Composing film scores is a "tradition," taking what came before and building on it. Music accompanies the moving pictures on screen, but the score doesn't take precedent. Even if film music never intends on stealing the limelight, but instead builds on the visuals, the process that goes into creating the melody is well thought out.
A music instructor and producer at Saddleback College,
Professor Geoffrey Munger offers his experience in producing film scores.
What impact does a film score have on storytelling, and how do composers typically approach enhancing that narrative? How would you approach it? That's a great question. I mean, if we think about the big film scores and we think about, I mean really any of the films that we can think of that are just blockbuster super heavy scores, anything by John Williams ... it's impossible to separate picture from the sound. I think that, you know, a good score, especially a memorable score, is kind of its own character in its own right. I think that, as a composer, your first thought is obviously wanting to make sure that you're not overshadowing the image that's on the screen but also how can you add another layer to the overall experience for the watcher, right? The person that's actually looking at the film. I think that as a composer, you can kind of go a couple different ways with this. Am I going to highlight the action that's on the screen? We could go even so far as to say I'm going to highlight every action on the screen, and we call that “
Mickey Mousing.” It’s this idea of, you know, every time someone walks I'm gonna put some type of step on there. Or, you know, am I gonna be more ethereal with it in terms of ... a theme that's coming back that isn't necessarily on the screen? I'm using some type of musical motive in order to convey a presence that may not exist and this is kind of a cool way to highlight something. If we think of the score for “
Jaws,” for example, it's just two notes, right? “Bum, bum,” and we don't even really see the shark for a long time. We just hear this menacing kind of approach to it. So as a composer, you kind of think of like, what does the director want?
What are the key elements that you would go for, for different genres? Say if it's a horror, romance or action, what, as a composer, would you be looking for?Hmm. That's an interesting question. These kind of come back to the toolbox of what we have in terms of tension in sound. You know, when I think of a great horror film, or at least early horror films, I think that we're starting to get kind of interestingly into a new genre of things where the idea of juxtaposition is becoming very influential to horror and I think of the score for “
Get Out,” which is a phenomenal score and it's actually quite ethereal and there's, you know, choir singing and it's almost like oh, you know, you're kind of lulled into a soft sense of yeah, you're safe, but you're not quite there, right? But when I think of horror in a traditional sense I'm going for, you know, something that's tension. So that's like discordant chords. High pitches in the violins, clicky sounds like that tend to just put us a little bit on edge. We think of like Herrmann’s score for “
Psycho,” and we have this “reet, reet, reet, reet, reet” and it's almost like mimicking a knife stab, right? But it's also high and it's discordant. There's this undulating motion of the strings. That’s the horror side of things. I think of it more as like, how can I create tension or discord in some way, compared to something like a romance where we tend to see in romances, there's more of this idea of “I need a melody to kind of swoop through and kind of carry the movie along.” It becomes a big deal with rom-coms in particular, where we tend to have this kind of [melody] that comes back. So as a composer, it's understanding [and] having these little toolboxes of like, okay, I'm in this world. I can start here, you know, and it's nice as a composer to just have forms to work off of, and then I can build.
How do movie scores differ from other kinds of musical composition, like pop music or symphonies in terms of structure or intention?The film itself is a medium in which it's mostly a visual medium. There are amazing film scores I think [that] can stand by themselves, but there's no way to delineate the music from the picture, and when we're thinking of something like a pop song ... we can think of some pop songs that still kind of have music videos to them and things that are very important, but for the most part, it's standalone media, right? And so that's something that I think is quite unique. You know, it's very similar to opera and musical theater in that way, because we need to have both sides of the picture. We need the visual as much as we need the audio in order to create a whole work of art. A pop song or a concert work, you know, that's what [they’re] for, that medium is there for sound and sound alone. I think that that's an interesting thing about film score is that you have to go into it and these composers are going into it with the thought, you know, this isn't, I'm not the primary portion of this. I'm secondary. I'm here just to lift up somebody else's vision. It's extremely collaborative compared to pieces of music that are written by a single person for a single thing. There's something much more insular about that.
What are some of the challenges that you or a composer would face in working closely with directors and editors to align the music with visual storytelling?
When you have two people, there's always going to be some kind of differing opinion. It's extremely rare that you're going to be in a collaboration where everyone is just on the same page. I mean, it wouldn't make for very interesting art. Anytime I've worked on film or, you know, I've talked to my buddies that work on film, one of the biggest things is like, oh my gosh, you know, this director had a vision for music, but they don't know anything about the music. And that can be kind of a tricky thing. A lot of directors, a lot of producers, they tend to work with what they call a “temp track.” They'll get temp music, which is just temporary scores that they'll draw from a bunch of different places, just as a place filler before the composer. In that type of process, you start just any type of creation. You fall in love with what you've created.
Do you have any advice for anyone looking into composing music for themselves or who are going into that general career?
Yes. I mean, play, right? It's all about play, and that's what I love about my job and my life. It's weird that I have a doctorate in play. I mean, the idea of being a composer for a living is a very interesting thing, encouraging people to compose because at the end of the day, the more you do it, the more you develop the craft and the more you do it, the more you can find other ways to develop your voice for you, all young composers, young songwriters, people that I teach, you know. I tell them that you are not going to be original right away and you can't remake a wheel if you don't know what goes into making a wheel to begin with. And so having the craft and understanding at least the processes of creation first before you start going out and trying to be new and unique is something that I think we can take for granted and we get frustrated with that. It's, you know, several years of studying and like trying to develop a craft can be very frustrating because it's, how do I know the technology and there's so much technology involved, you know, the craft, how do I do this and that, how can I convey what I really want and hearing in my head out into, you know, the people. So that's something that for young composers, you know, I ask them, I implore them, just play and take what you love and steal, steal, steal, you know? A good songwriter can borrow a great songwriter, a composer steals, because what we're doing is we're just taking what came before us and we're just building upon it. It's all a tradition.
(Photo credits: courtesy of Prof. Geoffrey Munger)
