Film Composer | Joel Christian Goffin | Music For Film And Television

| Private Composer Theater

J o e l C h r i s t i a n G o f f i n

Official Black Gold Trailer

Scoring Session

JOELCHRISTIANGOFFIN © 2010

Click artwork to purchase album at Amazon.com

Rango

Megamind

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Sherlock Holmes

February 24, 2011::

Alfred Music Publishing has recently published the INCEPTION songbook! Piano selections from Hans' Oscar-nominated score are now available from the Alfred website. Be sure to watch the Oscars this Sunday at 8pm EST/5pm PST on ABC!

February 22, 2011:

On March 4th, Paramount Pictures will release RANGO directed by Gore Verbinksi (PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN) with Johnny Depp voicing the lead role of the hero. RANGO is an original animated comedy-adventure that takes moviegoers for a hilarious and heartfelt walk in the Wild West. Music is composed by Hans Zimmer with original songs by Los Lobos.

The soundtrack, to be released by Anti Records, can be pre-ordered now with the official release on March 1st. For every pre-purchase and download of the album between now and March 8th, $1.00 will be donated to the organization Service Nation, a campaign to increase service opportunities and elevate service as a core ideal and problem-solving strategy in our society. You can enjoy the music and help a charity!

October 22, 2010::

The soundtrack to DreamWorks Animation's MEGAMIND, featuring music by Hans Zimmer and Lorne Balfe, will be released by Lakeshore Records on November 2! You can pre-order the album right now on Amazon.com. The film opens on Friday, November 5, nationwide!

© 2011 Remote Control Productions, LLC

Website by Warm Butter

Web

Images

Videos

Maps

News

Shopping

Gmail

more

Joel Goffin

Screen reader users, click here to turn off Google Instant.

Google

×

Instant is on ▼

Advanced search

About 1,080,000 results (0.10 seconds)

Search Results

Videos for hans zimmer youtube - Report videos

HANS ZIMMER PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN ORCHESTRA ...

7 min - Mar 25, 2007

Uploaded by JD95

youtube.com

Hans Zimmer - Greatest Hits

10 min - Feb 1, 2008

Uploaded by benydebney

youtube.com

The Very Best of Hans Zimmer Vol 1

10 min - Aug 12, 2008

Uploaded by kabir1365

youtube.com

Hans Zimmer - Ennio Morricone

3 min - Dec 28, 2006

Uploaded by juansaiji

youtube.com

Hans Zimmer - Chevaliers de Sangreal

4 min - Oct 22, 2007

Uploaded by shadielane

youtube.com

True Romance # You're so cool! - Hans Zimmer

4 min - Nov 4, 2006

Uploaded by ruempel

youtube.com

YouTube - Hans Zimmer - Black Hawk Down (Main Theme)

Feb 22, 2008 ... HQ : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVpgJWVjot0&feature=channel_page FAQ: 1) Used program: stupid Windovs Movie Maker 2) Song: The song is ...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWAhVbayGv4 - Cached - Similar

YouTube - Inception Soundtrack HD - #12 Time (Hans Zimmer)

Jul 23, 2010 ... This is the twelfth title (Time) of the Inception soundtrack made by Hans Zimmer . Story: Inception is a 2010 American science fiction action ...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0kGAz6HYM8

Hans Zimmer Explains the Intersection Between Edith Piaf and the ...

Jul 28, 2010 ... Hans Zimmer Explains the Intersection Between Edith Piaf and the ... And to the New York Times, Zimmer said of the YouTube comparison clip, ...

www.slashfilm.com/hans-zimmer-explains-the-intersection-between-edith- piaf-and-the-inception-score/ - Cached

Watch: YouTube - Beautiful music from Gladiator by Hans Zimmer ...

Oct 21, 2010 ... Video selection of original contemporary canvas art from The Paul Griggs Collection. The beautiful music is by German composer Hans Zimmer ...

www.mixx.com/.../youtube_beautiful_music_from_gladiator_by_hans_ zimmer_lisa_gerrard_original_art_from_paul_griggs - Cached - Similar

Searches related to hans zimmer youtube

john williams youtube

danny elfman youtube

james horner youtube

thomas newman youtube

youtube hans zimmer injection

youtube hans zimmer live

broken arrow hans zimmer youtube

hans zimmer the holiday soundtrack

Everything

Images

Videos

News

Shopping

More

Asheville, NC

Change location

Search Options

Any duration

Short (0–4 min.)

Medium (4–20 min.)

Long (20+ min.)

More search tools

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Next

Search Help Give us feedback

Google HomeAdvertising ProgramsBusiness SolutionsPrivacyAbout GoogleDesigna

Web

Images

Videos

Maps

News

Shopping

Gmail

more

Joel Goffin

Screen reader users, click here to turn off Google Instant.

Google

×

Instant is on ▼

Advanced search

About 353 results (0.15 seconds)

Search Results

Hans Zimmer contributing to Crysis 2 score‎

GameSpot - Eddie Makuch - 10 hours ago

Inception, The Dark Knight, and Modern Warfare 2 composer lending hand to soundtrack for Crytek shooter due out next week. ...

'Crysis 2' (ALL) Soundtrack Partly Created By Inception Composer‎ - WorthPlaying.com

Dark Knight/Inception composer contributed to Crysis 2‎ - Computerandvideogames.com

Legendary Composer Enriches Crysis 2; Demo & Pre-Order Special on Now‎ - VGChartz

Atomic - Eurogamer.net

all 73 news articles »

Develop

Glasgow-based composer asked to score latest De Niro film‎

Benzinga - 5 days ago

BAFTA award-winning composer Paul Leonard-Morgan has just completed work on the soundtrack for the new Robert de Niro movie, 'Limitless'”, which premieres ...

Black Mesa soundtrack is ready, claims composer‎

Computerandvideogames.com - 2 days ago

The latest shred of info comes to us from the Twitter profile of Joel Nielsen, a composer/producer/sound designer based in Canada. ...

World of WarCrafts: Revisting the WoW Soundtrack Project‎

Joystiq - Anne Stickney - 5 hours ago

Last year, we visited with WoW-playing composer Jejin (The Venture Co. ... The Warcraft Soundtrack Project was a method of replacing old world tracks with ...

'Captain America: The First Avenger' Score Gets 'Back To The ...‎

MTV.com - Adam Rosenberg - Mar 1, 2011

"Captain America: The First Avenger" is going to be a big movie, no question about that — and any big movie needs an epic soundtrack to go along with it. ...

Captain America will battle the Red Skull to the music of composer ...‎ - JoBlo.com

all 27 news articles »

Collider.com

Barbara Rose Shuler: Trying times turn to beautiful music‎

Monterey County Herald - Barbara Rose Shuler - 17 hours ago

The first composer to be awarded the honorary diploma of the Academy as well as ... as "Discovery of The Year" in the 2005 and 2008 World Soundtrack Awards. ...

Satire, soundtrack master Newman coming to VIMF‎

Comox Valley Record - 5 hours ago

Since 1981, however, with his score for Ragtime, Newman has been a prolific film music composer, a regular Academy Award nominee, and, in 2002, ...

Sony Classical Releases Soundtrack to Jane Eyre Film‎

Broadway World - 2 days ago

Sony Classical released the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack of Focus ... Academy Award-winning composer Dario Marianelli (Atonement) has created a ...

Things That Go Boom In The Night‎

Film Music - Jay Asher - 9 hours ago

But then they (Universal) thought the new composer's score might've gone too far .... and FX people to work together on the overall soundtrack of the movie. ...

Messing with 'The Kid'‎

Minneapolis Star Tribune - Britt Robson - 6 hours ago

Mentored by Haitian classical composer and guitarist Frantz Casseus, ... Saturday in Minneapolis, Ribot will perform a live soundtrack on solo guitar to ...

News archive results for soundtrack composer

May 4, 1999

Soundtrack Composer Scores Big .

The Vindicator - all 236 news articles »

Feb 21, 2009

"Slumdog Millionaire" soundtrack composer | Pri.org

Public Radio International PRI - all 357 news articles »

Jan 31, 2011

John Barry: James Bond Film Soundtrack Composer Dies Aged 77 ...

Sky News - all 64 news articles »

Stay up to date on these results:

Create an email alert for soundtrack composer

Everything

Images

Videos

News

Shopping

Realtime

More

Top Stories

Search Options

All news

Images

Blogs

Any time

Past hour

Past 24 hours

Past week

Past month

2002–2011

1998–2000

1993–1996

1990–1992a

1980–1989

Archives

Custom range...

Sorted by relevance

Sorted by date

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Next

The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program. The time or date displayed reflects when an article was added to or updated in Google News.

RSS Search Help Give us feedback

Google HomeAdvertising ProgramsBusiness SolutionsPrivacyAbout Googlea

The Online Magazine of Motion Picture and Television Music Appreciation

search the site:

Browse

Our CDs

  online:

  resources:

  online store:

  print:

  company:

So You Want to be a Film Composer?

by Lukas Kendall

Man alive, the number of people who want to be film composers these days... it used to be that when people wanted to be in music, they wanted to be a great pianist or a Broadway songwriter. Then, everybody wanted to be in a band. Now, everyone's already in a band, and they want to make money by scoring films.

I think it's great that film music is being taken seriously to the point where so many people want to get into it. But like screenwriting or professional athletics, this is a field where the available slots are few, and the hopefuls are many. To that end, here's some helpful advice, and we plan much more of this in FSM (the magazine) in 1998.

To start, two tips, from my own personal observations. If you want to be a film composer:

1) Don't try to be John Williams.

So many people, especially young people, want to be film composers because they love big, sweeping, beautiful orchestral romantic music--like the kind John Williams writes! This is a problem in that this is only a tiny fragment of what it is filmmakers are looking for in film score. Keep in mind, I am not talking about John Williams per se-- most directors would give their left nut for him--but the kind of melodic, symphonic score he has done on a specific type of fantasy film.

For one thing, John Williams is around 500 times smarter than most anyone reading this, and he can do these types of scores and make them great, instead of bloated and cliched. More practically, only a specific type of movie that requires a Star Wars type of score. They're aren't many of them made, and when they are made, they are so expensive that, if John Williams himself isn't hired, James Horner will be. Or Jerry Goldsmith. Or Bruce Broughton. Or around 40 other guys who have tons more experience than you.

If you really want to be a film composer, you have to divorce yourself from your 12 year-old dream to score the next Star Wars movie, and come up with the kind of sound that will make filmmakers come to you. If you write traditional, symphonic music, you will without a doubt end up working on a lot of lousy, juvenile children's films. But if you can come up with something sophisticated—something dramatic but subtle and contemporary— you can be "typecast" into good movies. Think Thomas Newman, Howard Shore, Rachel Portman, Graeme Revell, Elliot Goldenthal and the newest example, Mychael Danna. These composers write music that isn't necessarily flashy, but gets them consistently employed on high quality product. And from there you'll have a lot more options than you do now.

2) Put down the jar of paste.

Not to dwell too much on this, but I've met a few aspiring film composers whose personalities are about as fun as a Jehovah's witness at a Halloween party. Almost without exception, the big-time working film composers are also intelligent, likable, trustworthy and fun to be around. They aren't necessarily "party" people, but they radiate a certain confidence and charm that says, "Hire me." They are sensitive, but they don't burden you with their problems.

If you really want to do this, you can't be an arrogant, nerdy dullard. Film composing is highly competitive. (First prize: the oldsmobile. Second prize: steak knives. Third prize: you're fired.) You can't afford to be a creep.

Free Advice from Top Agent-- RICHARD KRAFT Now for something useful for a change. This was a brief set of questions I put to agent Richard Kraft in August, 1994, for issue #48. Richard represents Danny Elfman, Jerry Goldsmith, Marc Shaiman, Basil Poledouris, John Barry, Elmer Bernstein, Rachel Portman, and several others, so he knows what he's talking about.

One note: since this conversation, the film scoring landscape has changed with regard to independent films, in that there is once again a thriving independent market and many of today's most promising composers came out of it-- such as Mychael Danna, John Ottman, and Stephen Endelman. But other than this I don't think anything substantial has changed. Here's Richard:

***

1. How tough is it to break into film scoring?

Extremely tough, because there are so few movies made. There are probably six major studios and they make maybe a dozen movies each, so that's not a large pool of films. The number of independent movies being made is substantially less than it was even ten years ago, when there were Cannon Films and New World Pictures and Dino DeLaurentiis, those were a great breeding ground for up and coming talent. But now it's like major films and that's it. Television is not the great minor leagues it once was. If you look at John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith and people like that who cut their teeth in TV, it's not the same type of music being written anymore, there aren't all those great shows like Twilight Zone. Plus, there's a kind of snobbery that exists between features and television that I don't think existed back in the '60s.

2. How can I meet various important people to get myself work?

I would skip "various important people" and start with people in a similar "up and coming" spot. Instead of trying to get to Steven Spielberg, I would try to get to the next Steven Spielberg by working on student films, AFI films, UCLA and USC student films and forging relationships with the people who will be the next generation of biggies.

3. Is moving to L.A. or another production center (like New York) really important?

Essential. If you want to be in the car making business, you have to be in Detroit. You've got to be where the industry is.

4. What's the best kind of demo tape?

One based on knowledge of the project you're sending it out for. If you're going up for a horror movie, there are very few directors who could listen to great music for a love story and make the leap of faith that you would be appropriate for a horror movie. I would make the tape as specific to the project as possible.

5. Is it worth it to hire live players for a demo?

The better the tape could be, the better it is. It's best to do the "A" version of what you're doing. If you're trying to achieve an orchestral score, use live players. A problem with demos is that the ambition of the music sometimes exceeds the production abilities; it's hard to hear and fill in the blanks of what it's supposed to sound like. You should only have music that sounds like the real thing you're trying to achieve.

6. When should I start contacting agents?

The time to have an agent is when an agent wants you, when the agent feels he can parlay where you currently are in your career into something bigger. Agents are not set up to break talent in their first one or two movies. It's when there's a small movie that has some interest behind it--a Sex, Lies and Videotape, Drugstore Cowboy or Dead Calm--that an agent can take you to the next step.

7. How important is a traditional musical education and being classically trained?

It entirely depends on the type of composer you would like to be. The more varied your background the better, because film composing is about being a chameleon, being able to write in different styles to meet the needs of the movie. So the richer your background the better, but I don't think anybody has ever hired a composer based on looking at their degree. I think of the majority of currently successful film composers, their backgrounds are not conservatory training but life music training. Marc Shaiman was Bette Midler's musical director, Danny Elfman had the band Oingo Boingo, Stewart Copeland was from The Police, James Newton Howard was a session player and record producer, and so on.

