique as a holy warrior, and Chanson à boire depicts the protagonist as a drinker. Although his songs didn’t end up in the film, they have become some of the most performed songs in the Baritone repertoire. The songs were later published and were premiered on 1 December 1934 in Paris with baritone Martial Singher performing and Paul Perey leading the orchestra. These are Ravel’s final compositions before his death in 1937.

Pabst then turned to French composer Jacques Ibert, who, as it happens, was a friend of Ravel’s. Learning about the contest, both composers became outraged, Ravel even considering a lawsuit against the producers, an idea he later dropped.

Ibert provided four songs for Don Quixote, Chanson du depart, Chanson à Dulcinée, Chanson du Duc, and Chanson du mort. He also wrote a song for Sancho Panza, titled Chanson de Sancho. The song texts were written by Pierre de Ronsard and Alexandre Arnoux, with Ibert himself conducting the recording used in the picture. Ibert’s music ended up in all three productions and he went on to arrange the songs for voice and piano, which were later published under the title Chansons de Don Quichotte, for Voice and Piano.

‘THE GOOD EARTH’ FILM POSTER

The Good Earth (1937)

Herbert Stothart
Arnold Schoenberg

The Good Earth is an American drama based on Pearl S. Buck’s eponymous novel which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. It depicts the life of a Chinese family of farmers as they navigate through life’s up and downs.

The composer who was first approached with scoring this picture was none other than the great Arnold Schoenberg, the inventor of the twelve-tone technique, a revolutionary and highly-influential 20th-century compositional method. Schoenberg was living in California at the time in exile, having fled Europe to escape the Nazi regime. He was contacted by Irving Thalberg, the celebrated young producer at the Hollywood film studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Thalberg, who was a rather cultured movie mogul, met with Schoenberg at MGM’s studios in November 1935 and expressed his appreciation for the composer’s music. Thalberg explained that the music he imagined for this picture would be similar to Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, op.4, which he had heard on the radio earlier that year.

SCHOENBERG’S SKETCH FOR ‘WANG’S UNCLE’ ©ARNOLD SCHOENBERG CENTER

Unfortunately, Schoenberg got a little too involved in the project, long before signing any contract with the studio. He proceeded to carefully read the short novel that was sent to him by the MGM library and made numerous markings on its pages. Two of Schoenberg’s notebooks contain over thirty sketches of roughly worked out tonal, chromatic and pentatonic motifs and themes for The Good Earth. Among them are ‘a motif of an eventful growing crowd of people’, a motif to ‘the uncle of Ching’, a ‘lotus’ theme, a ‘fishpond’ motif, themes for ‘Wang’s Uncle’, ‘funeral/death’ motifs, motifs of a ‘turbulent folk scene in connection with the revolution’, motifs about the ‘fear of the Wang family because of the soldiers’, as well as a ‘pearl/wealth’ motif. It has to be noted that Schoenberg did all of this even before a second meeting took place.

Unaccustomed with Hollywood’s film-scoring process, Schoenberg requested full control of the soundtrack – including dialogue – and demanded a staggering fee of $50,000 for his services. He is also said to have requested to work directly with the actors and have the director shoot the film to match his music – not the other way around. The main stumbling blocks with contracting concert composers to score a picture were money and time, as they were used to their highly-priced concert music commissions and they liked to take their time to write the music. These were two issues that were not compatible with the film studios’ way of doing things since the production of a film was under a tight deadline – and so it remains to this day – and the studios had their own experienced composers that could do the work at a fraction of the price and in a short period of time.

The collaboration never came to fruition and three weeks after their initial meeting, Schoenberg addressed a letter to Thalberg expressing his disappointment with the former’s silent treatment.

Herbert Stothart and Edward Ward were eventually engaged to provide the music for The Good Earth.

‘THE THIEF OF BAGDAD’ FILM POSTER

The Thief of Bagdad (1940)

Miklós Rózsa
Oscar Strauss

The Thief of Bagdad is a 1940 film marketed at the time as an ‘An Arabian Fantasy in Technicolor’. The film was produced by the renowned director and producer Alexander Korda of London Films, who had long dreamt of remaking the 1924 silent film of the same name. The story takes inspiration from the classic Arabian tale One Thousand and One Nights, as well as the novel The Tower and the Elephant by Robert E. Howard, and features a classic hero, a villain, a love story, magic, and adventure.

Korda began working on the project early in 1939 and chose German filmmaker Ludwig Berger to direct the picture. Interestingly, the production team at London Films comprised almost entirely of Hungarian émigrés, including Alexander Korda and his brothers, director Zoltán Korda and art director Vincent Korda, screenwriter Lajos Biró, and composer Miklós Rózsa, who had already scored Knight Without Armour (1937) and The Four Feathers (1939) for the firm.

Alexander Korda was planning on hiring Rózsa once more for this film, promising him a significant increase in his salary – which, according to Rózsa, had been quite low up to that point – and that his contract would begin immediately. However, Berger insisted that they should instead bring Austrian composer Oscar Straus on board, as the pair had collaborated before on Ein Waltztraum (1925) and Les Trois Valses (1938). It was agreed then that Strauss would write all the pre-production music and Rózsa would provide ‘all the dramatic and colouristic music’. Rózsa had no choice at that point than to agree to this arrangement.

Strauss was taking a cure in the French town of Vichy at that time so he sent all his music to London by mail. A composer of waltzes and operettas, Strauss’ musical input proved to be unsuitable for the film, or as Rózsa himself put it, ‘It was impossible – typical turn-of-the-century Viennese candy-floss.’

The musical director, Muir Mathieson, was furious with the outcome and didn’t hold back in expressing his frustration during a tense meeting with Alexander Korda and Miklós Rózsa. While publicly siding with Berger on the issue of the music, Korda was unhappy with Strauss’ sketches as well and secretly instructed Rózsa to re-write the music and call him when he’s ready. A week later, Rózsa had the music ready and Korda had the brilliant idea of giving him an office next to Berger’s, where he had a piano installed. He then asked the composer to keep playing his music until Berger came out of his office. Rózsa started to work and play fortissimo in that office, and after three days, Berger finally came into his office and enquired about the music. After listening to a few of the pieces Rózsa had composed, Berger realized that this music was much better suited for the film.

MIKLÓS RÓZSA

A telegram was subsequently sent to Oscar Straus notifying him of his dismissal from the production. Strauss threatened to sue, stating that this incident was ruining his reputation, but soon had a change of heart after Korda paid him his fee in full.

Rózsa went on to compose the score and songs for The Thief of Bagdad, which would become instant classics. Due to the outbreak of WW2, the production was forced to move to California where the film was completed, a move which prompted Rózsa’s prolific Hollywood career.

The critically acclaimed film became a commercial success and earned four Academy Award nominations including Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, Best Special Effects and Best Film Score, winning all but the award for Best Film Score.