2. Composer vs. Film Composer
Even though the fundamental definition of being a musician is making music, all musicians excel in different roles/instruments/genres/styles. The same way all doctors cannot perform surgery and all surgeons cannot diagnose, all musicians are not composers and all composers are not trained as film composers. It can be pretty tempting to ask a friend who is part of a band to take care your soundtrack because you liked their sound at the last concert, however, it rarely ends up very successfully as it is an art in itself to translate that special sound into a soundtrack. Same thing goes for concert composers versus film music composers, and I speak from experience as I was myself trained as a concert composer initially, it took me several years to transition and fully understand the real challenges of creating music for media. When writing music for the sole sake of music, the structure of a piece is completely up to the composer, as well as the choice of instruments, style and complexity. On the other hand, writing music for films means the music should serve a purpose within the multidisciplinary piece of art that is a film.
Extra in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017)
The location/era of the movie should influence the selection of instruments, the edit should influence the structure of the music, and whatever is on the screen or discussed in the dialogue should influence the emotions to the milliseconds. It is also an art to decide how to efficiently split the attention span of the audience between all elements of the media. For instance, when a heavily complex key-dialogue is taking place in a scene, it would not be quite right to have very loaded epic music as it may distract the audience member from what will help them understand the narrative, the same way an extra actor should blend into the landscape instead of calling for attention. And there may be other moments when the film needs to breathe a little, in which case a more complex music with only visuals would be ideal. Although it is the director’s call to make those kinds of decision, it may appear more challenging than expected to get a concert composer to write music that fills the exact space it should. Good music for films is not simply good music pasted on a film.
In the eventuality where an artist’s specific sound would absolutely be crucial to the aesthetic of a movie, there are solutions. It has been the case on plenty of projects already, i.e., Daft Punk was asked to make the soundtrack of Tron Legacy. In every instance, though, a film composer and a music supervisor were hired to rearrange and place the artist’s tracks to the film. Both the film composer and the music supervisor were highly experienced in the art of filmmaking to successfully assist the French duo, new to the art of film scoring, in the making of the soundtrack.
Comments, suggestions, experiences you had with composers, and consequent advice for others are encouraged.
This blog will be updated with new experiences and illustrations as they occur.