8. How can I work on becoming a film composer while simultaneously supporting myself on a job?

There are two trains of thought. One is, have a job that has nothing to do with your career, just to make money. That way you can just do the job and leave it behind at the end of the day and concentrate on your film scoring career. Or, the best job is like being an orchestrator or a copyist, where it puts you in the situation where you meet people who are working on movies, and you can be a fly on the wall at scoring sessions and absorb all kinds of knowledge and information.

9. How many aspiring film composers are there?

Endless. Nowadays, almost all the major music schools have film scoring programs and the interest in being a film composer is at an all time high [cue Octopussy]. Besides writing hit songs, film composing is about the only lucrative job for somebody who composes music for a living.

10. Is it worth it to do projects for next to nothing just to get experience?

Absolutely. It's essential, as a matter of fact. The first few movies you do should be viewed like obtaining tuition to go to college. It's a learning process for you and having done three movies where you've lost money in the process puts you so many steps ahead of having no movies.

11. Should I try to develop the ability to sound like other composers, or work on developing a unique sound of my own?

I don't think it's an either/or. You definitely need to develop your own voice, but also to have an understanding of what other people might want. I wouldn't work on doing an Elmer Bernstein imitation, but if I was doing a movie where they said, "We want the feel of To Kill a Mockingbird," I'd need to have an understanding of what that meant so as to interpret it in my own voice.

12. Is it helpful to meet other film composers, established or otherwise?

It's helpful to commiserate and to have a support group, but--and again it's not black or white--if I had a choice I'd rather know five directors than five film composers.

13. Are there any sure-fire ways to piss off people so much that nobody will ever hire me?

Well... never say never, but I think a lot of talented people's careers haven't developed as far as they should based on them pissing people off.

14. Are there any specific pathetic stories of aspiring film composers you know about?

Specific pathetic stories? How about I give you a positive story: There was a composer several years ago who was in college and wanted to get a job in Hollywood. So what he did was he videotaped the main title sequences of all the Quinn-Martin TV shows, wrote new themes for all of them, got his college orchestra to play his new themes and sent the tape to Quinn-Martin Productions. And of course they're going to look at their own main titles, and they got such a kick out of it, they gave him a chance to write one cue for one episode of some show. They liked it and he ended up on a series. That's a positive story. The pathetic stories all tend to fall into the exact same category: People give up. It's hard. It's hard enough to be a composer, but at the beginning of your career, it's equally important to be a salesman, and that's not really a skill composers have developed. It's like selling any product, it's pounding the pavement and knocking on a lot of doors. It's hard to take the rejection so I think the reason most people don't make it isn't from a lack of talent, because I know there are a lot of really talented people out there, it's because they give up. They don't get this instant gratification and it's so hard to take the rejection that they don't keep it up.

15. What specific piece of advice would you have for getting work?

Put yourself in the shoes of the person who's hiring you. If you were making a movie, and you got a call from a composer, what would you want to hear? Get out of the brain of a composer and into the brain of the person hiring you. The people who tend to get those first few jobs are the people who make it easy for the person to hire them--by being so willing to do demos, by being available, and by being persistent, because most people aren't. It's a very delicate balance between being persistent and being pushy. Learning to finesse that, that's a real skill to work on. And this is my number one analogy: Every skill that one uses to get a date is the exact same skill one uses to get a job. Both involve seduction, it's identical. If you're a man and wanting to ask a woman out for a first date, how do you do that? How do you present yourself physically, what things do you say, how do you connect with the other person, what's the other person looking for? It's the exact same thing when you're trying to present yourself as a composer. It's a relationship you're trying to get involved in.

16. Realistically, if I'm an average aspiring film composer, what are my chances?

I don't think there's such a thing as an average one. There are so many factors. Are you talented, are you smart, do you have a good personality, do you know how to work with filmmakers? Someone who has all those ducks in a row has incredibly better odds than a social misfit who writes crappy music. I would say that if you have your act together, write really good music, and have the financial ability and determination to stick it out, the odds are you'll make it, because there are so few people who meet those requirements.

The Online Magazine of Motion Picture and Television Music Appreciation

search the site:

Browse

Our CDs

  online:

  resources:

  online store:

  print:

  company:

So You Want to be a Film Composer?

by Lukas Kendall

Man alive, the number of people who want to be film composers these days... it used to be that when people wanted to be in music, they wanted to be a great pianist or a Broadway songwriter. Then, everybody wanted to be in a band. Now, everyone's already in a band, and they want to make money by scoring films.

I think it's great that film music is being taken seriously to the point where so many people want to get into it. But like screenwriting or professional athletics, this is a field where the available slots are few, and the hopefuls are many. To that end, here's some helpful advice, and we plan much more of this in FSM (the magazine) in 1998.

To start, two tips, from my own personal observations. If you want to be a film composer:

1) Don't try to be John Williams.

So many people, especially young people, want to be film composers because they love big, sweeping, beautiful orchestral romantic music--like the kind John Williams writes! This is a problem in that this is only a tiny fragment of what it is filmmakers are looking for in film score. Keep in mind, I am not talking about John Williams per se-- most directors would give their left nut for him--but the kind of melodic, symphonic score he has done on a specific type of fantasy film.

For one thing, John Williams is around 500 times smarter than most anyone reading this, and he can do these types of scores and make them great, instead of bloated and cliched. More practically, only a specific type of movie that requires a Star Wars type of score. They're aren't many of them made, and when they are made, they are so expensive that, if John Williams himself isn't hired, James Horner will be. Or Jerry Goldsmith. Or Bruce Broughton. Or around 40 other guys who have tons more experience than you.

If you really want to be a film composer, you have to divorce yourself from your 12 year-old dream to score the next Star Wars movie, and come up with the kind of sound that will make filmmakers come to you. If you write traditional, symphonic music, you will without a doubt end up working on a lot of lousy, juvenile children's films. But if you can come up with something sophisticated—something dramatic but subtle and contemporary— you can be "typecast" into good movies. Think Thomas Newman, Howard Shore, Rachel Portman, Graeme Revell, Elliot Goldenthal and the newest example, Mychael Danna. These composers write music that isn't necessarily flashy, but gets them consistently employed on high quality product. And from there you'll have a lot more options than you do now.

2) Put down the jar of paste.

Not to dwell too much on this, but I've met a few aspiring film composers whose personalities are about as fun as a Jehovah's witness at a Halloween party. Almost without exception, the big-time working film composers are also intelligent, likable, trustworthy and fun to be around. They aren't necessarily "party" people, but they radiate a certain confidence and charm that says, "Hire me." They are sensitive, but they don't burden you with their problems.

If you really want to do this, you can't be an arrogant, nerdy dullard. Film composing is highly competitive. (First prize: the oldsmobile. Second prize: steak knives. Third prize: you're fired.) You can't afford to be a creep.

Free Advice from Top Agent-- RICHARD KRAFT Now for something useful for a change. This was a brief set of questions I put to agent Richard Kraft in August, 1994, for issue #48. Richard represents Danny Elfman, Jerry Goldsmith, Marc Shaiman, Basil Poledouris, John Barry, Elmer Bernstein, Rachel Portman, and several others, so he knows what he's talking about.

One note: since this conversation, the film scoring landscape has changed with regard to independent films, in that there is once again a thriving independent market and many of today's most promising composers came out of it-- such as Mychael Danna, John Ottman, and Stephen Endelman. But other than this I don't think anything substantial has changed. Here's Richard:

***

1. How tough is it to break into film scoring?

Extremely tough, because there are so few movies made. There are probably six major studios and they make maybe a dozen movies each, so that's not a large pool of films. The number of independent movies being made is substantially less than it was even ten years ago, when there were Cannon Films and New World Pictures and Dino DeLaurentiis, those were a great breeding ground for up and coming talent. But now it's like major films and that's it. Television is not the great minor leagues it once was. If you look at John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith and people like that who cut their teeth in TV, it's not the same type of music being written anymore, there aren't all those great shows like Twilight Zone. Plus, there's a kind of snobbery that exists between features and television that I don't think existed back in the '60s.

2. How can I meet various important people to get myself work?

I would skip "various important people" and start with people in a similar "up and coming" spot. Instead of trying to get to Steven Spielberg, I would try to get to the next Steven Spielberg by working on student films, AFI films, UCLA and USC student films and forging relationships with the people who will be the next generation of biggies.

3. Is moving to L.A. or another production center (like New York) really important?

Essential. If you want to be in the car making business, you have to be in Detroit. You've got to be where the industry is.

4. What's the best kind of demo tape?

One based on knowledge of the project you're sending it out for. If you're going up for a horror movie, there are very few directors who could listen to great music for a love story and make the leap of faith that you would be appropriate for a horror movie. I would make the tape as specific to the project as possible.

5. Is it worth it to hire live players for a demo?

The better the tape could be, the better it is. It's best to do the "A" version of what you're doing. If you're trying to achieve an orchestral score, use live players. A problem with demos is that the ambition of the music sometimes exceeds the production abilities; it's hard to hear and fill in the blanks of what it's supposed to sound like. You should only have music that sounds like the real thing you're trying to achieve.

6. When should I start contacting agents?

The time to have an agent is when an agent wants you, when the agent feels he can parlay where you currently are in your career into something bigger. Agents are not set up to break talent in their first one or two movies. It's when there's a small movie that has some interest behind it--a Sex, Lies and Videotape, Drugstore Cowboy or Dead Calm--that an agent can take you to the next step.

7. How important is a traditional musical education and being classically trained?

It entirely depends on the type of composer you would like to be. The more varied your background the better, because film composing is about being a chameleon, being able to write in different styles to meet the needs of the movie. So the richer your background the better, but I don't think anybody has ever hired a composer based on looking at their degree. I think of the majority of currently successful film composers, their backgrounds are not conservatory training but life music training. Marc Shaiman was Bette Midler's musical director, Danny Elfman had the band Oingo Boingo, Stewart Copeland was from The Police, James Newton Howard was a session player and record producer, and so on.

8. How can I work on becoming a film composer while simultaneously supporting myself on a job?

There are two trains of thought. One is, have a job that has nothing to do with your career, just to make money. That way you can just do the job and leave it behind at the end of the day and concentrate on your film scoring career. Or, the best job is like being an orchestrator or a copyist, where it puts you in the situation where you meet people who are working on movies, and you can be a fly on the wall at scoring sessions and absorb all kinds of knowledge and information.

9. How many aspiring film composers are there?

Endless. Nowadays, almost all the major music schools have film scoring programs and the interest in being a film composer is at an all time high [cue Octopussy]. Besides writing hit songs, film composing is about the only lucrative job for somebody who composes music for a living.

10. Is it worth it to do projects for next to nothing just to get experience?

Absolutely. It's essential, as a matter of fact. The first few movies you do should be viewed like obtaining tuition to go to college. It's a learning process for you and having done three movies where you've lost money in the process puts you so many steps ahead of having no movies.

11. Should I try to develop the ability to sound like other composers, or work on developing a unique sound of my own?

I don't think it's an either/or. You definitely need to develop your own voice, but also to have an understanding of what other people might want. I wouldn't work on doing an Elmer Bernstein imitation, but if I was doing a movie where they said, "We want the feel of To Kill a Mockingbird," I'd need to have an understanding of what that meant so as to interpret it in my own voice.

12. Is it helpful to meet other film composers, established or otherwise?

It's helpful to commiserate and to have a support group, but--and again it's not black or white--if I had a choice I'd rather know five directors than five film composers.

13. Are there any sure-fire ways to piss off people so much that nobody will ever hire me?

Well... never say never, but I think a lot of talented people's careers haven't developed as far as they should based on them pissing people off.

14. Are there any specific pathetic stories of aspiring film composers you know about?

Specific pathetic stories? How about I give you a positive story: There was a composer several years ago who was in college and wanted to get a job in Hollywood. So what he did was he videotaped the main title sequences of all the Quinn-Martin TV shows, wrote new themes for all of them, got his college orchestra to play his new themes and sent the tape to Quinn-Martin Productions. And of course they're going to look at their own main titles, and they got such a kick out of it, they gave him a chance to write one cue for one episode of some show. They liked it and he ended up on a series. That's a positive story. The pathetic stories all tend to fall into the exact same category: People give up. It's hard. It's hard enough to be a composer, but at the beginning of your career, it's equally important to be a salesman, and that's not really a skill composers have developed. It's like selling any product, it's pounding the pavement and knocking on a lot of doors. It's hard to take the rejection so I think the reason most people don't make it isn't from a lack of talent, because I know there are a lot of really talented people out there, it's because they give up. They don't get this instant gratification and it's so hard to take the rejection that they don't keep it up.

15. What specific piece of advice would you have for getting work?

Put yourself in the shoes of the person who's hiring you. If you were making a movie, and you got a call from a composer, what would you want to hear? Get out of the brain of a composer and into the brain of the person hiring you. The people who tend to get those first few jobs are the people who make it easy for the person to hire them--by being so willing to do demos, by being available, and by being persistent, because most people aren't. It's a very delicate balance between being persistent and being pushy. Learning to finesse that, that's a real skill to work on. And this is my number one analogy: Every skill that one uses to get a date is the exact same skill one uses to get a job. Both involve seduction, it's identical. If you're a man and wanting to ask a woman out for a first date, how do you do that? How do you present yourself physically, what things do you say, how do you connect with the other person, what's the other person looking for? It's the exact same thing when you're trying to present yourself as a composer. It's a relationship you're trying to get involved in.

16. Realistically, if I'm an average aspiring film composer, what are my chances?

I don't think there's such a thing as an average one. There are so many factors. Are you talented, are you smart, do you have a good personality, do you know how to work with filmmakers? Someone who has all those ducks in a row has incredibly better odds than a social misfit who writes crappy music. I would say that if you have your act together, write really good music, and have the financial ability and determination to stick it out, the odds are you'll make it, because there are so few people who meet those requirements.

The Online Magazine of Motion Picture and Television Music Appreciation

search the site:

Browse

Our CDs

  online:

  resources:

  online store:

  print:

  company:

So You Want to be a Film Composer?

by Lukas Kendall

Man alive, the number of people who want to be film composers these days... it used to be that when people wanted to be in music, they wanted to be a great pianist or a Broadway songwriter. Then, everybody wanted to be in a band. Now, everyone's already in a band, and they want to make money by scoring films.

