Graeme's In The Mist

By: Randall D. Larson
Date: Thursday, November 17, 2005

THIS WEEK'S RECOMMENDATIONS

Addressing an audience of musicians, songwriters, and composers at the 4th annual Hollywood Reporter/Billboard Film & TV Music Conference in Beverly Hills this week, film composer Graeme Revell noted that one of his challenges in writing the score for the remake of John Carpenter's creepy THE FOG (released on CD by Varese Sarabande 306 066 697-2) was in attributing horror to something as seemingly innocuous and slow-moving as.... fog.

Revell wound up amping up and revving up the maliciousness of the cold mist to craft a highly creepy atmospheric score for the film. After all, it isn't so much the fog that the villain of the piece it's what lurks within the fog. Revell crafts an effectively chilling ambience, typically combing some truly scary electronic tonalities with other samples and sounds to come up with a gloomy atmosphere that has depth, form, and malice. Against this murky miasma, which is most often described musically by a scraping tonality, Revell provides more intricate, higher register notation, usually from piano, that contrasts eloquently with the darker, more demonic ambiance such as the Carpenterlike piano figures of "Island History" (as close as Revell comes to acknowledging the previous FOG's musical design). A bold piano notation also resonates starkly amid the synth tonalities in "Statues," which are later taken by high-end xylophone or bells.

Like a lot of horror scores, this isn't the kind of soundtrack you'll put on for repeated listening, but it is worthwhile to appreciate the kind of sinister ambiance that Revell has put together to create a mesmerizing little horror score that provides a uneasy marriage of apprehension and constant panic. Horror music is about developing and sustaining tension, punctuated by unexpected shocks and scares. With his background in industrial rock, Revell has developed an affinity for creating unusual sounds and sonic clarities that create a powerful mood of trepidation, a hybrid fusion of tonalities and textures, which is nicely displayed in the midst of the FOG.

www.varesesarabande.com  

FILM & TV MUSIC CONFERENCE

The 4th annual Hollywood Reporter/Billboard Film & TV Music Conference took place this week in Beverly Hills. The two-day event featured sessions and panels on music for film, TV, Internet, gaming, commercials and other industry related topics. Designed for professionals and soon-to-be professionals and musicians, the conference maintained an effective balance between industry business and recognition of the artistry involved in motion picture scoring. Here are some highlights of Day One, which concluded just before this column's deadline.

A Q&A with composer Hans Zimmer, currently scoring THE DA VINCI CODE and PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN'S CHEST, was featured as the keynote session. Hosted by Tamara Conniff, Billboard's Co-Executive Editor, Zimmer described his personal technique and scoring films and his experiences working with James Newton Howard on BATMAN BEGINS.

"We're really good friends but there is a little rivalry, you know, so you do try to do

something really good before you show it to the other guy!" Zimmer said. "It's not your director you're worried about; it's your peers you're worried about! James phoned me before we went to London to really start working on this thing, and, said 'there are just two things I want to tell you I only work until 5 or 6 in the evening, from 7 o'clock there's nothing to be had out of me anymore, and I'm very private about my writing and I'd like a sound proof room.' Our first night there we worked until 1 in the morning and after the first week our writing rooms were literally opposite each other with the doors open all the time and constant traffic back and forth. I think it was sort of liberating for both of us.

"It gets you out of your normal habits a little bit," prompted Conniff. "You have to get out of your normal habits, otherwise you write the same stuff time and time again," said Zimmer. "I know this, right now, trying to write a theme! It's twelve notes, but everybody is using those twelve notes and probably whatever I'm playing somebody is playing at this very moment and none of it sounds good and none of it is original, and then suddenly there comes this moment where some of it starts making sense. But it's agony until you find that thing."

