Interview: Nicholas Britell, Composer of “12 Years a Slave”

Posted on December 23, 2013 at 8:00 am

One of the most powerful moments in the extraordinary film 12 Years a Slave has its main character, Solomon Northrup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) joining with the other slaves to sing a spiritual. It was a great pleasure to speak with the talented young composer, Nicholas Britell, who wrote “My Lord Sunshine (Sunrise)” and “Roll Jordan Roll” as well as three traditional fiddle tunes on the soundtrack. He painstakingly researched this lost form of music, which was never recorded and in many cases never written out, in an effort to bring the most accurate musical representation and help to tell this story.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PGeyMfdGag

Tell me a little bit about the research that you did to create music of this period.

It was a really unique challenge because the main character is a violinist and the movie itself, we knew, was going to have so much music in it, literally onscreen in the world of the characters. And it’s interesting because the 1840s is such a long time ago that we don’t have recordings, obviously until 50 to 60, 70 years later. And then on top of that, the spirituals themselves in the 1840s, there was really no music notation that was ever done of those songs. We only started getting people attempting to notate the songs of the slaves around the Civil War time. And even then, all the notes that they tried to write down, they all talked about how difficult it was, and how Western notation wasn’t really able to notate the sounds that they were hearing, people singing in the fields. Today, we can imagine that it was because of the unique rhythms, the syncopations, the African rhythms, all of the different cultural influences of those people who were there in the field. On the one hand, there is much as possible about whatever there was to be known but then we had to attempt to, essentially, recreate and re-imagine the sound because we’ll never really know what it actually sounded like in the 1840s. So I went to the library, I read everything I could, I looked at primary source texts. And there were two angles of the research: one was figuring out what was the music that Solomon would have played, and then what the slaves’ music would be. So the first question is really “What would an African-American violinist have played in New York in 1841?” Very interesting, very specific question.

What I discovered was there is much more research on the string music traditions certainly that goes back many hundred years so I was able to ascertain pretty well that the music that he probably would have been settling was very influenced by Scottish and Irish folk tunes. He wasn’t playing Beethoven but, interestingly, by way of re-imagining that world because it was so close to that era, this was within 12 years of Schubert’s death, essentially. That’s where we’re talking. Mendelssohn was still alive in Europe. Schumann was composing in Europe so some of the music that might have been coming over was some of this classical music and I imagined Solomon was a very accomplished violinist.

That was the starting point of mine. And because of that, I imagined that he might have had knowledge of a lot of different music potentially. So, on the one hand, while he was playing some of his Irish and Scottish folk tunes, I actually worked very hard with the violinist Tim Fain, an amazing violinist. We worked very hard to sort of imagine a unique sound for the violin that actually had elements of almost classical technique but not really. We wanted it to have a different feel than what we imagined fiddling sounds like today just to really kind of re-imagine that sound and give it a unique quality so we even did things like, there’s research that indicate the fiddlers would have held the violin more low-slung on their shoulder, the tuning would have been different. So we really tried to incorporate all of these thoughts into the way that, not only, the music was arranged and written because some of those are actually totally new songs that I wrote, some are arrangements of traditional songs that the research indicated might very well been played by Solomon.

But then the big thing was the sound. We really wanted to make sure that it had a very interesting quality to it.

Where is this research? Where do you go to look that stuff up?

I went to the library, I went on the internet, I spoke with people. We spoke with many on the violin side. I worked with Tim, the violinist, very closely. We know a lot of people in the string music world so there were many different angles on the question but, frankly, a lot of it is just going back to very old books and history books. It’s interesting because, actually, not that much was written on the music of the 1840s specifically. There’s a lot more music history written, it seems, on the Colonial Era. And then on the Civil War Era.

But the 1840s was an interesting period where, certainly, there was a lot of music going on in America. This was a world in America where every town had its own sort of like brass band. It was a very unique and fascinating musical world but, again, there just wasn’t much specifically on that decade so it was interesting. The more challenging side was really with the spirituals because the spirituals themselves and the work songs are something that, just by their nature, weren’t being notated. I think one thing I tried to be very conscious of was how much music changes in very short periods of time. Even 20 to 30 years can be a long time stylistically in music. It’s basically 20, 30 years between what the classical era of music and the romantic era of music. It’s 30 years between the height of Jazz and then Rock ‘n’ Roll really. So if you then imagine how different music would be a hundred years apart that I try to be very conscious of the responsibility of it. I tried to balance and really come up with very strong rationale for why I was thinking in a certain way but interestingly, there is a lot that you can find.