I think it's great that film music is being taken seriously to the point where so many people want to get into it. But like screenwriting or professional athletics, this is a field where the available slots are few, and the hopefuls are many. To that end, here's some helpful advice, and we plan much more of this in FSM (the magazine) in 1998.

To start, two tips, from my own personal observations. If you want to be a film composer:

1) Don't try to be John Williams.

So many people, especially young people, want to be film composers because they love big, sweeping, beautiful orchestral romantic music--like the kind John Williams writes! This is a problem in that this is only a tiny fragment of what it is filmmakers are looking for in film score. Keep in mind, I am not talking about John Williams per se-- most directors would give their left nut for him--but the kind of melodic, symphonic score he has done on a specific type of fantasy film.

For one thing, John Williams is around 500 times smarter than most anyone reading this, and he can do these types of scores and make them great, instead of bloated and cliched. More practically, only a specific type of movie that requires a Star Wars type of score. They're aren't many of them made, and when they are made, they are so expensive that, if John Williams himself isn't hired, James Horner will be. Or Jerry Goldsmith. Or Bruce Broughton. Or around 40 other guys who have tons more experience than you.

If you really want to be a film composer, you have to divorce yourself from your 12 year-old dream to score the next Star Wars movie, and come up with the kind of sound that will make filmmakers come to you. If you write traditional, symphonic music, you will without a doubt end up working on a lot of lousy, juvenile children's films. But if you can come up with something sophisticated—something dramatic but subtle and contemporary— you can be "typecast" into good movies. Think Thomas Newman, Howard Shore, Rachel Portman, Graeme Revell, Elliot Goldenthal and the newest example, Mychael Danna. These composers write music that isn't necessarily flashy, but gets them consistently employed on high quality product. And from there you'll have a lot more options than you do now.

2) Put down the jar of paste.

Not to dwell too much on this, but I've met a few aspiring film composers whose personalities are about as fun as a Jehovah's witness at a Halloween party. Almost without exception, the big-time working film composers are also intelligent, likable, trustworthy and fun to be around. They aren't necessarily "party" people, but they radiate a certain confidence and charm that says, "Hire me." They are sensitive, but they don't burden you with their problems.

If you really want to do this, you can't be an arrogant, nerdy dullard. Film composing is highly competitive. (First prize: the oldsmobile. Second prize: steak knives. Third prize: you're fired.) You can't afford to be a creep.

Free Advice from Top Agent-- RICHARD KRAFT Now for something useful for a change. This was a brief set of questions I put to agent Richard Kraft in August, 1994, for issue #48. Richard represents Danny Elfman, Jerry Goldsmith, Marc Shaiman, Basil Poledouris, John Barry, Elmer Bernstein, Rachel Portman, and several others, so he knows what he's talking about.

One note: since this conversation, the film scoring landscape has changed with regard to independent films, in that there is once again a thriving independent market and many of today's most promising composers came out of it-- such as Mychael Danna, John Ottman, and Stephen Endelman. But other than this I don't think anything substantial has changed. Here's Richard:

***

1. How tough is it to break into film scoring?

Extremely tough, because there are so few movies made. There are probably six major studios and they make maybe a dozen movies each, so that's not a large pool of films. The number of independent movies being made is substantially less than it was even ten years ago, when there were Cannon Films and New World Pictures and Dino DeLaurentiis, those were a great breeding ground for up and coming talent. But now it's like major films and that's it. Television is not the great minor leagues it once was. If you look at John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith and people like that who cut their teeth in TV, it's not the same type of music being written anymore, there aren't all those great shows like Twilight Zone. Plus, there's a kind of snobbery that exists between features and television that I don't think existed back in the '60s.

2. How can I meet various important people to get myself work?

I would skip "various important people" and start with people in a similar "up and coming" spot. Instead of trying to get to Steven Spielberg, I would try to get to the next Steven Spielberg by working on student films, AFI films, UCLA and USC student films and forging relationships with the people who will be the next generation of biggies.

3. Is moving to L.A. or another production center (like New York) really important?

Essential. If you want to be in the car making business, you have to be in Detroit. You've got to be where the industry is.

4. What's the best kind of demo tape?

One based on knowledge of the project you're sending it out for. If you're going up for a horror movie, there are very few directors who could listen to great music for a love story and make the leap of faith that you would be appropriate for a horror movie. I would make the tape as specific to the project as possible.

5. Is it worth it to hire live players for a demo?

The better the tape could be, the better it is. It's best to do the "A" version of what you're doing. If you're trying to achieve an orchestral score, use live players. A problem with demos is that the ambition of the music sometimes exceeds the production abilities; it's hard to hear and fill in the blanks of what it's supposed to sound like. You should only have music that sounds like the real thing you're trying to achieve.

6. When should I start contacting agents?

The time to have an agent is when an agent wants you, when the agent feels he can parlay where you currently are in your career into something bigger. Agents are not set up to break talent in their first one or two movies. It's when there's a small movie that has some interest behind it--a Sex, Lies and Videotape, Drugstore Cowboy or Dead Calm--that an agent can take you to the next step.

7. How important is a traditional musical education and being classically trained?

It entirely depends on the type of composer you would like to be. The more varied your background the better, because film composing is about being a chameleon, being able to write in different styles to meet the needs of the movie. So the richer your background the better, but I don't think anybody has ever hired a composer based on looking at their degree. I think of the majority of currently successful film composers, their backgrounds are not conservatory training but life music training. Marc Shaiman was Bette Midler's musical director, Danny Elfman had the band Oingo Boingo, Stewart Copeland was from The Police, James Newton Howard was a session player and record producer, and so on.

8. How can I work on becoming a film composer while simultaneously supporting myself on a job?

There are two trains of thought. One is, have a job that has nothing to do with your career, just to make money. That way you can just do the job and leave it behind at the end of the day and concentrate on your film scoring career. Or, the best job is like being an orchestrator or a copyist, where it puts you in the situation where you meet people who are working on movies, and you can be a fly on the wall at scoring sessions and absorb all kinds of knowledge and information.

9. How many aspiring film composers are there?

Endless. Nowadays, almost all the major music schools have film scoring programs and the interest in being a film composer is at an all time high [cue Octopussy]. Besides writing hit songs, film composing is about the only lucrative job for somebody who composes music for a living.

10. Is it worth it to do projects for next to nothing just to get experience?

Absolutely. It's essential, as a matter of fact. The first few movies you do should be viewed like obtaining tuition to go to college. It's a learning process for you and having done three movies where you've lost money in the process puts you so many steps ahead of having no movies.

11. Should I try to develop the ability to sound like other composers, or work on developing a unique sound of my own?

I don't think it's an either/or. You definitely need to develop your own voice, but also to have an understanding of what other people might want. I wouldn't work on doing an Elmer Bernstein imitation, but if I was doing a movie where they said, "We want the feel of To Kill a Mockingbird," I'd need to have an understanding of what that meant so as to interpret it in my own voice.

12. Is it helpful to meet other film composers, established or otherwise?

It's helpful to commiserate and to have a support group, but--and again it's not black or white--if I had a choice I'd rather know five directors than five film composers.

13. Are there any sure-fire ways to piss off people so much that nobody will ever hire me?

Well... never say never, but I think a lot of talented people's careers haven't developed as far as they should based on them pissing people off.

14. Are there any specific pathetic stories of aspiring film composers you know about?

Specific pathetic stories? How about I give you a positive story: There was a composer several years ago who was in college and wanted to get a job in Hollywood. So what he did was he videotaped the main title sequences of all the Quinn-Martin TV shows, wrote new themes for all of them, got his college orchestra to play his new themes and sent the tape to Quinn-Martin Productions. And of course they're going to look at their own main titles, and they got such a kick out of it, they gave him a chance to write one cue for one episode of some show. They liked it and he ended up on a series. That's a positive story. The pathetic stories all tend to fall into the exact same category: People give up. It's hard. It's hard enough to be a composer, but at the beginning of your career, it's equally important to be a salesman, and that's not really a skill composers have developed. It's like selling any product, it's pounding the pavement and knocking on a lot of doors. It's hard to take the rejection so I think the reason most people don't make it isn't from a lack of talent, because I know there are a lot of really talented people out there, it's because they give up. They don't get this instant gratification and it's so hard to take the rejection that they don't keep it up.

15. What specific piece of advice would you have for getting work?

Put yourself in the shoes of the person who's hiring you. If you were making a movie, and you got a call from a composer, what would you want to hear? Get out of the brain of a composer and into the brain of the person hiring you. The people who tend to get those first few jobs are the people who make it easy for the person to hire them--by being so willing to do demos, by being available, and by being persistent, because most people aren't. It's a very delicate balance between being persistent and being pushy. Learning to finesse that, that's a real skill to work on. And this is my number one analogy: Every skill that one uses to get a date is the exact same skill one uses to get a job. Both involve seduction, it's identical. If you're a man and wanting to ask a woman out for a first date, how do you do that? How do you present yourself physically, what things do you say, how do you connect with the other person, what's the other person looking for? It's the exact same thing when you're trying to present yourself as a composer. It's a relationship you're trying to get involved in.

16. Realistically, if I'm an average aspiring film composer, what are my chances?

I don't think there's such a thing as an average one. There are so many factors. Are you talented, are you smart, do you have a good personality, do you know how to work with filmmakers? Someone who has all those ducks in a row has incredibly better odds than a social misfit who writes crappy music. I would say that if you have your act together, write really good music, and have the financial ability and determination to stick it out, the odds are you'll make it, because there are so few people who meet those requirements.

The Online Magazine of Motion Picture and Television Music Appreciation

search the site:

Browse

Our CDs

  online:

  resources:

  online store:

  print:

  company:

So You Want to be a Film Composer?

by Lukas Kendall

Man alive, the number of people who want to be film composers these days... it used to be that when people wanted to be in music, they wanted to be a great pianist or a Broadway songwriter. Then, everybody wanted to be in a band. Now, everyone's already in a band, and they want to make money by scoring films.

I think it's great that film music is being taken seriously to the point where so many people want to get into it. But like screenwriting or professional athletics, this is a field where the available slots are few, and the hopefuls are many. To that end, here's some helpful advice, and we plan much more of this in FSM (the magazine) in 1998.

To start, two tips, from my own personal observations. If you want to be a film composer:

1) Don't try to be John Williams.

So many people, especially young people, want to be film composers because they love big, sweeping, beautiful orchestral romantic music--like the kind John Williams writes! This is a problem in that this is only a tiny fragment of what it is filmmakers are looking for in film score. Keep in mind, I am not talking about John Williams per se-- most directors would give their left nut for him--but the kind of melodic, symphonic score he has done on a specific type of fantasy film.

For one thing, John Williams is around 500 times smarter than most anyone reading this, and he can do these types of scores and make them great, instead of bloated and cliched. More practically, only a specific type of movie that requires a Star Wars type of score. They're aren't many of them made, and when they are made, they are so expensive that, if John Williams himself isn't hired, James Horner will be. Or Jerry Goldsmith. Or Bruce Broughton. Or around 40 other guys who have tons more experience than you.

If you really want to be a film composer, you have to divorce yourself from your 12 year-old dream to score the next Star Wars movie, and come up with the kind of sound that will make filmmakers come to you. If you write traditional, symphonic music, you will without a doubt end up working on a lot of lousy, juvenile children's films. But if you can come up with something sophisticated—something dramatic but subtle and contemporary— you can be "typecast" into good movies. Think Thomas Newman, Howard Shore, Rachel Portman, Graeme Revell, Elliot Goldenthal and the newest example, Mychael Danna. These composers write music that isn't necessarily flashy, but gets them consistently employed on high quality product. And from there you'll have a lot more options than you do now.

2) Put down the jar of paste.

Not to dwell too much on this, but I've met a few aspiring film composers whose personalities are about as fun as a Jehovah's witness at a Halloween party. Almost without exception, the big-time working film composers are also intelligent, likable, trustworthy and fun to be around. They aren't necessarily "party" people, but they radiate a certain confidence and charm that says, "Hire me." They are sensitive, but they don't burden you with their problems.

If you really want to do this, you can't be an arrogant, nerdy dullard. Film composing is highly competitive. (First prize: the oldsmobile. Second prize: steak knives. Third prize: you're fired.) You can't afford to be a creep.

Free Advice from Top Agent-- RICHARD KRAFT Now for something useful for a change. This was a brief set of questions I put to agent Richard Kraft in August, 1994, for issue #48. Richard represents Danny Elfman, Jerry Goldsmith, Marc Shaiman, Basil Poledouris, John Barry, Elmer Bernstein, Rachel Portman, and several others, so he knows what he's talking about.

One note: since this conversation, the film scoring landscape has changed with regard to independent films, in that there is once again a thriving independent market and many of today's most promising composers came out of it-- such as Mychael Danna, John Ottman, and Stephen Endelman. But other than this I don't think anything substantial has changed. Here's Richard:

***

1. How tough is it to break into film scoring?

Extremely tough, because there are so few movies made. There are probably six major studios and they make maybe a dozen movies each, so that's not a large pool of films. The number of independent movies being made is substantially less than it was even ten years ago, when there were Cannon Films and New World Pictures and Dino DeLaurentiis, those were a great breeding ground for up and coming talent. But now it's like major films and that's it. Television is not the great minor leagues it once was. If you look at John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith and people like that who cut their teeth in TV, it's not the same type of music being written anymore, there aren't all those great shows like Twilight Zone. Plus, there's a kind of snobbery that exists between features and television that I don't think existed back in the '60s.

2. How can I meet various important people to get myself work?

I would skip "various important people" and start with people in a similar "up and coming" spot. Instead of trying to get to Steven Spielberg, I would try to get to the next Steven Spielberg by working on student films, AFI films, UCLA and USC student films and forging relationships with the people who will be the next generation of biggies.

3. Is moving to L.A. or another production center (like New York) really important?

Essential. If you want to be in the car making business, you have to be in Detroit. You've got to be where the industry is.

4. What's the best kind of demo tape?

One based on knowledge of the project you're sending it out for. If you're going up for a horror movie, there are very few directors who could listen to great music for a love story and make the leap of faith that you would be appropriate for a horror movie. I would make the tape as specific to the project as possible.

