Documentaries, like fiction films, often use music to build tension, facilitate a transition, or enliven material that is lackluster. In fact, music can suggest what cannot be seen, and this might be a character’s interior mood, expectations, or withheld feelings. Such a character is the 82-year-old central character in Pernilla Rose Grønkjær’s lyrical and delicate The Monastery: Mr Vig and the Nun (Denmark, 2006). The retired parish priest Mr. Vig remarks poignantly that, during all his long life, he has never known love. He is now trying to donate his decrepit rural castle as a future monastery, and arriving to claim it is a Russian Orthodox nun from Moscow who wants to arrange extensive repairs. Though she is fifty years younger, and they are formal and undemonstrative with each other, she begins to look after him (Figure 34-1 ). It is Johan Söderqvist’s music that suggests a mutual affection developing inside these two tough and reserved characters. His guitar and string orchestra score has been described as “exquisite and … a living, breathing character all on its own.”1 Hear it at www.themonasterymovie.com/monastery.html and try to see the film, which has sequence after sequence of gorgeous imagery.
Today, less is more. A rhythm alone without melody or harmony can sometimes supply the uncluttered accompaniment that a sequence needs. Music can supply an underlying mood, and in a story with fine shading, a good score can hint at the integrity or melancholy in one character, and the emotional impulsiveness directing the actions of another. Music can enhance not just the “givens” of a character (what we already know about him or her) but the hidden interior developments that culminate in a particular action, thus implying moods, motives, or interior processes that are otherwise inaccessible.
Music, sad to say, sometimes duplicates or even upstages what’s already evident on the screen. Walt Disney was infamous for “Mickey Mousing” his films—the industry term for clamping musical strait-jackets around the minutia of action. The first of his “true life adventures,” The Living Desert (directed by James Algar, USA, 1953), was full of extraordinary documentary footage but disfigured by making scorpions square-dance and supplying a different note, trill, or percussion roll for everything that dared move. Used like this, music becomes a smothering form of control that blocks the audience from making any of its own emotional judgments.
Music can unify a thematic identity in several separated scenes, or strengthen dramatic structure by heralding the transition to a new act. Short stings or fragments of melody—a well-established convention in fiction film—can work in documentary when they belong to a larger musical picture, but use them cautiously unless the style of the film and its sound design have been boldly prepared for it.
Good music can prompt the audience to investigate emotional dimensions to the film that otherwise would pass unnoticed. Errol Morris does this masterfully in The Thin Blue Line (USA, 1989, Figure 34-2 ), in which the bleak, beautiful repetition in Philip Glass’s minimalist score underlines a nightmarish conundrum. A man trapped on death row for a crime he claims not to have done must eternally relive the fateful events that led to his entrapment. Morris is quite justified in calling his film a “documentary noir.”
Films provide their own clues about where music is needed. Often it seems natural during periods of tension, exhilaration, and in journeys or other bridging activities—a montage of a character driving across country to a new home, for instance. Transitions of any kind usually benefit from music, especially when the mood changes with the location. Music can enhance an emotional change when, for instance, an aspiring football player learns he can join the team, or when someone newly homeless must lie down in shame for her first night in a doorway.
Music can summon the spirit of an age, heighten the residual emotion in a landscape or city vista, or suggest an exotic ethnic or cultural atmosphere. Ethnic scenes in documentary pose problems of authenticity, however, and a poor facsimile of Thai music is no solution for a film set in Bangkok. With the aid of music, a film can modulate from realism to a more prophetic vision, as Godfrey Reggio does in his long, grandiloquent parable about man’s rape of the natural world, Koyaanisqatsi (USA, 1983). Music can supply ironic comment, or suggest alternative worlds, as in Alain Resnais’ matchless Holocaust documentary, Night and Fog (France, 1955), in which Hanns Eisler’s score plays a major part. Instead of picture-pointing the deportation trains, or playing an emotionally loaded accompaniment to the mountains of human hair and tangled eyeglasses, Eisler’s score pierces our defenses with a delicate, ghoulish dance or a sustained and unresolved interrogation between woodwind instruments.