There’s a lot of research on the lyrics. It’s a lot easier to find information on the lyrics than the music itself. So lyrically, certain things are true that there was definitely quite a bit of Biblical influence and also, lyrically, every culture has work songs going back to the dawn of time where these were songs that were sung to get through the day and actually to functionally sort of help you do your work. So the work songs in the fields are like the song I wrote “My Lord Sunshine.” I spent a lot of time, not only lyrically trying to get it right and musically imagining it but rhythmically to figure out even just the tempo of it so it matched the swinging of the cane chopping which was another sort of variable to think about. There were a lot of different sort of variables to get right and that song lyrics really were there’s Biblical influence. And while I was writing, I felt like I tried to put myself in the mind of if you were working 10, 11 hours a day under the hot sun, what would you have been singing to get through that day. I think that I imagined the Biblical influence of “my Lord.” But also the sunshine is such an omnipresent element to that so the lyrics, things like “it’s late, it’s hot, my Lord Sunshine” things like that so it all felt very true to life to what might have been like.

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Interview: Composer Dominic Lewis of “Free Birds”

Posted on November 1, 2013 at 7:00 am

“Free Birds,” an animated film opening today, stars Owen Wilson, Amy Poehler, and Woody Harrelson. And it has a great score by composer Dominic Lewis available on iTunes. He talked to me about what it was like to write music for a movie about time-traveling turkeys.

You could hardly have set yourself a more complicated challenge because you had science fiction element, history, comedy, and even romance. How do you begin to approach something like that?

I always watch a movie a few times before embarking on trying to come up with stuff that works. And I guess the great thing about it was that Jimmy gave me free reign. You know, it was a blank canvass. And he basically said “Do your thing.” And the lovely thing about the movie is it’s so fast-paced, I got a chance to explore all those different genres of music and it’s not just all those one thing. But I’d like to think that they’re going to take together in some shape or form. So it’s really great to be able to not just be in one box, which is what’s so great about animations is that you’re allowed to speak completely freely at whatever you’re doing to express yourself.

Is it different to score for animation that it is for live action?

Oh, hugely, yeah. I mean the thing with live action is that everything needs to be modern and visual. So gone are the days of being able to really pull from classical composers such as a lot of Stravinski and Chopin was used back in the day. With animation, it’s just a really great opportunity to be able to pull all your tricks out the box and really write. Whilst in live action and not negatively at all, but there are boxes that you need to tick. But it’s the animation that’s definitely freer which I love. It’s just lovely to do that.

I’m a little interested to hear that you saw the film before you started writing the score. So at what point did you get involved with the project?

Well music is the last thing to go in. I got involved, I guess I’d say, slightly before a composer would normally would come on which is nice because I saw the whole thing evolve from storyboards all the way through to its finished product now. That’s been a really cool journey. But yeah, I mean music is the last thing to go on so the film is able to be watched and you need to be able to see the whole thing down and ideas if they’re going to work with the whole thing. So that’s the normal process. And I guess, from then on, it was a question of coming up with scenes based on the images. I had meetings with Jimmy about what he wanted and so we kind of went from there really.

And does the theme of time travel pose any particular challenges?

It has to be in the realm of the sci-fi world which is nice. I got to use a lot of space-like sounds and electronic stuff with time travel. It was a nice challenge. It was a really good challenge to me to get my hands dirty with that one and trying to come up with something that works.

What was the first film you worked on?

I did my first movie in about 2007. In the US, it was called “Hearts of War.” Everywhere else, it was called “The Poet” and that was directed by Damian Lee. Before that, Rupert Gregson-Williams sort of took me under his wings when I was 15, 16 so I would go down to Rupert’s studio and watch him working and do a few vocal things for him, and he’d leave to make a cup of tea, and he’d say just tell me to play around with the samples and get a feel of his stuff. So a teenager, I was in and amongst the world of film music. Plus my father is a cellist and plays on all the movie soundtracks and pop stuff in London. So I was brought up with this stuff. We had work experience at school. When you’re 14, 15 you’re shoved into a workplace to see what you want to do. And I was lucky enough to go to work with my dad. I just fell in love with it. It was from then on, it was like “I have to do this.”