5. Is it worth it to hire live players for a demo?

The better the tape could be, the better it is. It's best to do the "A" version of what you're doing. If you're trying to achieve an orchestral score, use live players. A problem with demos is that the ambition of the music sometimes exceeds the production abilities; it's hard to hear and fill in the blanks of what it's supposed to sound like. You should only have music that sounds like the real thing you're trying to achieve.

6. When should I start contacting agents?

The time to have an agent is when an agent wants you, when the agent feels he can parlay where you currently are in your career into something bigger. Agents are not set up to break talent in their first one or two movies. It's when there's a small movie that has some interest behind it--a Sex, Lies and Videotape, Drugstore Cowboy or Dead Calm--that an agent can take you to the next step.

7. How important is a traditional musical education and being classically trained?

It entirely depends on the type of composer you would like to be. The more varied your background the better, because film composing is about being a chameleon, being able to write in different styles to meet the needs of the movie. So the richer your background the better, but I don't think anybody has ever hired a composer based on looking at their degree. I think of the majority of currently successful film composers, their backgrounds are not conservatory training but life music training. Marc Shaiman was Bette Midler's musical director, Danny Elfman had the band Oingo Boingo, Stewart Copeland was from The Police, James Newton Howard was a session player and record producer, and so on.

8. How can I work on becoming a film composer while simultaneously supporting myself on a job?

There are two trains of thought. One is, have a job that has nothing to do with your career, just to make money. That way you can just do the job and leave it behind at the end of the day and concentrate on your film scoring career. Or, the best job is like being an orchestrator or a copyist, where it puts you in the situation where you meet people who are working on movies, and you can be a fly on the wall at scoring sessions and absorb all kinds of knowledge and information.

9. How many aspiring film composers are there?

Endless. Nowadays, almost all the major music schools have film scoring programs and the interest in being a film composer is at an all time high [cue Octopussy]. Besides writing hit songs, film composing is about the only lucrative job for somebody who composes music for a living.

10. Is it worth it to do projects for next to nothing just to get experience?

Absolutely. It's essential, as a matter of fact. The first few movies you do should be viewed like obtaining tuition to go to college. It's a learning process for you and having done three movies where you've lost money in the process puts you so many steps ahead of having no movies.

11. Should I try to develop the ability to sound like other composers, or work on developing a unique sound of my own?

I don't think it's an either/or. You definitely need to develop your own voice, but also to have an understanding of what other people might want. I wouldn't work on doing an Elmer Bernstein imitation, but if I was doing a movie where they said, "We want the feel of To Kill a Mockingbird," I'd need to have an understanding of what that meant so as to interpret it in my own voice.

12. Is it helpful to meet other film composers, established or otherwise?

It's helpful to commiserate and to have a support group, but--and again it's not black or white--if I had a choice I'd rather know five directors than five film composers.

13. Are there any sure-fire ways to piss off people so much that nobody will ever hire me?

Well... never say never, but I think a lot of talented people's careers haven't developed as far as they should based on them pissing people off.

14. Are there any specific pathetic stories of aspiring film composers you know about?

Specific pathetic stories? How about I give you a positive story: There was a composer several years ago who was in college and wanted to get a job in Hollywood. So what he did was he videotaped the main title sequences of all the Quinn-Martin TV shows, wrote new themes for all of them, got his college orchestra to play his new themes and sent the tape to Quinn-Martin Productions. And of course they're going to look at their own main titles, and they got such a kick out of it, they gave him a chance to write one cue for one episode of some show. They liked it and he ended up on a series. That's a positive story. The pathetic stories all tend to fall into the exact same category: People give up. It's hard. It's hard enough to be a composer, but at the beginning of your career, it's equally important to be a salesman, and that's not really a skill composers have developed. It's like selling any product, it's pounding the pavement and knocking on a lot of doors. It's hard to take the rejection so I think the reason most people don't make it isn't from a lack of talent, because I know there are a lot of really talented people out there, it's because they give up. They don't get this instant gratification and it's so hard to take the rejection that they don't keep it up.

15. What specific piece of advice would you have for getting work?

Put yourself in the shoes of the person who's hiring you. If you were making a movie, and you got a call from a composer, what would you want to hear? Get out of the brain of a composer and into the brain of the person hiring you. The people who tend to get those first few jobs are the people who make it easy for the person to hire them--by being so willing to do demos, by being available, and by being persistent, because most people aren't. It's a very delicate balance between being persistent and being pushy. Learning to finesse that, that's a real skill to work on. And this is my number one analogy: Every skill that one uses to get a date is the exact same skill one uses to get a job. Both involve seduction, it's identical. If you're a man and wanting to ask a woman out for a first date, how do you do that? How do you present yourself physically, what things do you say, how do you connect with the other person, what's the other person looking for? It's the exact same thing when you're trying to present yourself as a composer. It's a relationship you're trying to get involved in.

16. Realistically, if I'm an average aspiring film composer, what are my chances?

I don't think there's such a thing as an average one. There are so many factors. Are you talented, are you smart, do you have a good personality, do you know how to work with filmmakers? Someone who has all those ducks in a row has incredibly better odds than a social misfit who writes crappy music. I would say that if you have your act together, write really good music, and have the financial ability and determination to stick it out, the odds are you'll make it, because there are so few people who meet those requirements.

The Online Magazine of Motion Picture and Television Music Appreciation

search the site:

Browse

Our CDs

  online:

  resources:

  online store:

  print:

  company:

So You Want to be a Film Composer?

by Lukas Kendall

Man alive, the number of people who want to be film composers these days... it used to be that when people wanted to be in music, they wanted to be a great pianist or a Broadway songwriter. Then, everybody wanted to be in a band. Now, everyone's already in a band, and they want to make money by scoring films.

I think it's great that film music is being taken seriously to the point where so many people want to get into it. But like screenwriting or professional athletics, this is a field where the available slots are few, and the hopefuls are many. To that end, here's some helpful advice, and we plan much more of this in FSM (the magazine) in 1998.

To start, two tips, from my own personal observations. If you want to be a film composer:

1) Don't try to be John Williams.

So many people, especially young people, want to be film composers because they love big, sweeping, beautiful orchestral romantic music--like the kind John Williams writes! This is a problem in that this is only a tiny fragment of what it is filmmakers are looking for in film score. Keep in mind, I am not talking about John Williams per se-- most directors would give their left nut for him--but the kind of melodic, symphonic score he has done on a specific type of fantasy film.

For one thing, John Williams is around 500 times smarter than most anyone reading this, and he can do these types of scores and make them great, instead of bloated and cliched. More practically, only a specific type of movie that requires a Star Wars type of score. They're aren't many of them made, and when they are made, they are so expensive that, if John Williams himself isn't hired, James Horner will be. Or Jerry Goldsmith. Or Bruce Broughton. Or around 40 other guys who have tons more experience than you.

If you really want to be a film composer, you have to divorce yourself from your 12 year-old dream to score the next Star Wars movie, and come up with the kind of sound that will make filmmakers come to you. If you write traditional, symphonic music, you will without a doubt end up working on a lot of lousy, juvenile children's films. But if you can come up with something sophisticated—something dramatic but subtle and contemporary— you can be "typecast" into good movies. Think Thomas Newman, Howard Shore, Rachel Portman, Graeme Revell, Elliot Goldenthal and the newest example, Mychael Danna. These composers write music that isn't necessarily flashy, but gets them consistently employed on high quality product. And from there you'll have a lot more options than you do now.

2) Put down the jar of paste.

Not to dwell too much on this, but I've met a few aspiring film composers whose personalities are about as fun as a Jehovah's witness at a Halloween party. Almost without exception, the big-time working film composers are also intelligent, likable, trustworthy and fun to be around. They aren't necessarily "party" people, but they radiate a certain confidence and charm that says, "Hire me." They are sensitive, but they don't burden you with their problems.

If you really want to do this, you can't be an arrogant, nerdy dullard. Film composing is highly competitive. (First prize: the oldsmobile. Second prize: steak knives. Third prize: you're fired.) You can't afford to be a creep.

Free Advice from Top Agent-- RICHARD KRAFT Now for something useful for a change. This was a brief set of questions I put to agent Richard Kraft in August, 1994, for issue #48. Richard represents Danny Elfman, Jerry Goldsmith, Marc Shaiman, Basil Poledouris, John Barry, Elmer Bernstein, Rachel Portman, and several others, so he knows what he's talking about.

One note: since this conversation, the film scoring landscape has changed with regard to independent films, in that there is once again a thriving independent market and many of today's most promising composers came out of it-- such as Mychael Danna, John Ottman, and Stephen Endelman. But other than this I don't think anything substantial has changed. Here's Richard:

***

1. How tough is it to break into film scoring?

Extremely tough, because there are so few movies made. There are probably six major studios and they make maybe a dozen movies each, so that's not a large pool of films. The number of independent movies being made is substantially less than it was even ten years ago, when there were Cannon Films and New World Pictures and Dino DeLaurentiis, those were a great breeding ground for up and coming talent. But now it's like major films and that's it. Television is not the great minor leagues it once was. If you look at John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith and people like that who cut their teeth in TV, it's not the same type of music being written anymore, there aren't all those great shows like Twilight Zone. Plus, there's a kind of snobbery that exists between features and television that I don't think existed back in the '60s.

2. How can I meet various important people to get myself work?

I would skip "various important people" and start with people in a similar "up and coming" spot. Instead of trying to get to Steven Spielberg, I would try to get to the next Steven Spielberg by working on student films, AFI films, UCLA and USC student films and forging relationships with the people who will be the next generation of biggies.

3. Is moving to L.A. or another production center (like New York) really important?

Essential. If you want to be in the car making business, you have to be in Detroit. You've got to be where the industry is.

4. What's the best kind of demo tape?

One based on knowledge of the project you're sending it out for. If you're going up for a horror movie, there are very few directors who could listen to great music for a love story and make the leap of faith that you would be appropriate for a horror movie. I would make the tape as specific to the project as possible.

5. Is it worth it to hire live players for a demo?

The better the tape could be, the better it is. It's best to do the "A" version of what you're doing. If you're trying to achieve an orchestral score, use live players. A problem with demos is that the ambition of the music sometimes exceeds the production abilities; it's hard to hear and fill in the blanks of what it's supposed to sound like. You should only have music that sounds like the real thing you're trying to achieve.

6. When should I start contacting agents?

The time to have an agent is when an agent wants you, when the agent feels he can parlay where you currently are in your career into something bigger. Agents are not set up to break talent in their first one or two movies. It's when there's a small movie that has some interest behind it--a Sex, Lies and Videotape, Drugstore Cowboy or Dead Calm--that an agent can take you to the next step.

7. How important is a traditional musical education and being classically trained?

It entirely depends on the type of composer you would like to be. The more varied your background the better, because film composing is about being a chameleon, being able to write in different styles to meet the needs of the movie. So the richer your background the better, but I don't think anybody has ever hired a composer based on looking at their degree. I think of the majority of currently successful film composers, their backgrounds are not conservatory training but life music training. Marc Shaiman was Bette Midler's musical director, Danny Elfman had the band Oingo Boingo, Stewart Copeland was from The Police, James Newton Howard was a session player and record producer, and so on.

8. How can I work on becoming a film composer while simultaneously supporting myself on a job?

There are two trains of thought. One is, have a job that has nothing to do with your career, just to make money. That way you can just do the job and leave it behind at the end of the day and concentrate on your film scoring career. Or, the best job is like being an orchestrator or a copyist, where it puts you in the situation where you meet people who are working on movies, and you can be a fly on the wall at scoring sessions and absorb all kinds of knowledge and information.

9. How many aspiring film composers are there?

Endless. Nowadays, almost all the major music schools have film scoring programs and the interest in being a film composer is at an all time high [cue Octopussy]. Besides writing hit songs, film composing is about the only lucrative job for somebody who composes music for a living.

10. Is it worth it to do projects for next to nothing just to get experience?

Absolutely. It's essential, as a matter of fact. The first few movies you do should be viewed like obtaining tuition to go to college. It's a learning process for you and having done three movies where you've lost money in the process puts you so many steps ahead of having no movies.

11. Should I try to develop the ability to sound like other composers, or work on developing a unique sound of my own?

I don't think it's an either/or. You definitely need to develop your own voice, but also to have an understanding of what other people might want. I wouldn't work on doing an Elmer Bernstein imitation, but if I was doing a movie where they said, "We want the feel of To Kill a Mockingbird," I'd need to have an understanding of what that meant so as to interpret it in my own voice.

12. Is it helpful to meet other film composers, established or otherwise?

It's helpful to commiserate and to have a support group, but--and again it's not black or white--if I had a choice I'd rather know five directors than five film composers.

13. Are there any sure-fire ways to piss off people so much that nobody will ever hire me?

Well... never say never, but I think a lot of talented people's careers haven't developed as far as they should based on them pissing people off.

14. Are there any specific pathetic stories of aspiring film composers you know about?

Specific pathetic stories? How about I give you a positive story: There was a composer several years ago who was in college and wanted to get a job in Hollywood. So what he did was he videotaped the main title sequences of all the Quinn-Martin TV shows, wrote new themes for all of them, got his college orchestra to play his new themes and sent the tape to Quinn-Martin Productions. And of course they're going to look at their own main titles, and they got such a kick out of it, they gave him a chance to write one cue for one episode of some show. They liked it and he ended up on a series. That's a positive story. The pathetic stories all tend to fall into the exact same category: People give up. It's hard. It's hard enough to be a composer, but at the beginning of your career, it's equally important to be a salesman, and that's not really a skill composers have developed. It's like selling any product, it's pounding the pavement and knocking on a lot of doors. It's hard to take the rejection so I think the reason most people don't make it isn't from a lack of talent, because I know there are a lot of really talented people out there, it's because they give up. They don't get this instant gratification and it's so hard to take the rejection that they don't keep it up.

15. What specific piece of advice would you have for getting work?

Put yourself in the shoes of the person who's hiring you. If you were making a movie, and you got a call from a composer, what would you want to hear? Get out of the brain of a composer and into the brain of the person hiring you. The people who tend to get those first few jobs are the people who make it easy for the person to hire them--by being so willing to do demos, by being available, and by being persistent, because most people aren't. It's a very delicate balance between being persistent and being pushy. Learning to finesse that, that's a real skill to work on. And this is my number one analogy: Every skill that one uses to get a date is the exact same skill one uses to get a job. Both involve seduction, it's identical. If you're a man and wanting to ask a woman out for a first date, how do you do that? How do you present yourself physically, what things do you say, how do you connect with the other person, what's the other person looking for? It's the exact same thing when you're trying to present yourself as a composer. It's a relationship you're trying to get involved in.

