Gary Calamar

Despite having the same composer duo as seasons 1-3, someone’s wings got clipped in season 4.

As I study the credits on IMDB.com, the music figure gone after season three seems to be the music supervisor, Gary Calamar. Was it actually Calamar’s vision that made seasons 2 and 3 so terrific? I don’t know the inside story — I can only speculate: Calamar got bought away by someone else; the WeeDS team had to cut back their music budget as commissioning all those famous musicians became too expensive; or, Ms Kohan found the music was becoming too good, so much so that it was distracting from the story.

“Little Boxes” only appears in the opening episode for programmatic reasons–which is fine. Nothing really replaces the introduction now, the show just starts after we see the “previously, on WeeDS” segment. The variable theme music has been replaced by new clever Title/Creator card. Cheaper, I’m sure.

The music for season four is fine, normal, does its job like other TV shows. Too bad.

Mel Shapiro

I’m doing the music to a short film by Mel Shapiro called INFRARED. Mel, as you may remember, wrote the book and lyrics to HOMER IN CYBERSPACE — a musical we premiered last years. I’m playing all the parts myself using Logic 9 (just arrived yesterday). It’s the smokiest, jazziest music I’ve composed to date, but somehow the material seems to call for it. The orchestration so far is piano, pizz acoustic bass, brush light drums, and sustained strings. I’ve got a muted trumpet obbligato line in each cue if we need it — I’m leaving it out because it interferes with the dialog, but by itself, the chord progression is screaming for a melody. So, I’ll probably string together a piece made from cues from INFRARED and if we end up using the trumpet melodies, I’ll get a REAL trumpeter to play that line.

[I have some advice for electronic musicians in emulating monophonic instruments (i.e. instruments that can only play one note at a time) on a keyboard: don't let notes overlap; use ONE FINGER to play the melody whenever possible. You'll find this works surprisingly well, especially for brass. This won't work for fast passagework, of course.]

The “hit” song from the 38 minute film is called “Terrible” which is a very infectious Vaudevillian-type song that I know people will like.

I stumbled across this cover for a film I that did the music for in 1989 called NIGHT LIFE. I didn’t realize that it had been released in Spanish under the name “Animas” and at another time as “Vida Noctorna.” Here is the VHS cover. Zowie!

Remember this one? I had once thought that it was John and Yoko that were the trail blazers for Asian-Caucasian relationships, but no, South Pacific was. I looked at the population statistics for Hawaii and saw a huge spike right after this movie came out. But it wasn’t until after 1968 that interracial relationships were legal in America.

As I listened to the score of SOUTH PACIFIC, one of the most important harmonic colors is sharp-4. The sharp-4 (on the syllable ‘Hai’ in Bali Hai) gives a feeling of exoticism. The parallel chords in the introduction to this song evoke impressionism––a style that was also strongly influenced by the East (Debussy heard the Balinese gamelan in the 1894 Worlds Fair). The final chord of the song has a tonic add-6 chord that gives the impression of a magical hovering, not unlike that magical island in the distance in the film.

The most stunning film I’ve seen in a long time is Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West.” Ennio Morricone provides mystic cowboy music for the score with haunting, unforgettable leitmotivs. Every shot in the film is one I would be proud to blow up and hang on my wall. Every shot has a fantastic sense of perspective, texture, and clutter. Yes, clutter. He jams stuff into every shot. It is really western baroque in its attention to detail — detail made up of little things, and shapes. The textures are breathtaking. Pause any frame in the film and you’ll see what I mean. (The representation on YouTube is a lower resolution than what you will see on the DVD.)

Many composers in the 20th century were driven to explore alternative sound sources. “Musique concrete” was such a music put together from bits and pieces of sounds: sounds made by familiar and ambiguous sources. The sound is then manipulated and can be played backwards or sped up or slowed down. This is all common practice nowadays, but then it was done by cutting up and splicing pieces of audio tape. French composers, Pierre Henry, and Pierre Schaeffer were the pioneers in this field. Here is Schaeffer’s first work in this genre, “Etude aux chemins de fer” (1948).

In “Once Upon a Time in the West” Ennio Morricone uses musique concrete to provide a chillingly original and effective film score.

Sounds are collected and looped In the opening scene, we hear a drip, and then something that is probably a bird. An unusual bird. But then it changes. We don’t find out what actually is making the sound until 5 minutes into the movie. (It is a squeaky windmill.) This use of sonic found objects from the scene of the shoot is an organic approach and highly effective. There are no pitches or melodies or harmonics in the opening of the film. (Morricone evidently wrote some but it was discarded.) We hear water dripping, insect buzzing, train sounds, bells, a mysterious choral chant, escaping steam, along with the mysterious bird call that opens and closes this amazing scene.

And then the first “music” enters — it is the harmonica leitmotiv.

We don’t find out what it means until the end of the film, and I won’t tell you, but this little tune is used continually throughout the film. The main orchestrational palette in the film is the harmonica, the solo banjo, and strings.

There is a love making scene that is accompanied by a solo viola that is not to be missed.

Morricone was Leone’s composer of choice. Contrary to tradition, Leone asked Morricone to compose the music FIRST, so that all the actors could get the feeling of the movie and reflect it in their work.