What kind of music did you listen to in the home?

It was everything. I mean it was predominantly classical with both parents being classically trained and working in the classical world. My Mom’s a singer and my Dad’s was in a quartet and played on soundtracks. And I started cello when I was 3. So a lot of classical, but as every parent is, they are also huge Beatles fans. We listened to the Beatles and the Beach Boys and, you know, on trips going to the seaside and stuff. So it was everything. And I’ve got an older sister as well so when she was a teenager, she was listening to all sorts of grunge music and Iindie music. And that all filtered down to me. Yeah. It was everything, really, which you need to have in film music. You need to have everything.

Was it recorded in England?

Yeah. We went over to London to record the orchestra which was great because I got to hang out with my Dad for four days. Normally when I go back to London, I’m working and I don’t get to see my family. But my Dad is the only one I get to see because he’s always in the sessions with me so it’s really nice to have it in the family like that. It’s great. And the guys over there, they’re unbelievable musicians. I mean some of the stuff in this score you can probably hear is quite tricky. Hard and it’s all over the place, and epic, and big.

Do you have a favorite all time film score?

I absolutely love Alan Silvestri’s “Back to the Future.” I still think its theme is just perfect. It’s one of those things that you can just put with anything and it just worked. If I could choose a moment of filmmaking married with music, I think I’d choose the last 15 minutes of E.T. John Williams. It is just incredible and also because of the whole story behind it. It’s one of the very few times that picture has been cut up to music rather than the other way around. They were recording the score of E.T. and he couldn’t quite get the performance he wanted so in the end, Spielberg said “You just record it how you want it done and I’ll cut the picture with the music.” It’s just a perfect performance and it’s just so perfect for the end for that moment in the movie. When that track comes on my iPod or whatever, I can be in the bus and I’d get off the bus, absolutely in flood with tears. I think if I have to choose, that would be the moment that I’d choose.

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Interview: “The World’s End” Composer Steven Price

Posted on August 21, 2013 at 5:12 pm

The fifth and best end of the world movie of the summer is called “The World’s End,” and it is the last in what is now being called the Cornetto Trilogy from Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and co-writer and director Edgar Wright. “Shaun of the Dead” was a zom-rom-com (zombie romantic comedy) that featured red Cornetto ice cream. “Hot Fuzz,” a send-up of over-the-top action films, featured blue. Stay through the credits of this one to find out what flavor, or, I guess I should say, flavour since it is British, appears in this one.

I spoke to Steven Price, who composed the score.

You were writing for the wonderful Pegg/Frost/Wright trio and the movie has robot aliens! Was this the most fun movie project ever?

It’s certainly up there! It was an amazing gift for someone who does music to play with because you’ve got the big action sequences and the sci-fi mystery stuff and relationship scenes. So it’s everything you might want to do as a composer and the team involved were pretty good as well.

How did you get involved?

I met Edgar quite a while ago now. The first film I worked on was “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.” It is wonderful to work with him because everything is so well-planned so choreographed, but he is very, very open to different ways of doing things, so as a collaborator he is great fun. Edgar exec produced “Attack the Block,” which was my first feature film, so when this one came up, and he explained what he had in mind, it was an exciting time, really. The characters were all friends and getting out of school. Now they’ve all moved on with their lives, with wives and kids, except for Gary King, who was one of the most popular ones in school and never got over that night. Everything seems to have gone wrong for him so he persuades them to do this pub crawl but none of them really want to. You can’t go back, really. That’s the main theme.

This is a comedy action sci-fi film. How do you set the mood for that musically?