Now documentaries are more ready to be subjective and lyrical, music is ready to assist the Storyteller’s “voice.” The best examples seem to give expression to nascent feelings and an emotional point of view, either that of a character or of the Storyteller. Music can even function like a Storyteller’s aside by implying something we cannot see or interpreting what is visible but apparently neutral.
Film music, like debt and smoking, is easier to start than stop, and ending a section of music without giving the audience withdrawal pains can be difficult. The panacea is to supply a substitute, and this can either be a commanding effects track (a rich train-station atmosphere, for example, really a composition in its own right) or a new scene’s dialogue. The diversion might also be behavioral rather than sonic—an inciting moment of action that lugs the spectator’s attention forward into a new phase of the narrative, for instance.
When using music not composed to fit your film, section-ends can either be faded out or, better, come to a natural finish. In the latter mode, you would back-lay the music from the picture finish point, either arranging to fade music up at the picture start, or lengthening the scene to fit the music from composer’s start to composer’s finish. When music is over-long, you can frequently cut out repeated phrases. Most music is replete with repeated segments.
If you need something from the recorded classical repertoire, enlist the advice of a knowledgeable enthusiast. Be careful not to select something overused or fraught with existing film associations, like Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, or Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra. You can never know if a piece works until you play it against the sequence in question.
Spotting for music is the process of director and editor viewing the fine cut, and discussing a framework for a music cue list. For this you will need a start and stop for each proposed section, and a description of how you want the music to function. It might be to suggest release or change, foreshadow danger, or even suggest the maturing of a central character in years and judgment. Taken together, the notes you make at this stage will be helpful for developing an overall musical structure.
You must also decide where music should come from. Some might be popular music or orchestral music of a particular era used for atmosphere, for which you will need copyright clearance, which may be troublesome to acquire. You won’t need clearance, however, if the music is a legitimate part of a scene, coming from a radio in a store, say, or made by a visible street musician.
Part of your process now will be to experimentally throw in temp music, because you often cannot judge what music of any kind will do until you try it.
For the rest you will need a film composer.
Music libraries will license a range of music at affordable prices and with a minimum of difficulty. I am assured that their offerings have improved in the last decade. To get the right to use other previously recorded music is more complicated, and requires fees and clearances that involve any or all of the following: composer, artist(s), publishers, and the record company. Students can often get written clearance for a manageable fee but only for use in festivals and competitions. If you then sell your film or receive rentals for showings, you may find yourself at the sharp end of a lawsuit.
Find out about clearing music for your film from Lisa Allif and Michael C. Donaldson’s The American Bar Association’s Legal Guide to Independent Filmmaking (American Bar Association, 2011), or Phillip Miller’s Media Law for Producers (Focal, 2003). Never, ever assume that recorded music will be available when you get around to inquiring.
Commissioning original music has two big advantages: it solves the clearance problem and gives you music unique to your film. Film composers are usually hired last in the creative chain, and are expected to work fast and efficiently under pressured circumstances. That said, the more time you can give them, the better.
For most of what follows I am indebted to my son Paul Rabiger of Cologne, Germany, who makes music for film there—largely documentaries ( http://paulrabiger.com/en/index.html ). Like many involved in producing music economically, he works largely with sampling technology and virtual instruments, but likes to use live instrumentalists when the budget allows. Favored software includes Digital Performer, Steinberg Cubase, and Logic Pro. Such programs permit many tracks, integrate MIDI with live recording, and support video in Quicktime format so that the composer can build music to an accurate video version of the film. MIDI is short for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, a communications protocol that connects computers and electronic musical instruments.
Generally, each composer has their own range of preferred sound, texture of instruments, and musical genres. You should certainly approach those whose musical style already fits your f lm. Writing for film is an interesting challenge, but a composer new to the process should be warned film composing nearly always happens under the gun.
