THE MODERN FILM COMPOSER; “Find The Balance”

It has been said that music is 60% of a film. Whether or not that figure is accurate, there is no question that music has always been a huge piece of the film puzzle, and appears to be an ever-changing landscape. There is a part of me that feels like true film composers are a dying art. With apple loops and powerful software at times musicianship has become mechanized, a series of key strokes and quantizing plug ins. Don’t get me wrong, I am a firm supporter of technology, and to be perfectly honest wouldn’t be able to do what I do without the help of that support.

Here’s the thing, no matter how you are writing, you still need to know how to write. For the moment, much of the music written for film and T.V. is made up of acoustical instruments, familiar sounds that are played by humans in real spaces. If a composer doesn’t have the ability to recreate that sound with a semblance of classical knowledge, then we all begin to lose the knowledge of how real music resonates in the human ear. How the wave forms travel from a vibrating string, wind reed, or skin of a drum, to the drums in our ears. I know that may sound a bit dramatic, but the point is that music equates into emotion, with or without picture. Music can make you feel pensive, happy, melancholy, or angry, you name it the emotion is there. It is my firm belief that a composer’s responsibility is to “service the film“; To support the emotion and vision of a director drawing their audience into a film, series, or commercial. If we lose the fundamentals of what that means, we have lost the art of music in its relationship to film.

There have been many points in history where the face of music has changed. When technology threatened to alter the course of sound that we have been familiar with for centuries. A synthesizer to define an era, or a voice altering generator that defines an entertainment icon, we always end up back with the fundamentals of the “real thing”, incorporating those innovations throughout. What does that mean you ask? It means two things to me. If you are a modern film composer, don’t forget to be a musician. Don’t forget what music is and the instruments and the people that play them (another subject) give to the overall art. At the same time, understanding that we live in a world of orchestras in a box, hip hop beats testing the limits of bass levels, synthetic sounds found only in fiction, and that ignoring these advances only stifles our own inspiration.

Find the balance. Don’t forget the music.