16. Realistically, if I'm an average aspiring film composer, what are my chances?

I don't think there's such a thing as an average one. There are so many factors. Are you talented, are you smart, do you have a good personality, do you know how to work with filmmakers? Someone who has all those ducks in a row has incredibly better odds than a social misfit who writes crappy music. I would say that if you have your act together, write really good music, and have the financial ability and determination to stick it out, the odds are you'll make it, because there are so few people who meet those requirements.

The Online Magazine of Motion Picture and Television Music Appreciation

search the site:

Browse

Our CDs

  online:

  resources:

  online store:

  print:

  company:

So You Want to be a Film Composer?

by Lukas Kendall

Man alive, the number of people who want to be film composers these days... it used to be that when people wanted to be in music, they wanted to be a great pianist or a Broadway songwriter. Then, everybody wanted to be in a band. Now, everyone's already in a band, and they want to make money by scoring films.

I think it's great that film music is being taken seriously to the point where so many people want to get into it. But like screenwriting or professional athletics, this is a field where the available slots are few, and the hopefuls are many. To that end, here's some helpful advice, and we plan much more of this in FSM (the magazine) in 1998.

To start, two tips, from my own personal observations. If you want to be a film composer:

1) Don't try to be John Williams.

So many people, especially young people, want to be film composers because they love big, sweeping, beautiful orchestral romantic music--like the kind John Williams writes! This is a problem in that this is only a tiny fragment of what it is filmmakers are looking for in film score. Keep in mind, I am not talking about John Williams per se-- most directors would give their left nut for him--but the kind of melodic, symphonic score he has done on a specific type of fantasy film.

For one thing, John Williams is around 500 times smarter than most anyone reading this, and he can do these types of scores and make them great, instead of bloated and cliched. More practically, only a specific type of movie that requires a Star Wars type of score. They're aren't many of them made, and when they are made, they are so expensive that, if John Williams himself isn't hired, James Horner will be. Or Jerry Goldsmith. Or Bruce Broughton. Or around 40 other guys who have tons more experience than you.

If you really want to be a film composer, you have to divorce yourself from your 12 year-old dream to score the next Star Wars movie, and come up with the kind of sound that will make filmmakers come to you. If you write traditional, symphonic music, you will without a doubt end up working on a lot of lousy, juvenile children's films. But if you can come up with something sophisticated—something dramatic but subtle and contemporary— you can be "typecast" into good movies. Think Thomas Newman, Howard Shore, Rachel Portman, Graeme Revell, Elliot Goldenthal and the newest example, Mychael Danna. These composers write music that isn't necessarily flashy, but gets them consistently employed on high quality product. And from there you'll have a lot more options than you do now.

2) Put down the jar of paste.

Not to dwell too much on this, but I've met a few aspiring film composers whose personalities are about as fun as a Jehovah's witness at a Halloween party. Almost without exception, the big-time working film composers are also intelligent, likable, trustworthy and fun to be around. They aren't necessarily "party" people, but they radiate a certain confidence and charm that says, "Hire me." They are sensitive, but they don't burden you with their problems.

If you really want to do this, you can't be an arrogant, nerdy dullard. Film composing is highly competitive. (First prize: the oldsmobile. Second prize: steak knives. Third prize: you're fired.) You can't afford to be a creep.

Free Advice from Top Agent-- RICHARD KRAFT Now for something useful for a change. This was a brief set of questions I put to agent Richard Kraft in August, 1994, for issue #48. Richard represents Danny Elfman, Jerry Goldsmith, Marc Shaiman, Basil Poledouris, John Barry, Elmer Bernstein, Rachel Portman, and several others, so he knows what he's talking about.

One note: since this conversation, the film scoring landscape has changed with regard to independent films, in that there is once again a thriving independent market and many of today's most promising composers came out of it-- such as Mychael Danna, John Ottman, and Stephen Endelman. But other than this I don't think anything substantial has changed. Here's Richard:

***

1. How tough is it to break into film scoring?

Extremely tough, because there are so few movies made. There are probably six major studios and they make maybe a dozen movies each, so that's not a large pool of films. The number of independent movies being made is substantially less than it was even ten years ago, when there were Cannon Films and New World Pictures and Dino DeLaurentiis, those were a great breeding ground for up and coming talent. But now it's like major films and that's it. Television is not the great minor leagues it once was. If you look at John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith and people like that who cut their teeth in TV, it's not the same type of music being written anymore, there aren't all those great shows like Twilight Zone. Plus, there's a kind of snobbery that exists between features and television that I don't think existed back in the '60s.

2. How can I meet various important people to get myself work?

I would skip "various important people" and start with people in a similar "up and coming" spot. Instead of trying to get to Steven Spielberg, I would try to get to the next Steven Spielberg by working on student films, AFI films, UCLA and USC student films and forging relationships with the people who will be the next generation of biggies.

3. Is moving to L.A. or another production center (like New York) really important?

Essential. If you want to be in the car making business, you have to be in Detroit. You've got to be where the industry is.

4. What's the best kind of demo tape?

One based on knowledge of the project you're sending it out for. If you're going up for a horror movie, there are very few directors who could listen to great music for a love story and make the leap of faith that you would be appropriate for a horror movie. I would make the tape as specific to the project as possible.

5. Is it worth it to hire live players for a demo?

The better the tape could be, the better it is. It's best to do the "A" version of what you're doing. If you're trying to achieve an orchestral score, use live players. A problem with demos is that the ambition of the music sometimes exceeds the production abilities; it's hard to hear and fill in the blanks of what it's supposed to sound like. You should only have music that sounds like the real thing you're trying to achieve.

6. When should I start contacting agents?

The time to have an agent is when an agent wants you, when the agent feels he can parlay where you currently are in your career into something bigger. Agents are not set up to break talent in their first one or two movies. It's when there's a small movie that has some interest behind it--a Sex, Lies and Videotape, Drugstore Cowboy or Dead Calm--that an agent can take you to the next step.

7. How important is a traditional musical education and being classically trained?

It entirely depends on the type of composer you would like to be. The more varied your background the better, because film composing is about being a chameleon, being able to write in different styles to meet the needs of the movie. So the richer your background the better, but I don't think anybody has ever hired a composer based on looking at their degree. I think of the majority of currently successful film composers, their backgrounds are not conservatory training but life music training. Marc Shaiman was Bette Midler's musical director, Danny Elfman had the band Oingo Boingo, Stewart Copeland was from The Police, James Newton Howard was a session player and record producer, and so on.

8. How can I work on becoming a film composer while simultaneously supporting myself on a job?

There are two trains of thought. One is, have a job that has nothing to do with your career, just to make money. That way you can just do the job and leave it behind at the end of the day and concentrate on your film scoring career. Or, the best job is like being an orchestrator or a copyist, where it puts you in the situation where you meet people who are working on movies, and you can be a fly on the wall at scoring sessions and absorb all kinds of knowledge and information.

9. How many aspiring film composers are there?

Endless. Nowadays, almost all the major music schools have film scoring programs and the interest in being a film composer is at an all time high [cue Octopussy]. Besides writing hit songs, film composing is about the only lucrative job for somebody who composes music for a living.

10. Is it worth it to do projects for next to nothing just to get experience?

Absolutely. It's essential, as a matter of fact. The first few movies you do should be viewed like obtaining tuition to go to college. It's a learning process for you and having done three movies where you've lost money in the process puts you so many steps ahead of having no movies.

11. Should I try to develop the ability to sound like other composers, or work on developing a unique sound of my own?

I don't think it's an either/or. You definitely need to develop your own voice, but also to have an understanding of what other people might want. I wouldn't work on doing an Elmer Bernstein imitation, but if I was doing a movie where they said, "We want the feel of To Kill a Mockingbird," I'd need to have an understanding of what that meant so as to interpret it in my own voice.

12. Is it helpful to meet other film composers, established or otherwise?

It's helpful to commiserate and to have a support group, but--and again it's not black or white--if I had a choice I'd rather know five directors than five film composers.

13. Are there any sure-fire ways to piss off people so much that nobody will ever hire me?

Well... never say never, but I think a lot of talented people's careers haven't developed as far as they should based on them pissing people off.

14. Are there any specific pathetic stories of aspiring film composers you know about?

Specific pathetic stories? How about I give you a positive story: There was a composer several years ago who was in college and wanted to get a job in Hollywood. So what he did was he videotaped the main title sequences of all the Quinn-Martin TV shows, wrote new themes for all of them, got his college orchestra to play his new themes and sent the tape to Quinn-Martin Productions. And of course they're going to look at their own main titles, and they got such a kick out of it, they gave him a chance to write one cue for one episode of some show. They liked it and he ended up on a series. That's a positive story. The pathetic stories all tend to fall into the exact same category: People give up. It's hard. It's hard enough to be a composer, but at the beginning of your career, it's equally important to be a salesman, and that's not really a skill composers have developed. It's like selling any product, it's pounding the pavement and knocking on a lot of doors. It's hard to take the rejection so I think the reason most people don't make it isn't from a lack of talent, because I know there are a lot of really talented people out there, it's because they give up. They don't get this instant gratification and it's so hard to take the rejection that they don't keep it up.

15. What specific piece of advice would you have for getting work?

Put yourself in the shoes of the person who's hiring you. If you were making a movie, and you got a call from a composer, what would you want to hear? Get out of the brain of a composer and into the brain of the person hiring you. The people who tend to get those first few jobs are the people who make it easy for the person to hire them--by being so willing to do demos, by being available, and by being persistent, because most people aren't. It's a very delicate balance between being persistent and being pushy. Learning to finesse that, that's a real skill to work on. And this is my number one analogy: Every skill that one uses to get a date is the exact same skill one uses to get a job. Both involve seduction, it's identical. If you're a man and wanting to ask a woman out for a first date, how do you do that? How do you present yourself physically, what things do you say, how do you connect with the other person, what's the other person looking for? It's the exact same thing when you're trying to present yourself as a composer. It's a relationship you're trying to get involved in.

16. Realistically, if I'm an average aspiring film composer, what are my chances?

I don't think there's such a thing as an average one. There are so many factors. Are you talented, are you smart, do you have a good personality, do you know how to work with filmmakers? Someone who has all those ducks in a row has incredibly better odds than a social misfit who writes crappy music. I would say that if you have your act together, write really good music, and have the financial ability and determination to stick it out, the odds are you'll make it, because there are so few people who meet those requirements.

The Online Magazine of Motion Picture and Television Music Appreciation

search the site:

Browse

Our CDs

  online:

  resources:

  online store:

  print:

  company:

So You Want to be a Film Composer?

by Lukas Kendall

Man alive, the number of people who want to be film composers these days... it used to be that when people wanted to be in music, they wanted to be a great pianist or a Broadway songwriter. Then, everybody wanted to be in a band. Now, everyone's already in a band, and they want to make money by scoring films.

I think it's great that film music is being taken seriously to the point where so many people want to get into it. But like screenwriting or professional athletics, this is a field where the available slots are few, and the hopefuls are many. To that end, here's some helpful advice, and we plan much more of this in FSM (the magazine) in 1998.

To start, two tips, from my own personal observations. If you want to be a film composer:

1) Don't try to be John Williams.

So many people, especially young people, want to be film composers because they love big, sweeping, beautiful orchestral romantic music--like the kind John Williams writes! This is a problem in that this is only a tiny fragment of what it is filmmakers are looking for in film score. Keep in mind, I am not talking about John Williams per se-- most directors would give their left nut for him--but the kind of melodic, symphonic score he has done on a specific type of fantasy film.

For one thing, John Williams is around 500 times smarter than most anyone reading this, and he can do these types of scores and make them great, instead of bloated and cliched. More practically, only a specific type of movie that requires a Star Wars type of score. They're aren't many of them made, and when they are made, they are so expensive that, if John Williams himself isn't hired, James Horner will be. Or Jerry Goldsmith. Or Bruce Broughton. Or around 40 other guys who have tons more experience than you.

If you really want to be a film composer, you have to divorce yourself from your 12 year-old dream to score the next Star Wars movie, and come up with the kind of sound that will make filmmakers come to you. If you write traditional, symphonic music, you will without a doubt end up working on a lot of lousy, juvenile children's films. But if you can come up with something sophisticated—something dramatic but subtle and contemporary— you can be "typecast" into good movies. Think Thomas Newman, Howard Shore, Rachel Portman, Graeme Revell, Elliot Goldenthal and the newest example, Mychael Danna. These composers write music that isn't necessarily flashy, but gets them consistently employed on high quality product. And from there you'll have a lot more options than you do now.

2) Put down the jar of paste.

Not to dwell too much on this, but I've met a few aspiring film composers whose personalities are about as fun as a Jehovah's witness at a Halloween party. Almost without exception, the big-time working film composers are also intelligent, likable, trustworthy and fun to be around. They aren't necessarily "party" people, but they radiate a certain confidence and charm that says, "Hire me." They are sensitive, but they don't burden you with their problems.

If you really want to do this, you can't be an arrogant, nerdy dullard. Film composing is highly competitive. (First prize: the oldsmobile. Second prize: steak knives. Third prize: you're fired.) You can't afford to be a creep.

Free Advice from Top Agent-- RICHARD KRAFT Now for something useful for a change. This was a brief set of questions I put to agent Richard Kraft in August, 1994, for issue #48. Richard represents Danny Elfman, Jerry Goldsmith, Marc Shaiman, Basil Poledouris, John Barry, Elmer Bernstein, Rachel Portman, and several others, so he knows what he's talking about.

One note: since this conversation, the film scoring landscape has changed with regard to independent films, in that there is once again a thriving independent market and many of today's most promising composers came out of it-- such as Mychael Danna, John Ottman, and Stephen Endelman. But other than this I don't think anything substantial has changed. Here's Richard:

***

1. How tough is it to break into film scoring?

Extremely tough, because there are so few movies made. There are probably six major studios and they make maybe a dozen movies each, so that's not a large pool of films. The number of independent movies being made is substantially less than it was even ten years ago, when there were Cannon Films and New World Pictures and Dino DeLaurentiis, those were a great breeding ground for up and coming talent. But now it's like major films and that's it. Television is not the great minor leagues it once was. If you look at John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith and people like that who cut their teeth in TV, it's not the same type of music being written anymore, there aren't all those great shows like Twilight Zone. Plus, there's a kind of snobbery that exists between features and television that I don't think existed back in the '60s.