People who make interesting music are often actively developing, and may jump at the chance to work in a genre that is new to them. A good way to protect yourself, yet see if their ideas work, is to pitch a given scene to two or three composers and invite a musical treatment from each. You can usually arrange this process for no fee, or one that is minimal. Its advantages are that shortlisted composers can show you their work, and you see how the discussion and development process goes with each. You may get some pleasant surprises.
Any composer under consideration should see the whole film and discuss their reactions and initial ideas for music with you. To make an investment of hard work in your film, they need to like and respect it. You want to see what connections they have made with your work, and thus whether their musical ideas are likely to complement your film. The composer gets the prize of having their music accompany a film—usually highly desirable for anyone not yet a household name.
Upfront you should be very explicit about what your budget and schedule allow, since you will probably be asking for a lot of work in a short time, and for not much money.
The composer who joins you early will see the latest available film version, and mull over the characters, settings, and the film’s overall content. If the music must reflect a particular era or ethnicity, research will sometimes be necessary. Let the composer take a copy of the film home, so that ideas can develop from multiple viewings. With time in which to develop basic melodic themes and decide what instrumental texture works best within the budget, he or she will probably see particular characters or situations, each deserving of their own musical treatment or leitmotif (pronounced “light-motif,” which means recurring themes). Recurring sounds or sound textures in the sound track may also have a thematic subtext, and may at the composer’s suggestion become leitmotifs in their own right, possibly integrated with the music.
Often while editing, the editor drops in temp (temporary) or scratch track music because it helps establish a particular sequence’s potential. It is wise to warn the composer ahead of time that temp music exists, and to offer to omit it if they prefer, since they may be thrown by a Beatles song or a soul-stirring passage from Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony.
Many composers take the temp music as a useful demonstration of the rhythm, orchestration, texture, or mood you have in mind. It obviates the awkwardness of discussions in which filmmak- ers know what they like, but have zero command of a musical vocabulary in which to describe it. Temp music can be an important tool of communication that shows the tempo driving the cutting, say, or how music should act as a counterweight to a fast action scene. This leaves nothing up to theoretical discussion, since what you want is of proven viability. Paul Rabiger adds: “Music is often dictated by the sounds that are already inherent in a scene: there should be some sense of this going on: for example, horses’ hooves on cobble stones require perhaps a careful rhythmic handling by the composer. Or the elongated sounds of water—fountains, traffic, the sea—these tend to merge with long sustain sounds that can be good, but can also create problems.” He believes temp music can point to sonic solutions that might take far too long to find by discussion and experiment alone.
Once you are near a picture lock (pictorially complete version), it is time to screen the film formally so that the composer, director, editor, and producer can break the film into acts, noting where they transition along the film’s time line. You discuss where music seems desirable, what it should achieve, and what kind of instrumentation, tempo, mood, and musical texture seem best. Start-points may begin from particular cues in the imagery or dialogue, and discussion typically centers on how time is supposed to pass, and whether you want music to shore up a weak scene, as often it must.
When music’s job is to set a mood, it should do its work, then get out of the way, perhaps returning to comment later. Since the rhythms of action, camera movement, montage, and dialogue are themselves a kind of music, they may need no enhancement, and the composer will sometimes point out just how effective, even loaded, a silence can be.
Knowing where each music section starts and stops, the composer aims to depart the discussion session with a music cue list in hand, notes as to the music’s function, and beginnings and endings defined as timecode in- and out-points. The DVD or other version of the film you give to the composer must carry a cumulative timecode identical to that in your editing software, or you won’t have a common reference.
Log sections from point to point in the cumulative timecode, and for tightly fitting sections log them to the nearest half second. Figure 34-3 shows what this looks like. Ending cues will take careful planning, and the rule of thumb is to conclude (or fade out) music under cover of something more commanding. You might take music out during the first seconds of a noisy street scene, or just before the dialogue in a new scene. For best-practice examples, study fiction films that successfully integrate music with your film’s type of action. The computer-savvy composer then takes a download copy, and either writes a traditional score to be performed and recorded, or creates music sections directly using computers and MIDI-controlled synthesizers.
