Chihara today

Today in my “music theory” class, composer and colleague Paul Chihara spoke to us about working in Hollywood, and showed four stages of the evolution of a musical cue. The cut the director gives the composer that will have SMPTE time code on it and little or no sound, nor sound effects; a version with a synthesizer mockup that sounds damned good already; a third version that has the full orchestral (no synth) version with no dialog or sound effects; and then the final version that has it all. He annotated it as we went along. Paul is charming and lovable, referring to himself as “an old man” (b.1938), but in spirit, he was likely the youngest one there.