One of the first things that Edgar and I talked about was that everything musically we would do would be serious because for the characters none of it is a joke for them. Whenever we did err on the side of doing anything at all funny you realize very soon that it doesn’t help at all. We took it incredibly seriously and the action music was meant to drive along what was happening. The performances in the fight sequences are so amazing and convincing and the actors genuinely did it themselves. It’s not like there are a lot of cutaway for stunt people. It’s all very choreographed and well put together that it was great of fun to do. It’s not like when you have to cover up a lot of cuts. You could play along with the action and progress the whole tension of the scene as it went. It was fun to do those fight scenes and get the energy right up there. There was so much on scene you find yourself just playing along and enjoying it, really.

At what stage did you get involved?

Edgar’s great because he involves you early on. I saw the script a while before they shot and we talked about what he was doing. There’s a lot of great pop tracks in the film, really evocative songs from the years when these characters were growing up that Simon and Edgar put into the script. We talked a lot about that and Edgar wanted to make sure that it was not like, here’s a song and here’s the score but the whole thing weaved around it so that the music should feel connected to that. That was something we were very keen to do, incorporate some of those sounds into the score itself so you feel like the whole thing’s a body of work, this rhythm going through and connected to the characters. Simon plays a character named Gary King. Quite often you’ll hear a kind of slide guitar thing for his character. The connotation is the Western and getting the gang back together and all of that kind of thing. That came out of me listening to “Loaded” , which is a huge song in the film. In my mind, he lives that era, and the slide guitar became a kind of character thing for Gary. So all along I was playing it, and I always intended to replace it with some great player because my slide guitar playing is a little bit shaky. But toward the end I realized it was was absolutely the thing to do to leave it as it was. This version is in Gary’s mind. There are a lot of things wrong in Gary’s life and it’s not a bad thing to have the guitar a little shaky.

And what about the female lead, played by Rosamund Pike?

We’ve all looked back on things in our youth, so that was a great one to do. We played it very pure. We didn’t steer away from being emotive. We didn’t try to make it arch or a bit knowing. Steven, played by Paddy Considine, always genuinely wondered how it would have worked out. So we played it very purely. That is, until it is interrupted by aliens!

The characters were in high school in the 90’s? Was that your era?

Yes, we hark back to the early 90’s, like ’91.

I’m a little younger than them but music-wise that was when I was first old enough to have my own money to buy records and some of the tracks we used were real blasts for me like Suede’s “So Young.” Scary that it was 20 years ago! It evokes that whole time so well and it was nice to reflect that in the score. There’s music of the era like the Stone Roses. I remember vividly getting Stone Roses records, comparing the vinyl and it was almost like a currency at the time, which records you had. The Blur track — I remember being obsessed with that in the day and trying to learn the guitar part.

It’s not a traditional Hollywood film score. It’s embedded in the British sounds from what we would watch in science fiction programs and the Radiophonic Workshop stuff. They we a BBC unit who did the 80’s-era “Dr. Who” — a lot of those early synth sounds came in very useful. They evoked a peculiarly British thing. We also have an orchestra. The film does get very big. But it’s combined with a lot of the electronic stuff and interesting noises and experiments, things that felt very rooted in this small town where it takes place.

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Interview: Atli Örvarsson, Composer of “The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones”

Posted on August 21, 2013 at 8:08 am

The Icelandic composer Atli Örvarsson was attending the premiere of Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters. Director Harald Zwart was so impressed with the score that he offered Örvarsson the job of creating the score for his new project, a film based on the first of Cassandra Clare’s best-selling fantasy series, “The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones.” One problem for Zward — he had to tell the Oscar-winning composer he had already hired that the job was going to someone else. One problem for Örvarsson — he only had three weeks to score an entire movie. Based on the fantasy world of Shadowhunters, Örvarsson created several themes for the film. Incorporating bells and dulcimers to exemplify the presence of new and old, Örvarsson’s theme for Clary is inspired by New Age music with gypsy undertones. He talked to me about writing for a female heroine and why having less choice in what to watch on television can be a good education.

How do you prepare a score that sets the mood for fantasy?

I don’t think about it too much. For me, in a funny way the key to thinking about this movie was Johann Sebastian Bach. The reason being, he’s written into the script in a clever, funny way. He is supposedly a part of the Shadow Hunters, the group of people this story is about, half angel, half human, who fight the dark elements. I thought, that makes life easier. If you’re going to steal you might as well steal from the best and he is arguably the best Western composer of all time, so that was a good place to start. My job is to lend the characters and the story emotion and also importance. That’s the trick, isn’t it? For you to suspend belief, you have to invest in the story and the characters. I felt that the most important thing I could do was to make all these events that are outlandish seem important and personal. That’s what I was going for?