2. How can I meet various important people to get myself work?

I would skip "various important people" and start with people in a similar "up and coming" spot. Instead of trying to get to Steven Spielberg, I would try to get to the next Steven Spielberg by working on student films, AFI films, UCLA and USC student films and forging relationships with the people who will be the next generation of biggies.

3. Is moving to L.A. or another production center (like New York) really important?

Essential. If you want to be in the car making business, you have to be in Detroit. You've got to be where the industry is.

4. What's the best kind of demo tape?

One based on knowledge of the project you're sending it out for. If you're going up for a horror movie, there are very few directors who could listen to great music for a love story and make the leap of faith that you would be appropriate for a horror movie. I would make the tape as specific to the project as possible.

5. Is it worth it to hire live players for a demo?

The better the tape could be, the better it is. It's best to do the "A" version of what you're doing. If you're trying to achieve an orchestral score, use live players. A problem with demos is that the ambition of the music sometimes exceeds the production abilities; it's hard to hear and fill in the blanks of what it's supposed to sound like. You should only have music that sounds like the real thing you're trying to achieve.

6. When should I start contacting agents?

The time to have an agent is when an agent wants you, when the agent feels he can parlay where you currently are in your career into something bigger. Agents are not set up to break talent in their first one or two movies. It's when there's a small movie that has some interest behind it--a Sex, Lies and Videotape, Drugstore Cowboy or Dead Calm--that an agent can take you to the next step.

7. How important is a traditional musical education and being classically trained?

It entirely depends on the type of composer you would like to be. The more varied your background the better, because film composing is about being a chameleon, being able to write in different styles to meet the needs of the movie. So the richer your background the better, but I don't think anybody has ever hired a composer based on looking at their degree. I think of the majority of currently successful film composers, their backgrounds are not conservatory training but life music training. Marc Shaiman was Bette Midler's musical director, Danny Elfman had the band Oingo Boingo, Stewart Copeland was from The Police, James Newton Howard was a session player and record producer, and so on.

8. How can I work on becoming a film composer while simultaneously supporting myself on a job?

There are two trains of thought. One is, have a job that has nothing to do with your career, just to make money. That way you can just do the job and leave it behind at the end of the day and concentrate on your film scoring career. Or, the best job is like being an orchestrator or a copyist, where it puts you in the situation where you meet people who are working on movies, and you can be a fly on the wall at scoring sessions and absorb all kinds of knowledge and information.

9. How many aspiring film composers are there?

Endless. Nowadays, almost all the major music schools have film scoring programs and the interest in being a film composer is at an all time high [cue Octopussy]. Besides writing hit songs, film composing is about the only lucrative job for somebody who composes music for a living.

10. Is it worth it to do projects for next to nothing just to get experience?

Absolutely. It's essential, as a matter of fact. The first few movies you do should be viewed like obtaining tuition to go to college. It's a learning process for you and having done three movies where you've lost money in the process puts you so many steps ahead of having no movies.

11. Should I try to develop the ability to sound like other composers, or work on developing a unique sound of my own?

I don't think it's an either/or. You definitely need to develop your own voice, but also to have an understanding of what other people might want. I wouldn't work on doing an Elmer Bernstein imitation, but if I was doing a movie where they said, "We want the feel of To Kill a Mockingbird," I'd need to have an understanding of what that meant so as to interpret it in my own voice.

12. Is it helpful to meet other film composers, established or otherwise?

It's helpful to commiserate and to have a support group, but--and again it's not black or white--if I had a choice I'd rather know five directors than five film composers.

13. Are there any sure-fire ways to piss off people so much that nobody will ever hire me?

Well... never say never, but I think a lot of talented people's careers haven't developed as far as they should based on them pissing people off.

14. Are there any specific pathetic stories of aspiring film composers you know about?

Specific pathetic stories? How about I give you a positive story: There was a composer several years ago who was in college and wanted to get a job in Hollywood. So what he did was he videotaped the main title sequences of all the Quinn-Martin TV shows, wrote new themes for all of them, got his college orchestra to play his new themes and sent the tape to Quinn-Martin Productions. And of course they're going to look at their own main titles, and they got such a kick out of it, they gave him a chance to write one cue for one episode of some show. They liked it and he ended up on a series. That's a positive story. The pathetic stories all tend to fall into the exact same category: People give up. It's hard. It's hard enough to be a composer, but at the beginning of your career, it's equally important to be a salesman, and that's not really a skill composers have developed. It's like selling any product, it's pounding the pavement and knocking on a lot of doors. It's hard to take the rejection so I think the reason most people don't make it isn't from a lack of talent, because I know there are a lot of really talented people out there, it's because they give up. They don't get this instant gratification and it's so hard to take the rejection that they don't keep it up.

15. What specific piece of advice would you have for getting work?

Put yourself in the shoes of the person who's hiring you. If you were making a movie, and you got a call from a composer, what would you want to hear? Get out of the brain of a composer and into the brain of the person hiring you. The people who tend to get those first few jobs are the people who make it easy for the person to hire them--by being so willing to do demos, by being available, and by being persistent, because most people aren't. It's a very delicate balance between being persistent and being pushy. Learning to finesse that, that's a real skill to work on. And this is my number one analogy: Every skill that one uses to get a date is the exact same skill one uses to get a job. Both involve seduction, it's identical. If you're a man and wanting to ask a woman out for a first date, how do you do that? How do you present yourself physically, what things do you say, how do you connect with the other person, what's the other person looking for? It's the exact same thing when you're trying to present yourself as a composer. It's a relationship you're trying to get involved in.

16. Realistically, if I'm an average aspiring film composer, what are my chances?

I don't think there's such a thing as an average one. There are so many factors. Are you talented, are you smart, do you have a good personality, do you know how to work with filmmakers? Someone who has all those ducks in a row has incredibly better odds than a social misfit who writes crappy music. I would say that if you have your act together, write really good music, and have the financial ability and determination to stick it out, the odds are you'll make it, because there are so few people who meet those requirements.

The Online Magazine of Motion Picture and Television Music Appreciation

search the site:

Browse

Our CDs

  online:

  resources:

  online store:

  print:

  company:

So You Want to be a Film Composer?

by Lukas Kendall

Man alive, the number of people who want to be film composers these days... it used to be that when people wanted to be in music, they wanted to be a great pianist or a Broadway songwriter. Then, everybody wanted to be in a band. Now, everyone's already in a band, and they want to make money by scoring films.

I think it's great that film music is being taken seriously to the point where so many people want to get into it. But like screenwriting or professional athletics, this is a field where the available slots are few, and the hopefuls are many. To that end, here's some helpful advice, and we plan much more of this in FSM (the magazine) in 1998.

To start, two tips, from my own personal observations. If you want to be a film composer:

1) Don't try to be John Williams.

So many people, especially young people, want to be film composers because they love big, sweeping, beautiful orchestral romantic music--like the kind John Williams writes! This is a problem in that this is only a tiny fragment of what it is filmmakers are looking for in film score. Keep in mind, I am not talking about John Williams per se-- most directors would give their left nut for him--but the kind of melodic, symphonic score he has done on a specific type of fantasy film.

For one thing, John Williams is around 500 times smarter than most anyone reading this, and he can do these types of scores and make them great, instead of bloated and cliched. More practically, only a specific type of movie that requires a Star Wars type of score. They're aren't many of them made, and when they are made, they are so expensive that, if John Williams himself isn't hired, James Horner will be. Or Jerry Goldsmith. Or Bruce Broughton. Or around 40 other guys who have tons more experience than you.

If you really want to be a film composer, you have to divorce yourself from your 12 year-old dream to score the next Star Wars movie, and come up with the kind of sound that will make filmmakers come to you. If you write traditional, symphonic music, you will without a doubt end up working on a lot of lousy, juvenile children's films. But if you can come up with something sophisticated—something dramatic but subtle and contemporary— you can be "typecast" into good movies. Think Thomas Newman, Howard Shore, Rachel Portman, Graeme Revell, Elliot Goldenthal and the newest example, Mychael Danna. These composers write music that isn't necessarily flashy, but gets them consistently employed on high quality product. And from there you'll have a lot more options than you do now.

2) Put down the jar of paste.

Not to dwell too much on this, but I've met a few aspiring film composers whose personalities are about as fun as a Jehovah's witness at a Halloween party. Almost without exception, the big-time working film composers are also intelligent, likable, trustworthy and fun to be around. They aren't necessarily "party" people, but they radiate a certain confidence and charm that says, "Hire me." They are sensitive, but they don't burden you with their problems.

If you really want to do this, you can't be an arrogant, nerdy dullard. Film composing is highly competitive. (First prize: the oldsmobile. Second prize: steak knives. Third prize: you're fired.) You can't afford to be a creep.

Free Advice from Top Agent-- RICHARD KRAFT Now for something useful for a change. This was a brief set of questions I put to agent Richard Kraft in August, 1994, for issue #48. Richard represents Danny Elfman, Jerry Goldsmith, Marc Shaiman, Basil Poledouris, John Barry, Elmer Bernstein, Rachel Portman, and several others, so he knows what he's talking about.

One note: since this conversation, the film scoring landscape has changed with regard to independent films, in that there is once again a thriving independent market and many of today's most promising composers came out of it-- such as Mychael Danna, John Ottman, and Stephen Endelman. But other than this I don't think anything substantial has changed. Here's Richard:

***

1. How tough is it to break into film scoring?

Extremely tough, because there are so few movies made. There are probably six major studios and they make maybe a dozen movies each, so that's not a large pool of films. The number of independent movies being made is substantially less than it was even ten years ago, when there were Cannon Films and New World Pictures and Dino DeLaurentiis, those were a great breeding ground for up and coming talent. But now it's like major films and that's it. Television is not the great minor leagues it once was. If you look at John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith and people like that who cut their teeth in TV, it's not the same type of music being written anymore, there aren't all those great shows like Twilight Zone. Plus, there's a kind of snobbery that exists between features and television that I don't think existed back in the '60s.

2. How can I meet various important people to get myself work?

I would skip "various important people" and start with people in a similar "up and coming" spot. Instead of trying to get to Steven Spielberg, I would try to get to the next Steven Spielberg by working on student films, AFI films, UCLA and USC student films and forging relationships with the people who will be the next generation of biggies.

3. Is moving to L.A. or another production center (like New York) really important?

Essential. If you want to be in the car making business, you have to be in Detroit. You've got to be where the industry is.

4. What's the best kind of demo tape?

One based on knowledge of the project you're sending it out for. If you're going up for a horror movie, there are very few directors who could listen to great music for a love story and make the leap of faith that you would be appropriate for a horror movie. I would make the tape as specific to the project as possible.

5. Is it worth it to hire live players for a demo?

The better the tape could be, the better it is. It's best to do the "A" version of what you're doing. If you're trying to achieve an orchestral score, use live players. A problem with demos is that the ambition of the music sometimes exceeds the production abilities; it's hard to hear and fill in the blanks of what it's supposed to sound like. You should only have music that sounds like the real thing you're trying to achieve.

6. When should I start contacting agents?

The time to have an agent is when an agent wants you, when the agent feels he can parlay where you currently are in your career into something bigger. Agents are not set up to break talent in their first one or two movies. It's when there's a small movie that has some interest behind it--a Sex, Lies and Videotape, Drugstore Cowboy or Dead Calm--that an agent can take you to the next step.

7. How important is a traditional musical education and being classically trained?

It entirely depends on the type of composer you would like to be. The more varied your background the better, because film composing is about being a chameleon, being able to write in different styles to meet the needs of the movie. So the richer your background the better, but I don't think anybody has ever hired a composer based on looking at their degree. I think of the majority of currently successful film composers, their backgrounds are not conservatory training but life music training. Marc Shaiman was Bette Midler's musical director, Danny Elfman had the band Oingo Boingo, Stewart Copeland was from The Police, James Newton Howard was a session player and record producer, and so on.

8. How can I work on becoming a film composer while simultaneously supporting myself on a job?

There are two trains of thought. One is, have a job that has nothing to do with your career, just to make money. That way you can just do the job and leave it behind at the end of the day and concentrate on your film scoring career. Or, the best job is like being an orchestrator or a copyist, where it puts you in the situation where you meet people who are working on movies, and you can be a fly on the wall at scoring sessions and absorb all kinds of knowledge and information.

9. How many aspiring film composers are there?

Endless. Nowadays, almost all the major music schools have film scoring programs and the interest in being a film composer is at an all time high [cue Octopussy]. Besides writing hit songs, film composing is about the only lucrative job for somebody who composes music for a living.

10. Is it worth it to do projects for next to nothing just to get experience?

Absolutely. It's essential, as a matter of fact. The first few movies you do should be viewed like obtaining tuition to go to college. It's a learning process for you and having done three movies where you've lost money in the process puts you so many steps ahead of having no movies.

11. Should I try to develop the ability to sound like other composers, or work on developing a unique sound of my own?

I don't think it's an either/or. You definitely need to develop your own voice, but also to have an understanding of what other people might want. I wouldn't work on doing an Elmer Bernstein imitation, but if I was doing a movie where they said, "We want the feel of To Kill a Mockingbird," I'd need to have an understanding of what that meant so as to interpret it in my own voice.

12. Is it helpful to meet other film composers, established or otherwise?

It's helpful to commiserate and to have a support group, but--and again it's not black or white--if I had a choice I'd rather know five directors than five film composers.

13. Are there any sure-fire ways to piss off people so much that nobody will ever hire me?

Well... never say never, but I think a lot of talented people's careers haven't developed as far as they should based on them pissing people off.

14. Are there any specific pathetic stories of aspiring film composers you know about?

Specific pathetic stories? How about I give you a positive story: There was a composer several years ago who was in college and wanted to get a job in Hollywood. So what he did was he videotaped the main title sequences of all the Quinn-Martin TV shows, wrote new themes for all of them, got his college orchestra to play his new themes and sent the tape to Quinn-Martin Productions. And of course they're going to look at their own main titles, and they got such a kick out of it, they gave him a chance to write one cue for one episode of some show. They liked it and he ended up on a series. That's a positive story. The pathetic stories all tend to fall into the exact same category: People give up. It's hard. It's hard enough to be a composer, but at the beginning of your career, it's equally important to be a salesman, and that's not really a skill composers have developed. It's like selling any product, it's pounding the pavement and knocking on a lot of doors. It's hard to take the rejection so I think the reason most people don't make it isn't from a lack of talent, because I know there are a lot of really talented people out there, it's because they give up. They don't get this instant gratification and it's so hard to take the rejection that they don't keep it up.

