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  • Musical content vs general goal

     Hi, everyone.

    I'd like to hear your opinion about  this nuance when writing film music. The thing is when I write a film score I often have hard time making my music less packed with the content so that it wouldn't shift the viewer's attention on itself but rather enhance  what's in the video sequence while still preserving its good musical qualities. This is one fine ballance not always easily achieved.

    Do you happen to come across such a problem and how do you solve it?

    Michael. 


  • Anybody to share his wisdom? 


  • First consideration is stay out of the way of dialogue. Doing that will tame your music to a certain degree. As for a general problem of drawing attention to the music and not supporting the visual it may be an issue of approach. John Williams makes lots of noise in the Star Wars movies and draws the listener to the music in a big way. But Star Wars is Opera and so he's actually doing his job and scoring appropriately. The point being that the music must reflect or at least be in sync with the tone of the film. Each scene can vary a great deal and so can the character of the music but you must find the musically expressive devices, styles etc., that mesh with the picture. You cannot impose your music outright upon the film and it's audience. You have to first digest what the film is calling for emotionally or technically or both. Then you can use your own personal musical language to help the film say what it's trying to say. For example If a scene is a bit lifeless you can liven it up with music, but what ever you come up with, it simply has to work. Your ultimately saying that your music isn't working because it's too far away from the visual feel and tempo (rather than the music tempos and feels being the issue it's always going to be what the film will allow for.) As long as your motivation is to serve the film you will not feel like your hands are tied musically or feel frustrated by not being able to express your own point of view. It just has to start with the film and not from your own needs as a composer. Those will be satisfied by crafting music that is very much you but based upon the films needs not the composers.

  • PaulP Paul moved this topic from Orchestration & Composition on