The Music Class

Welcome back from your shooting period. Probably the one thing you don't want to think about now is what the camera needs now, so this week's subject is about as far away as could be: music in film. We talk about the different types of music, some of the practical issues around the process, and how we can make use of this powerful tool as storytellers.

Perhaps the best way to measure what music can do is to take it away. What would Star Wars be? Or Goodfellas for that matter? (So much for it being all about that steadicam shot.) Or poor Britney? Film music is a nuclear weapon. (Sometimes those win wars.)

Another way of measuring what an underscore can do is to look at what other music might have contributed in the place of something we know well. This reconstruction of how Alex North's rejected score for 2001: A Space Odyssey might have been intended to work is worth seeing for this reason. (Film scores are the one aspect of the filmmaking process where rejection of work is reasonably common. Some high profile rejected scores include The Exorcist, Mission: Impossible, Troy, King Kong, Pirates of the Caribbean, Drive - reasonably common in other words.)

Other online resources:
- Andrew Ford's series The Sound of Pictures contains a lot of gold. Interviews with director Peter Weir, the maestro of maestros Ennio Morricone, and others (find links through those) can be listened to online, but are also available as transcripts in Ford's excellent (entry level) book.
- Composer roundtable from The Hollywood Reporter's annual series: 2015, 2014 and 2013.
 - Film Music Notes - This site's annual series on the Oscar nominees for Best Score goes beyond gushing and gets into the thematic mechanics of the scores. Great work.
- Few working composers get the sort of time you'd need to explain your creative decisions in detail to a lay audience. Somehow Bear McCreary (Battlestar Galactica, Outlander, Constantine) finds the time.
- Coffee table books tend not to be the cheapest way to get to know an art form. Matt Zoller Seitz has put out a couple of books on Wes Anderson's films, and the latest on Grand Budapest Hotel contains an interview with Alexandre Desplat that amply illustrates why he is the film composer par excellence of our time. If you don't want to buy that book, look at this piece on Imitation Game instead.
- Speaking of Desplat, his cues are beautifully intricate. This deconstruction of the Imitation Game main title should open your ears if all you hear when you listen to scores is 'songs without lyrics'.
- From another age of the internet (2006 HTML!), Film Music on the Web. I only mention it because I was its last editor, writing many of the gushing-yet-critical reviews that dotted its front page.

Scenes considered in Monday, 10am: Trois Coleurs: Bleu, Shanghai Triad, Once, The Great Gatsby, Gravity, Octopussy, Planet Earth (Otters), 2001: A Space Odyssey, 'Duck Dodgers and the 24 and a half century', Infernal Affairs, Girl on the Bridge, The Leftovers, Masters of Sex.

Scenes considered in Tuesday, 10am: Trois Coleurs: Bleu, Shanghai Triad, Les Intouchables, Gravity, Planet Earth (Otters), 2001: A Space Odyssey,  'Duck Dodgers and the 24 and a half century', Star Wars, The Leftovers.