The longitudinal relationships in a complex film’s progression often need clarifying and strengthening, so your composer may use special coding to help group scenes, characters, or situations into musically related families. In a 90-minute film there may be many music cues, from a sting or short punctuation to long and elaborate passages that build, say, foreboding or melancholy. The composer may develop a theme for a main plot, then employ other themes for two subplots. Keeping these from clashing during cross-cutting can be problematical, so their relationship in key is important. Using a coding system keeps the composer aware of the logical connections and continuity that the music must underpin.
| Music Section 4 | |
| 00:59:43 | Begin music over long shot of Drottningholm Palace |
| 00:59:59 | Medium shot actors crossing courtyard and entering theatre building |
| 01:00:22 | Interior theatre, long shot |
| 01:00:31 | Backstage, actors enter |
| 01:00:40 | Stage manager tests primitive wind machine (make space in music here) |
| 01:00:51 | Actors getting into costumes (bring music up between 00:54 and 01:05) |
| 01:01:24 | Curtains opening on dress rehearsal |
| 01:01:34 | Lose music under first lines from cast |
FIGURE 34-3
Typical scene measurements for a music cue segment.
Music can also function as a key to the viewer’s memory. By repeating a theme or musical texture, music can unite a discussion with the mood of its original event, and reinforce the drama in human states of emotion.
Given the sophistication that music brings, it is evidently important to have concluded editing. The composer’s recurring nightmare, especially in documentary, is creating music for a film whose final form is still in debate.
In the planning stage the composer decides, based on the emotional logic of the story itself, what progression of keys to use through the film. You will recall that any sound that is a part of the film characters’ world is called diegetic sound, but since the characters can neither hear nor react to the film’s own music, this counts as non-diegetic sound. That, in fact, is addressed to the audience as part of the film’s authorial commentary. When non-diagetic composed music takes over from dia- getic music coming from a radio, say, the keys between the two usually must not clash. This is true for all adjacent music sections, not original scoring alone.
An experienced musician composing for a recording session will write to very precise timings, paying attention to track features such as dialogue lines and spot effects such as a door slam or a bird call. Instrumentation must not fight dialogue, nor can the arrangement be too busy at points where it might compete with dialogue or effects. Music can successfully displace an overloaded diegetic track. That is, in place of a welter of naturalistic sound, a musical comment may be far more impressionistic and effective.
To work around dialogue and spot effects, the composer should have an advanced version of the sound track rather than the simple dialogue-only track available during editing.
When you record a written score to picture—the recommended recording practice, by the way—the score is marked with cumulative timings so the conductor can see that sync points are lining up during recording.
Low budget film scores are more likely to use MIDI computerized composing techniques, and because the composer builds the music to a Quicktime scratch version of the film, music fitting is done at source.
How long does it take? An experienced composer likes to take upward of six weeks to compose, say, 15 minutes of music for a 90-minute feature film, but may have to do it in three weeks or less, with a flurry of music copyist work at the end if musicians are to play from scores.
With higher budget productions, the editing crew prepares for a live music recording session which is done to picture under the supervision of the composer, director, and editor. Only the editor can say for sure whether a shot can be lengthened to accommodate the slight mis-timings that always appear during live recording. Be prepared anyway for conductor, composer, and soloists to pursue a degree of perfection indistinguishable to ordinary mortals.
After a live recording session, the editor lays in each music section, adjusting picture and dialogue tracks as necessary. If the music is appropriate, the film takes a quantum leap forward in effectiveness. In the feature film world, there are music editors who specialize in cutting and fitting music.
The composer may want to be present at the final mix session if it affects the functionality of the music. If the music results from using MIDI, the composer can sometimes return to the musical elements with minimal delay and fashion a new version incorporating necessary changes.
1. Kirby Dick interview with the director in Still in Motion, May 14, 2007 at http://stillinmotion.typepad.com/still_in_motion/2007/05/interview_perni.html.