His controlled sense of patience in pacing is palpable. Everything unfolds and flows slowly. The music and sonic creatures drift in the air. No scherzo, no danse macabre, no moto perpetuo. It just hangs in the air, like gunsmoke in a bright New Mexican sky.

I rented the 1952 Stanley Kramer film, “High Noon” and discovered an old familiar song I thought was called “Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling” which is actually called “High Noon” with lyrics by Ned Washington and music by Dmitri Tiomkin.

The theme from the opening phrase is used, and perhaps overused, like a leitmotiv throughout the film. The song is sung by an old famous singer of cowboy songs, Tex Ritter. I hate to point out that the performance of this song is fairly sloppy. Listen to the drum pattern. This part was probably played by a dutiful studio musician whose main job was to keep the beat. Add the pump organ (or whatever the accompanying instrument is) and Tex’s voice and you have the orchestration. The problem is that Tex has a hard time following the beat. The phrase structure of the song is fairly unusual. The eccentric second phrase probably threw him for a loop [or a lasso].

I love the middle section. Melodically, it taps into the drum rhythm of the opening and then finishes with something that nearly threatens becoming Schubert’s “March Militaire.” I suspect this was the main influence for the eccentric orchestration of Rufus Wainwright’s similar sleepy cowboy song, “Banks of the Wabash.”

The shootout at the end of the movie is sweet by today’s standards. The good guy (Gary Cooper) wins. Surprised?

Yes, at the beginning of this clip is a very cute Clint Eastwood riding off into the sunset, But Wait!! We get to hear the famous Dimitri Tiomkin cowboy classic “Rawhide.” I don’t know who the singer is, but what a voice! I’ve sung it my whole life. Some mornings I get up and just wanna sing “RAW-HIIIIIIIIIIIIIIDE! Yeah!” I know, it’s the testosterone.

A new responsibility has now been put on my plate as a teacher of composition. Now that UCLA has an MA in Visual Media and I am part of the faculty, we train young film composers. We expect them to know as much of the same things we expect of our traditional composers.

Part of the new reality is that students come into their lessons with the locked print imported as a Quicktime video within Apple’s Logic 7 or 8. We turn down the lights and watch the movie in progress on the laptop. Laptop speakers are notoriously lousy, so I invested in a headphone splitter, so we both watch the film on a laptop with headphones. This is the same technology I am using for providing the orchestration for HOMER IN CYBERSPACE. I also used it for the various POSSUM DEATH SPREE movies as well as CAGES, so I know the software well. Sometimes the students are using the electronic libraries they own, and sometimes it is a mock up for a live session that will be taking place soon.

The mockup is primarily used to show the director how the music lines up with the film for his/her approval. Gone are the days where the composer sits at a piano emulating an orchestra with tremolo chords at the piano in a dark smoke filled room with the projector showing the film in progress. A composer can put the mockup on a private website where the director can access it at their convenience. They can meet in person, video chat, or talk on the phone. Email is even better because you have a record of everything.

The other day Nick and I were working on a film he is scoring, and the solution to one passage was to move the music up an octave. For a whole variety of reasons, that seemed to be the best solution — it was out of the range of the room tone as well as the dialog. Often a solution for an awkward passage will be to “do what you did back here; you set this up to mean this here, and it still means this now, so do it again” and this organic solution works.

I love this brave new world!

People ask me who my favorite film composer is. These days I say Dario Marianelli and Alexandre Desplat, but if I had to take this question seriously, I’d have to say that John Williams is right there at the top. Too many people try to accuse him of just spitting out Star Wars music over and over which is simply not true. Williams continues to reinvent himself. He shows up year after year with an Oscar nomination and I know that he won’t win. Why? I guess people think he’s had enough recognition, which is probably true. I remember reading in Guinness book of records some 10 or 15 years ago that John had become the first billion dollar composer, and I’m sure he is way beyond that by now. He is rich for good reasons: he is a great composer.

Take the music here in this opening to Steven Spielberg’s CATCH ME IF YOU CAN (2002) — how do we describe the music? Film music? Well, technically yes, but the musical language reminds me a bit of Ornette Coleman, Paul Hindemith, Darius Milhaud, Duke Ellington, and maybe even a bit of Stravinsky (Ebony Concerto). It is his courage and interest in builiding upon our rich musical heritage that draws me to his music.

I find contemporary so-called classical music getting more and more out of of the reach of people who like music. (I don’t need to go into that here.) I see film music getting stylistically richer and richer, and new concert music getting more remote. Yes, there is room for everyone, but in terms of what to spend my own energies on for the rest of my life as a composer, modern classical music seems like a dreary choice.

As a teacher of composition, I can no longer look down on non-classical music as unimportant populist pap. The experience I’ve had composing my new musical, and the last couple of films I’ve done has been tremendously satisfying. In this music, I have used all the tools I learned to be a concert composer, but have no interest in out-Boulezing Boulez, or out-Cartering Carter, which is what I thought I had to do when I was in college. Out-Bourlanding Bourland should be just fine.

John Williams or Elliott Carter? Williams: hands down.