How do you work on such a tight time frame?

It’s like when you’re in school and you have two months to write a paper and you end up writing it in two days regardless of how much time you have. In some ways, time is relative in the sense that if you have a good relationship and an understanding about the aesthetics that clicks with the director, having a limited amount of time can be a blessing because you don’t have time to second-guess every decision. I had to just jump in and start writing. I’ve learned that to write good cues for movies you have to have strong music in the first place, proper melodies, strong musical ideas. It was a bit scary because I knew the clock was ticking, but I also knew I had to have strong material or it would just be wallpaper. It was finding that balance and then jump in and hope for the best.

Did you have a full orchestra or create the score on a computer?

I composed on the computer and then I went to London and recorded at Abbey Road with an orchestra and choir and solo pianist and choir boy soloist and all sorts of interesting things, about seven days of recording. Lily Collins, who stars in the movie, came to the recording.

There’s a scene early in the film at a modern-day club. How do you work with the club music that is already matched to that scene?

I take over that scene toward the end of it when a killing happens and the music goes from a club track to morph into the score piece. But I ended up writing strings for a sweetening for a couple of the songs to co-exist or merge with the score.

What kind of exposure did you have to American films, growing up in Iceland?

There wasn’t much exposure to Icelandic films because at the time they would make them every five years or so. What we saw was mostly about 50 percent American and 50 percent European. The funny thing about it was that there was one television station in Iceland when I was growing up and it broadcast only in the evenings, except on Thursday which was when the staff had the day off so there was no broadcast and the month of July when they had summer break. It’s ironic that I write music for television and film which I am clearly not qualified to do because I wasn’t exposed to it enough as a child. But all joking aside, one night there would be a depressing Czech drama on and the next night would be something like “Dallas.” It’s good to be exposed to such a wide range. There’s a place for both. My next film could not be more different from this one. It is a Holocaust love story. Having limited choices meant a broader exposure to stories and genres and that was a good education.

Is it different to write an action film score for a female lead?

Absolutely! There’s a feminine element that wouldn’t be present if it was a guy. In “Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters,” there’s a guy and a girl. The presence of a female character made that dynamic different. “Mortal Instruments” even more so because the hero is a girl. I’m not going to write the same thing for a girl hero as a guy. Men and women just function differently. There’s a different core there. As much as I’m all about equality of the sexes but we have to celebrate the differences.

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Interview: “Elysium” Composer Ryan Amon

Posted on August 5, 2013 at 8:00 am

Ryan Amon talked to me about the YouTube video that led to his first feature film score, in this week’s “Elysium,” directed by Neil Blomkamp (“District 9”) and starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster and how two notes create a mood.

How did you get involved with this project?

I had been doing trailers and before that I was an assistant on reality TV, so I had a lot of experience writing on deadline, but never anything like a film, which is a very different approach. I was living in Bolivia, where my wife’s family is, on a different continent when I got the email from Neill Blomkamp, who was in Vancouver. He had come across a YouTube video that a trailer music fan had posted. Someone had taken one of my tracks and posted it. Neill must have been searching through and found it somehow. And I got a one-line email: “Is this you?” I thought one of my friends was playing a prank on me. I’ve got very funny friends who have done things like that in the past. So I didn’t think too much about it until his assistant Victoria followed up, and I thought, “This is real.” Then I got nervous. He was still in the early stages but a few months later, he got in touch by Skype, with me still in Bolivia, and he talked about the film a little bit and his interests and my interests, and he offered me the job. You can’t turn that down! It was awesome.

When you have to write music for a story set in the future, how do you approach it? Do you try to project ahead to what kinds of instruments or genres will be used?

That’s tricky. I thought a lot about that one. His approach on this was not letting me see much of the film. I was working while they were filming. He didn’t want to let me read the script or see any footage. I had a few sketches of Matt Damon’s character in his exo-suit. So I had a few images but basically knew nothing of what was going on. My direction was to write something dark and then something light. It was a huge blank canvas for me. It was really hard but it was also very liberating and gave me a lot of room to experiment.