Currently beginning to compose the score for PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN'S CHEST, Zimmer who, uncredited, co-wrote most of the first PIRATES film along with his protégé, credited composer Klaus Badelt, returned to the original as a springboard for what he'd write for the first sequel. "I wrote about 90-% of the cues in the first one, but the problem with that was there weren't that many cues, and they were written in a day and a half. In fact I found the old recording of my sequence of the themes for the first PIRATES movie, and it starts of really well the first 32 bars are really well orchestrated but then in the middle of bar 33 the drums just stop, and by the end it's just one tired guy paying really bad piano! But that's what the whole movie was basically made out of, except we used all that up, so now I went into it and took literally, 4-bar sections and just really started to elaborate on those things. There is something good when you write fast, because ... the opposite to doing something very artful is doing something spontaneous and very immediate and it either land or it doesn't land and it comes straight from the gut."

A panel discussion on budgeting in film scores, also moderated by Tamara Coniff, included the participation of Composers Michael Giacchino, Mark Isham and Harry Gregson-Williams along with Joel C. High, VP Music/Soundtracks, Lions Gate Entertainment; Composer Robert Kraft, President, Fox Music; Lia Vollack, President of Worldwide Music, Sony Pictures Entertainment.

"Budgets are always challenging," said Sony's Lia Vollack. "We keep thinking that this is going to right itself somewhere, but it continues not to. I think a lot of pressure is put on music budgets and therefore on the composers that we're hiring and the songs we're trying to license and the supervisors that we're not hiring as much anymore because music costs where the record companies have gone up. What they're charging us to license their music has gone up a lot since they're not getting the revues from other sources. But the fact that soundtracks have become so completely de-emphasized, except in cases like WALK THE LINE or a musical, which has actually provided a lot of opportunities, because it gives you a little more freedom, you're not looking at such a commercial driver for it, rather you're looking at what's really going to serve the picture the best way."

Harry Gregson-Williamss, who is now scoring the first film of THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA, described his experiences composing the music for Ridley Scott's lavish historical drama, KINGDOM OF HEAVEN: "My experience is a slightly different in terms of budgetary constraints. I did KINGDOM OF HEAVEN a while back, and it was a challenge to get the thing done with the amount of music that Ridley required. But it

was still a fantastic opportunity. Having said that, just coming off that back of that and going to DOMINO, a much smaller movie, and a movie where [director] Tony Scott called me and said by the way, you won't get anything like your normal fee on this fine, but he's such a fantastic... - but more than that, you're going to have to deal with a package budget that we're going to give you, and don't come back to us, that's just going to be it, Harry. Now that was fine to do the score, and I hurtled up to Seattle and did some strings and came back, there wasn't much orchestral music on it, but with a couple of weeks to go before the dub I found myself in the unenviable position of having countless needle drops in the movie that Tony had on the soundtrack right at that moment, none of which he could afford to license, and I knew that was going to rebound on me, which was a little uncomfortable but fun all the same, one minute one is being a Fatboy Slim, the next..., it was a little bit crazy and if you see the movie you'll see how crazy it was, but for me the challenge of the budget is the same for me, whether we're working on a smaller one or a larger one, it always seems to be crunchy to me, we're always trying to pull it off as best we can."

Mark Isham described his budgetary experiences while scoring last year's drama, CRASH. "The challenges of the finances versus the artistry is a double edged sword, because yes there are business concerns, why budgets perhaps are getting smaller, but one of the nice reasons that budgets are getting smaller is that the independent film over the last five or eight years has just become stronger and stronger and yielded tremendous artistic products over the years and have shown the industry that independent films are a tremendous viable potential industry to make money and to expand the entire artistry of filmmaking.

"A movie like CRASH comes along which nobody wanted to make it in the first place, and is championed by an actor, a producer, then a director, it finds a home, is championed by a studio that prides itself on its independent movies, and Paul comes to me and says 'I have two cents for music,' The challenge for me, artistically, as the composer, is that I have to sit down and look at this and come up with the bright idea the idea that's going to solve the musical problem for this film within the budget. More than that, though that idea has to be the best idea for that score, even if you had $2 million. In other records, the score to CRASH has to be the best score for CRASH no matter how much money you have."