15. What specific piece of advice would you have for getting work?

Put yourself in the shoes of the person who's hiring you. If you were making a movie, and you got a call from a composer, what would you want to hear? Get out of the brain of a composer and into the brain of the person hiring you. The people who tend to get those first few jobs are the people who make it easy for the person to hire them--by being so willing to do demos, by being available, and by being persistent, because most people aren't. It's a very delicate balance between being persistent and being pushy. Learning to finesse that, that's a real skill to work on. And this is my number one analogy: Every skill that one uses to get a date is the exact same skill one uses to get a job. Both involve seduction, it's identical. If you're a man and wanting to ask a woman out for a first date, how do you do that? How do you present yourself physically, what things do you say, how do you connect with the other person, what's the other person looking for? It's the exact same thing when you're trying to present yourself as a composer. It's a relationship you're trying to get involved in.

16. Realistically, if I'm an average aspiring film composer, what are my chances?

I don't think there's such a thing as an average one. There are so many factors. Are you talented, are you smart, do you have a good personality, do you know how to work with filmmakers? Someone who has all those ducks in a row has incredibly better odds than a social misfit who writes crappy music. I would say that if you have your act together, write really good music, and have the financial ability and determination to stick it out, the odds are you'll make it, because there are so few people who meet those requirements.

Film score

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A film score (also sometimes called background music or incidental music) is original music written specifically to accompany a film, forming part of the film's soundtrack, which also usually includes dialogue and sound effects. The score comprises a number of orchestral, instrumental or choral pieces called cues which are timed to begin and end at specific points during the film in order to enhance the dramatic narrative and the emotional impact of the scene in question.[1]

Songs are usually not considered part of the film's score,[2] although songs do also form part of the film's soundtrack. Although some songs, especially in musicals, are based on thematic ideas from the score (or vice-versa), scores usually do not have lyrics, except for when sung by choirs or soloists as part of a cue. Similarly, pop songs which are "needle dropped" into a specific scene in film for added emphasis are not considered part of the score.

Scores are written by one or more composers , under the guidance of the film's director and/or producer, and are then usually performed by an ensemble of musicians - most often comprising an orchestra or band, instrumental soloists, and choir or vocalists - and recorded by a sound engineer.

Film scores encompass an enormous variety of styles of music, depending on the nature of the film it accompanies. The majority of scores are orchestral works rooted in Western classical music, but a great number of scores also draw influence from jazz, rock, pop, blues, New Age ambient music, and a wide range of ethnic and world music styles. Since the 1950s, a growing number of scores have also included electronic elements as part of the score, and many scores written today feature a hybrid of orchestral and electronic instruments.[3]

Since the invention of digital technology and audio sampling, many low budget films have been able to rely on digital samples to imitate the sound of live instruments, and many scores are created and performed wholly by the composers themselves, by programming sophisticated music composition software.

Contents [hide]

1 Process of creation

1.1 Spotting

1.2 Writing

1.3 Orchestration

1.4 Recording

2 Elements of a film score

2.1 Temp tracks

2.2 Structure

2.3 Source music

3 Historical notes

4 Composers

4.1 Academy Award nominees and winners

4.2 Other award nominees and winners

4.3 Box office champions

5 Production music

6 See also

6.1 Film music organizations

6.2 Film music review sites

6.3 Independent specialist original soundtrack recording labels

6.4 Journals

7 References

8 Further reading

9 External links

[edit]Process of creation

[edit]Spotting

The composer usually enters the creative process towards the end of filming, at around the same time as the film is being edited, although on some occasions the composer is on hand during the entire film shoot, especially when actors are required to perform with or be aware of original diegetic music. The composer is shown an unpolished "rough cut" of the film, before the editing is completed, and talks to the director or producer about what sort of music is required for the film in terms of style and tone. The director and composer will watch the entire film, taking note of which scenes require original music. During this process the composer will take precise timing notes so that he knows how long each cue needs to last, where it begins, where it ends, and of particular moments during a scene with which the music may need to coincide in a specific way. This process is known as "spotting".[4]

Occasionally, a film maker will actually edit his film to fit the flow of music, rather than the other way around, which is the norm. Director Godfrey Reggio edited his films Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi based on composer Philip Glass's music.[5] Similarly, the relationship between director Sergio Leone and composer Ennio Morricone was such that the finale of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly[6] and the films Once Upon a Time in the West and Once Upon a Time in America were edited to Morricone's score as the composer had prepared it months before the film's production ended. Also, the finale of Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was edited to match the music of his long-time collaborator John Williams: as recounted in a companion documentary on the DVD, Spielberg gave Williams complete freedom with the music and asked him to record the cue without picture; Spielberg then re-edited the scene later to match the music.

Less frequently, a composer will be asked to write music based on his or her impressions of the script or storyboards, without seeing the film itself, and is given more freedom to create music without the need to adhere to specific cue lengths or mirror the emotional arc of a particular scene. This approach is usually taken by a director who does not wish to have the music comment specifically on a particular scene or nuance of a film, and which can instead be inserted into the film at any point the director wishes during the post-production process. Composer Hans Zimmer was asked to write music in this way in 2010 for director Christopher Nolan's film Inception;[7] composer Gustavo Santaolalla did the same thing when he wrote his Oscar-winning score for Brokeback Mountain.[8]

[edit]Writing

Once the spotting session has been completed and the precise timings of each cue determined, the composer will then work on writing the score. The methods of writing the score vary from composer to composer; some composers prefer to work with a traditional pencil and paper, writing notes by hand on a staff and performing works-in-progress for the director on a piano, while other composers write on computers using sophisticated music composition software such as Logic Pro, Cubase or Protools.[9] Working with software allows composers to create MIDI-based demos of cues, called MIDI mockups, for review by the filmmaker prior to the final orchestral recording.

The length of time a composer has to write the score varies from project to project; depending on the post-production schedule, a composer may have as little as two weeks, or as much as three months to write the score. In normal circumstances, the actual writing process usually lasts around six weeks from beginning to end.

The actual musical content of a film score is wholly dependent on the type of film being scored, and the emotions the director wishes the music to convey. A film score can encompass literally thousands of different combinations of instruments, ranging from full symphony orchestral ensembles to single solo instruments to rock bands to jazz combos, along with a multitude of ethnic and world music influences, soloists, vocalists, choirs and electronic textures. The style of the music being written also varies massively from project to project, and can be influenced by the time period in which the film is set, the geographic location of the film's action, and even the musical tastes of the characters. As part of their preparations for writing the score the composer will often research different musical techniques and genres as appropriate for that specific project; as such, it is not uncommon for established film composers to be proficient at writing music in dozens of different styles.

[edit]Orchestration

Once the music has been written, it must then be arranged or orchestrated in order for the ensemble to be able to perform it. The nature and level of orchestration varies from project to project and composer to composer, but in its basic form the orchestrator's job is to take the single-line music written by the composer and "flesh it out" in to instrument-specific sheet music for each member of the orchestra to perform.

Some composers, notably Ennio Morricone, orchestrate their own scores themselves, without using an additional orchestrator. Some composers provide intricate details in how they want this to be accomplished, and will provide the orchestrator with copious notes outlining which instruments are being asked to perform which notes, giving the orchestrator no personal creative input whatsoever beyond re-notating the music on different sheets of paper as appropriate. Other composers are less detailed, and will often ask orchestrators to "fill in the blanks", providing their own creative input into the makeup of the ensemble, ensuring that each instrument is capable of performing the music as written, and even allowing then to introduce performance techniques and flourishes to enhance the score.

Over the years several orchestrators have become linked to the work of one particular composer, often to the point where one will not work without the other. Examples of enduring composer-orchestrator relationships include Jerry Goldsmith with Arthur Morton, Alexander Courage and Herbert W. Spencer; Miklos Rozsa with Eugene Zador; Alfred Newman with Edward Powell, Ken Darby and Hugo Friedhofer; Danny Elfman with Steve Bartek; David Arnold with Nicholas Dodd; Basil Poledouris with Greig McRitchie; and Elliot Goldenthal with Robert Elhai. Others have become orchestrators-for-hire, and work with many different composers over the course of their careers; examples of prominent film music orchestrators include Pete Anthony, Jeff Atmajian, Brad Dechter, Bruce Fowler, John Neufeld, Thomas Pasatieri, Conrad Pope, Nic Raine and J.A.C. Redford.

Once the orchestration process has been completed, the sheet music is physically printed onto paper by one or more music copyists, and is ready for performance.

[edit]Recording

When the music has been composed and orchestrated, the orchestra or ensemble then performs it, often with the composer conducting. Musicians for these ensembles are often uncredited in the film or on the album and are contracted individually (and if so, the orchestra contractor is credited in the film or the soundtrack album). However, some films have recently begun crediting the contracted musicians on the albums under the name Hollywood Studio Symphony after an agreement with the American Federation of Musicians. Other performing ensembles that are often employed include the London Symphony Orchestra, the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra (an orchestra dedicated exclusively to recording), and the Northwest Sinfonia.[citation needed]

The orchestra performs in front of a large screen depicting the movie, and sometimes to a series of clicks called a "click-track" that changes with meter and tempo, assisting the conductor to synchronize the music with the film.[10]

More rarely, the director will talk to the composer before shooting has started, so as to give more time to the composer or because the director needs to shoot scenes (namely song or dance scenes) according to the final score. Sometimes the director will have edited the film using "temp (temporary) music": already published pieces with a character that the director believes to fit specific scenes.

[edit]Elements of a film score

[edit]Temp tracks

In some instances, film composers have been asked by the director to imitate a specific composer or style present in the temp track.[11] On other occasions, directors have become so attached to the temp score that they decide to use it and reject the original score written by the film composer. One of the most famous cases is Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, where Kubrick opted for existing recordings of classical works, including pieces by composer György Ligeti rather than the score by Alex North,[12] although Kubrick had also hired Frank Cordell to do a score. While North's 2001 is indeed a major example, it is not the sole case of well-known rejected scores. Others include Torn Curtain (Bernard Herrmann),[13] Troy (Gabriel Yared),[14] Peter Jackson's King Kong (Howard Shore)[15] and The Bourne Identity (John Powell).[16]

[edit]Structure

Films often have different themes for important characters, events, ideas or objects, an idea often associated with Wagner's use of leitmotif.[17] These may be played in different variations depending on the situation they represent, scattered amongst incidental music. A example of this technique is John Williams' score for the Star Wars saga, and the numerous themes associated with characters like Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, and Princess Leia Organa (see Star Wars music for more details). Other examples are Italian composers Stefano Lentini and oscar's winner Ennio Morricone. [18] The Lord of the Rings trilogy uses a similar technique, with recurring themes for many main characters and places. Others are less known by casual moviegoers, but well known among score enthusiasts, such as Jerry Goldsmith's underlying theme for the Borg in Star Trek: First Contact, or his Klingon theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture which other composers carry over into their Klingon motifs, and he has brought back on numerous occasions as the theme for Worf, Star Trek: The Next Generation's most prominent Klingon.[citation needed] Michael Giacchino employed character themes in the soundtrack for the 2009 animated film Up, for which he received the Academy Award for Best Score. His orchestral soundtrack for the television series Lost also depended heavily on character and situation-specific themes.

In 1983, a non-profit organization, the Society for the Preservation of Film Music, was formed to preserve the "byproducts" of creating a film score:[19] the music manuscripts (written music) and other documents and studio recordings generated in the process of composing and recording scores which, in some instances, have been discarded by the movie studios. The written music must be kept to perform the music on concert programs and to make new recordings of it. Sometimes only after decades has an archival recording of a film score been released on CD.

[edit]Source music

Most films have between 40 and 120 minutes of music. However, some films have very little or no music; others may feature a score that plays almost continuously throughout. Dogme 95 is a genre that has music only from sources within a film, such as from a radio or television. This is called "source music" (or a "source cue") because it comes from an on screen source that can actually be seen or that can be inferred (in academic film theory such music is called "diegetic" music, as it emanates from the "diegesis" or "story world").[20] An example of "source music" is the use of the Frankie Valli song "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" in Michael Cimino's "The Deer Hunter". Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 thriller The Birds is an example of a Hollywood film with no non-diegetic music whatsoever.

[edit]Historical notes

Before the age of recorded sound in motion pictures, efforts were taken to provide suitable music for films, usually through the services of an in-house pianist or organist, and, in some cases, entire orchestras, typically given cue sheets as a guide. In 1914, The Oz Film Manufacturing Company sent full-length scores by Louis F. Gottschalk for their films. Other examples of this include Victor Herbert's score in 1915 to The Fall of a Nation (a sequel to The Birth of a Nation) and Camille Saint-Saëns' music for The Assassination of the Duke of Guise in 1908. It was preceded by Nathaniel D. Mann's score for The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays by four months, but that was a mixture of interrelated stage and film performance in the tradition of old magic lantern shows.[21] Most accompaniments at this time, these examples notwithstanding, comprised pieces by famous composers, also including studies. These were often used to form catalogues of film music, which had different subsections broken down by 'mood' and/or genre: dark, sad, suspense, action, chase, etc.

German cinema, which was highly influential in the era of silent movies, provided some original scores such as Fritz Lang's movies Die Nibelungen (1924) and Metropolis (1927) which were accompanied by original full scale orchestral and leitmotific scores written by Gottfried Huppertz, who also wrote piano-versions of his music, for playing in smaller cinemas.[citation needed] Friedrich W. Murnau's movies Nosferatu (1922 - music by Hans Erdmann) and Faust – eine deutsche Volkssage (1926 - music by Werner Richard Heymann) also had original scores written for them. Other films like Murnau's Der letzte Mann contained a mixing of original compositions (in this case by Giuseppe Becce) and library music / folk tunes, which were artistically included into the score by the composer. Nevertheless fully developed original scores were quite rare in the silent movie era. When sound came to movies, director Fritz Lang barely used musical scores in his movies anymore. Apart from Peter Lorre whistling a short piece from Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt, Lang's movie M - Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder was lacking musical accompaniment completely and Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse only included one original piece written for the movie by Hans Erdmann played at the very beginning and end of the movie. One of the rare occasions on which music occurs in the movie is a song one of the characters sings, that Lang uses to put emphasis on the man's insanity, similar to the use of the whistling in M.