As for the future thing, who knows what music will sound like in 150 years? I knew I wanted to keep it relevant. Sometimes using too many synthetic elements, too many synthesizers, could backfire. In the 80’s, all those synthesizers sounded cutting edge and futuristic, but now they sound dated. So I wanted to steer away from that and bring in more orchestral elements. I took some traditional instruments, even piano strings, violin strings, and I scraped them metallically, and tried to create a sound that wouldn’t feel dated, even if we watch the film 20 or 30 years from now. We recorded in Abbey Road with the London Philarmonia. My first picture, and I’m in Abbey Road with a full orchestra!

Did you take a picture like the cover of the Abbey Road album?

Yes, we had to do that! It was freezing, in January, but it was still fun.

Before you were in Bolivia, where were you? What is your background in music?

I never really had that much interest in the classical side of things. I was classically trained and played piano and played the saxophone in a jazz band. But I was more interested in science, in biology. The music fell into my lap a little bit. I promised myself I would not try to do music professionally. But when I was in college I ended up enjoying coming back to my dorm room to play my guitar or I would write music on the piano instead of going to class. And I said, “Why am I enjoying this more, when it used to be such a struggle?” I think when you get older you are more comfortable embracing the areas where you have a gift, start to appreciate it more and want to explore it. I went to the McNally Smith College of Music in St. Paul to learn the technical things and got an associate degree. It was very new, more of a guitar school than anything back then. They only had a songwriting course at that time, so I studied film scores on my own, by ear, watching a ton of movies to see what worked and what didn’t. That’s what I was trying to train myself to do, to be more cerebral.

I entered a competition through BMI called the Pete Carpenter fellowship that allows one or two students every year to go out and shadow Mike Post in his studio in Los Angeles. He teaches us the way he approaches TV shows and we get to score a few scenes as practice. That was invaluable. And I knew that was what I wanted to do. I went back home, packed up everything I had in my car — and it all fit — and went to LA. I worked at IKEA and Virgin Records, and then through BMI I got a job as an assistant for a group that was doing reality TV. So that was a fast and steep learning curve. We had to produce at a very high level but also very, very quickly, two to three tracks a day for the show. It goes into a library and the editors get to place it where they want to. The most valuable thing was learning to use the software.

How do you begin to work on a movie score?

In writing a film score you have to be more of a psychologist than a musician. I approach it a bit differently. I sit at the keyboard and play intervals, just two notes at a time. These two notes, played on one instrument, what emotions does that evoke for me? I make a list of vocabulary words, as many as I could, of what these two notes felt like. I realized that a lot of music can be written from our background in music theory. But I felt it could be much open than that, a much wider spectrum of colors and instruments. So I always try to write from someplace deep inside, not to sound cheesy, but I try to write from my heart and not my head. In a way it’s cerebral, but I’m like channeling it. For dark and light it’s almost like not having an image in front of you can help sometimes. You can picture the whole world in your mind the way you do when you read a book. It’s fun to do that musically — what would light sound like? What would dark sound like?

So when you saw it with the footage, how did that go?

It was a little bit cringe-worthy to me. The original idea was that I would do some of the music first and they would use what I wrote as a temp score, and then we were going to manipulate it and see what’s working and what’s not. Sometimes Neill likes experimentation and wants you to go off and do your own thing, but sometimes he knows exactly what he is looking for and he will push you to search for it until it clicks. So there was a lot of music written for this film. I did over 200 tracks and they chose a handful. When I saw the temps with my music I thought, “Oo, that’s completely different than what I thought it would be — it looks different or the editing is slower or faster than I thought.” So that was terrifying at first, but as we went along I flew up to Vancouver to work with the post-production team for the last few months. It was definitely a surprise to see some of the matches between the music and the visuals.

What are some of the movies that inspire you?

My favorite movie was always “Jurassic Park.” That film score by John Williams is perfect and Spielberg is such a great story-teller. I love “Braveheart” and I would love to do a movie like that in the future, very raw and the power comes from traditional instruments. I love that old sound from the old world, what it might have sounded like in those days. I love hybrids, too. That’s a little bit of what I became known for when I was doing trailers.

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