Billboard's West Coast Bureau Chief, Melissa Newman, facilitated a discussion with composer Graeme Revell (AEON FLUX, SIN CITY, CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK), who

described learning events encountered along the way. His latest feature score, for the remake of THE FOG, proved to be an interesting experience. "I sat in the first meeting and one of the young studio guys said 'we're thinking of having that eee-oooo [fog horn] sound every time we see the fog.... I swear to God, and I looked at him and I'm trying to think, now is this guy just like the most straight-faced joker in the world, or is he serious? He was serious! And I politely explained to him that it would be fun to be in the cinema and go through that experience, because after about the third "weee-oooo" the whole audience would be going, "weeee-oooo!" So you have to fend off these brilliant ideas some times.

"The other thing about THE FOG was, just thinking about the fog as scary subject matter, and you think, 'what's the worst thing that can happen with fog? Well, you might get a bit damp, or you might develop this bronchial thing...' But it was very interesting to create scares for something that comes around he corner that slowly. You know 'Fog comes around the corner', (mimics Herrmannesque violin shrieks), 'Fog comes around the corner a little bit more..' (mimics more Herrmannesque violin shrieks)."

"For me, though, the excitement is to find that really beautiful core of love and remembrance and all those kinds of things, and I suppose, I hope that's my trademark, while I am writing the nastiest and scariest music possible there are these really beautiful counterpoint moments where you actually care about the character and what he's trying to do. I also love relationships. Very rarely will I use motifs for everybody; I'll try and find what the core relationships are and design a piece of music that will that actually will contrapuntally work together towards the end of the film."

Revell described how he only used 28 string players AEON FLUX to record the film's entire sore, and yet you'd think it was gigantic," he added. "Lots of electronica, lots of samples. We all have banks of stuff that we've written and recorded in Moscow and wherever, and we'll just slot it in to build up the score each time."

"You put a lot of personal investment into the process," Revell continued. "What we do is in some way more of as craft than an art. If we wanted to be artists we'd be out there being conductors of pop musicians or something, but we're not, we're facilitators, and my end in life if to make the director's vision even better than he thought it could be."

ORIENTAL MUSIC CONCERT

Karen Han is a virtuoso on the erhu (2-stringed Chinese violin) who has performed the instrument on a number of film scores including JADE, IRON MONKEY, WE WERE SOLDIERS, THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST, and John William's latest score, MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA. She was featured in her first solo concert last week in Los

Angeles. "Music of the Orient - Karen Han and Friends in Concert" included an array of classical music (much composed by Japanese "Asian Wind" composer Missa Johnouchi, who was present as a featured pianist) as well as modern material and jazz (including a guest appearance from the jazz band Hiroshima, on whose recordings Karen has performed). The concert was a deliberate attempt to increase awareness of Asian musical culture and the combination of East meets West in musical interaction. Karen's performance on this instrument was nothing short of amazing, from solo avant-garde pieces in which the erhu (pronounced ar-hoo) chirps like a bird, to gorgeous melodies and the improvised interactions with the koto, saxophone, and keyboards of the Hiroshima ensemble. I've always been impressed by this instrument as a featured performer in film music, but to see what it can do as a solo and featured player outside of movie scores was truly eye-opening.

For more information on the concert, including photos, see: www.karenhan.com/Nov05Concert/index.html  

Former editor/publisher of CinemaScore magazine, Randall Larson was for many years senior editor for Soundtrack Magazine and a film music columnist for Cinefantastique magazine. He is the author of Musique Fantastique: A Survey of Film Music in the Fantastic Cinema (Scarecrow, 1984) and Music from the House of Hammer (Scarecrow, 1995). In addition to Soundtrax and Music News for Cinescape.com, Randall reviews soundtracks Music from the Movies, writes for Film Music Magazine, and in many other fields.

Recommended Soundtrack sources:
www.buysoundtrax.com  
www.intrada.com  
www.screenarchives.com  
www.footlight.com  
www.arksquare.com/index_main.html (Japan)
www.intermezzomedia.com/ (Italy)
www.moviegrooves.com  
www.moviemusic.com  

For questions or comments, contact the author at Soundtrax@cinescape.com