Though "the scoring of narrative features during the 1940s lagged decades behind technical innovations in the field of concert music,"[22] the 1950s saw the rise of the modernist film score. Director Elia Kazan was open to the idea of jazz influences and dissonant scoring and worked with Alex North, whose score for A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) combined dissonance with elements of blues and jazz. Kazan also approached Leonard Bernstein to score On the Waterfront (1954) and the result was reminiscent of earlier works by Aaron Copland and Igor Stravinsky with its "jazz-based harmonies and exciting additive rhythms."[22] A year later, Leonard Rosenman, inspired by Arnold Schoenberg, experimented with atonality in his scores for East of Eden (1955) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955). In his ten-year collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock, Bernard Herrmann experimented with ideas in Vertigo (1958), Psycho (1960), and The Birds (1963). The use of non-diegetic jazz was another modernist innovation, such as jazz star Duke Ellington's score for Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder (1959).

A full film score widely regarded[by whom?][citation needed]as the first made by a popular artist came in 1973 with the film Pat Garret and Billy the Kid, by Bob Dylan. However the album received very little critical acclaim. This had not been done before in popular film history as featured bands had films written around their music such as in the animation Yellow Submarine with music by The Beatles.

[edit]Composers

[edit]Academy Award nominees and winners

The following list includes all composers who have been nominated for an Academy Award by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in the Best Score category (which, over the years, had gone by a variety of names, included song scores and arrangements, and been split into awards for scoring in dramas and comedies). Winners of the Award appear in bold. Note: Composers whose only Oscar nominations came in the Best Original Song category are not listed, and Best Original Song wins are not counted in the wins tally.

John Addison (1 win)

Larry Adler

Peter Herman Adler

Lynn Ahrens

Daniele Amfitheatrof

Louis Applebaum

Robert Armbruster

Leo Arnaud

Malcolm Arnold (1 win)

Kenny Ascher

Gil Askey

Luis Enríquez Bacalov (1 win)

Burt Bacharach (1 win)

Constantin Bakaleinikoff

Buddy Baker

Victor Baravalle

John Barry (4 wins)

Marco Beltrami

Richard Rodney Bennett

Robert Russell Bennett (1 win)

Alan Bergman (1 win)

Marilyn Bergman (1 win)

Elmer Bernstein (1 win)

Leonard Bernstein

Jay Blackton (1 win)

Chris Boardman

Phil Boutelje

Leslie Bricusse (1 win)

Bruce Broughton

George Bruns

Ralph Burns (2 wins)

Dale Butts

David Byrne (1 win)

Jorge Calandrelli

John Cameron

Gerard Carbonara

Charlie Chaplin (1 win)

Saul Chaplin (3 wins)

Frank Churchill (1 win)

Cy Coleman

Anthony Collins

Alberto Colombo

Bill Conti (1 win)

Aaron Copland (1 win)

Carmine Coppola (1 win)

Frank Cordell

John Corigliano (1 win)

Alexander Courage

Andrae Crouch

Ken Darby (3 wins)

John Debney

Georges Delerue (1 win)

Jacques Demy

Alexandre Desplat

Adolph Deutsch (3 wins)

Frank DeVol

Robert Emmett Dolan

Patrick Doyle

Carmen Dragon (1 win)

Anne Dudley (1 win)

Tan Dun (1 win)

George Duning

Brian Easdale (1 win)

Roger Edens (3 wins)

Hanns Eisler

Danny Elfman

Duke Ellington

Jack Elliott

Leo Erdody

Yuri Faier

Percy Faith

George Fenton

Cy Feuer

Jerry Fielding

Stephen Flaherty

Lou Forbes

Ian Fraser

Gerald Fried

Hugo Friedhofer (1 win)

Douglas Gamley

Joseph Gershenson

Michael Giacchino (1 win)

Herschel Burke Gilbert

Philip Glass

Lud Gluskin

Ernest Gold (1 win)

Elliot Goldenthal (1 win)

Jerry Goldsmith (1 win)

Michael Gore (1 win)

Johnny Green (4 wins)

Walter Greene

Peter Greenwell

Ferde Grofe

Louis Gruenberg

Dave Grusin (1 win)

Vince Guaraldi

Jonas Gwangwa

Earle H. Hagen

Richard Hageman (1 win)

Karl Hajos

Al Ham

Marvin Hamlisch (1 win)

Herbie Hancock (1 win)

Leigh Harline (1 win)

W. Franke Harling (1 win)

George Harrison (1 win)

Marvin Hatley

Isaac Hayes

Jack Hayes

Lennie Hayton (1 win)

Ray Heindorf (3 wins)

Charles Henderson

Bernard Herrmann (1 win)

Jerry Hey

Werner Heymann

David Hirschfelder

Joel Hirschhorn

Samuel Hoffenstein

Frederick Hollander

James Horner (1 win)

James Newton Howard

Alberto Iglesias

Mark Isham

Calvin Jackson

Werner Janssen

Maurice Jarre (3 wins)

Quincy Jones

Jan A.P. Kaczmarek (1 win)

Gus Kahn (1 win)

Bronislau Kaper (1 win)

Fred Karlin

Marsha Karlin

Al Kasha

Edward Kay

Roger Kellaway

Randy Kerber

Jerome Kern

Erich Wolfgang Korngold (2 wins)

Irwin Kostal (1 win)

Kris Kristofferson

Francis Lai (1 win)

Arthur Lange

Michel Legrand (2 wins)

John Leipold (1 win)

John Lennon (1 win)

Alan Jay Lerner

Joseph J. Lilley

Andrew Lloyd Webber

Frederick Loewe

Jeremy Lubbock

Michel Magne

Henry Mancini (2 wins)

Dario Marianelli (1 win)

George Martin

Muir Mathieson

Peter Matz

Peter Maxwell Davies

Toshiro Mayuzumi

Paul McCartney (1 win)

Rod McKuen

Bill Melendez

Alan Menken (4 wins)

Gian-Carlo Menotti

Johnny Mercer

Mahlon Merrick

Michel Michelet

Cyril J. Mockridge

Lucien Moraweck

Angela Morley

Giorgio Moroder (1 win)

Jerome Moross

Ennio Morricone (Honorary Oscar)

John Morris

Boris Morros

Jeff Moss

Javier Navarrete

Anthony Newley

Alfred Newman (9 wins)

David Newman

Emil Newman

Lionel Newman (1 win)

Randy Newman

Thomas Newman

Jack Nitzsche

Alex North (Honorary Oscar)

Edward Paul

Frank Perkins

Nicola Piovani (1 win)

Edward H. Plumb

Rachel Portman (1 win)

John Powell

André Previn (5 wins)

Charles Previn

Prince (1 win)

A.R. Rahman (1 win)

David Raksin

Sid Ramin (1 win)

Raymond Rasch (1 win)

Joe Renzetti (1 win)

Trent Reznor (1 win)

Frederic E. Rich

Nelson Riddle (1 win)

Hugo Riesenfeld

Richard Robbins

Milan Roder

Heinz Roemheld (1 win)

Ann Ronell

David Rose

Joel Rosenbaum

Leonard Rosenman (2 wins)

Laurence Rosenthal

Atticus Ross (1 win)

Nino Rota (1 win)

Gennadi Rozhdestvensky

Miklós Rózsa (3 wins)

Larry Russell (1 win)

Ryuichi Sakamoto (1 win)

Conrad Salinger

Hans J. Salter

Buck Sanders

Gustavo Santaolalla (2 wins)

Philippe Sarde

Walter Scharf

Victor Schertzinger (1 win)

Lalo Schifrin

Stephen Schwartz (1 win)

Morton Scott

Caiphus Semenya

Marc Shaiman

Ravi Shankar

Artie Shaw

Al Shean

Richard M. Sherman (1 win)

Robert B. Sherman (1 win)

Nathaniel Shilkret

Howard Shore (2 wins)

Dimitri Shostakovich

Leo Shuken (1 win)

Louis Silvers (1 win)

Alan Silvestri

Marlin Skiles

Frank Skinner

Paul J. Smith (1 win)

Herbert W. Spencer

Ringo Starr (1 win)

Fred Steiner

Max Steiner (3 wins)

Leith Stevens

Georgie Stoll (1 win)

Morris Stoloff (3 wins)

Robert Stolz

Gregory Stone

Herbert Stothart (1 win)

Cong Su (1 win)

Harry Sukman (1 win)

Alexander Tansman

Rod Temperton

Max Terr

Ken Thorne (1 win)

Dimitri Tiomkin (3 wins)

Ernst Toch

Peter Townshend

John Scott Trotter

Jonathan Tunick (1 win)

Vangelis (1 win)

Tom Waits

Don Walker

Oliver Wallace (1 win)

William Walton

Stephen Warbeck (1 win)

Edward Ward

Ned Washington (1 win)

Franz Waxman (2 wins)

Kenneth Webb

Roy Webb

Kurt Weill

Jerry Wexler

Matthew Wilder

John Williams (5 wins)

Patrick Williams

Paul Williams

Meredith Willson

Charles Wolcott

Albert Woodbury

Gabriel Yared (1 win)

Victor Young (1 win)

Hans Zimmer (1 win)

David Zippel

Source: The Official Academy Awards Database [1]

[edit]Other award nominees and winners

The following list includes all composers who have been nominated for one of the other major film music awards (Golden Globes, BAFTA Awards, Grammy Awards, Emmy Awards, International Film Music Critics Association), but have never been nominated for an Oscar. Winners of an Award appear in bold.

John Altman (BAFTA)

Armand Amar (IFMCA)

Benny Andersson (BAFTA)

Oscar Araujo (IFMCA)

Craig Armstrong (Globe, BAFTA, Grammy)

David Arnold (BAFTA, Grammy)

Angelo Badalamenti (Globe, BAFTA, Grammy)

Lionel Bart (Globe)

Jeff Beal (Emmy)

Christophe Beck (Emmy)

Richard Bellis (Emmy)

Howard Blake (BAFTA)

Terence Blanchard (Globe)

Pieter Bourke (Globe)

Jon Brion (Grammy)

Michael Brook (Globe)

Stephen Bruton (BAFTA)

Velton Ray Bunch (Emmy)

T-Bone Burnett (BAFTA)

Carter Burwell (Globe, BAFTA)

Sean Callery (Emmy)

Jay Chattaway (Emmy)

Eric Clapton (Grammy)

Michel Colombier (Globe, Grammy)

Ry Cooder (BAFTA)

Stewart Copeland (Globe)

Bruno Coulais (BAFTA)

Daft Punk (IFMCA)

Burkhard Dallwitz (Globe)

Carl Davis (BAFTA, Grammy)

Don Davis (Emmy)

Paco de Lucía (BAFTA)

Marius de Vries (BAFTA)

Vince DiCola (Grammy)

James Di Pasquale (Emmy)

Neil Diamond (Globe, Grammy)

Ramin Djawadi (Grammy)

Jim Dooley (Emmy)

Clint Eastwood (Globe, Grammy)

Fred Ebb (Globe)

Randy Edelman (Globe, BAFTA)

Ilan Eshkeri (IFMCA)

Harold Faltermeyer (Globe)

Allyn Ferguson (Emmy)

David Foster (Grammy)

Charles Fox (Globe, Grammy)

Benjamin Frankel (Globe)

Dominic Frontiere (Globe)

Peter Gabriel (Globe, Grammy)

Brian Gascoigne (BAFTA)

Lisa Gerrard (Globe, Grammy)

Barry Gibb (Globe)

Nick Gold (BAFTA)

Billy Goldenberg (Emmy)

Howard Goodall (Emmy)

Miles Goodman (Globe)

Ron Goodwin (Globe)

Gerald Gouriet (Globe)

Jonny Greenwood (BAFTA, Grammy)

Harry Gregson-Williams (Globe, BAFTA)

Guy Gross (BAFTA)

Christopher Gunning (BAFTA)

James Hannigan (IFMCA)

Richard Hartley (Emmy)

Knut Avenstroup Haugen (IFMCA)

Joe Hisaishi (IFMCA)

Lee Holdridge (Emmy)

Junior Homrich (BAFTA)

Nellee Hooper (BAFTA)

Nicholas Hooper (Grammy)

Richard Horowitz (Globe)

Dick Hyman (BAFTA)

Joe Jackson (Grammy)

Chaz Jankel (BAFTA)

Carl Johnson (Emmy)

Adrian Johnston (Emmy)

Trevor Jones (Globe, BAFTA)

Michael Kamen (Globe, Grammy)

John Kander (Globe, BAFTA)

Rolfe Kent (Globe)

Wojciech Kilar (BAFTA)

Kaki King (Globe)

Kitaro (Globe)

Mark Knopfler (BAFTA, Grammy)

Krzysztof Komeda (Globe)

Abel Korzeniowski (Globe, IFMCA)

Henry Krieger (BAFTA)

Robert Lane (IFMCA)

Andrew Lockington (IFMCA)

Joseph LoDuca (Emmy)

John Lurie (Grammy)

Nuno Malo (IFMCA)

Johnny Mandel (Globe)

Chuck Mangione (Globe)

Hummie Mann (Emmy)

Clint Mansell (Globe)

David Mansfield (Globe)

Wynton Marsalis (Grammy)

Peter Martin (BAFTA)

Cliff Martinez (Grammy)

Dennis McCarthy (Emmy)

Bear McCreary (IFMCA)

Joel McNeely (Emmy)

Gil Melle (Globe)

Dudley Moore (Globe)

Trevor Morris (Emmy)

Stanley Myers (BAFTA)

Lennie Niehaus (BAFTA)

Julian Nott (IFMCA)

Michael Nyman (Globe, BAFTA)

Mike Oldfield (Globe)

Riz Ortolani (Globe)

Karen Orzolek (Globe)

Larry Paxton (Globe)

James Peterson (IFMCA)

Jean-Claude Petit (BAFTA)

Barrington Pheloung (BAFTA)

Basil Poledouris (Emmy)

Jocelyn Pook (Globe)

Mike Post (Emmy)

Zbigniew Preisner (Globe)

Alan Price (Globe)

Harold Rome (Globe)

David Rose (Emmy)

Brett Rosenberg (IFMCA)

Arthur B. Rubinstein (Emmy)

Pete Rugolo (Emmy)

The RZA (BAFTA)

Arturo Sandoval (Grammy)

David Schwartz (Grammy)

Edward Shearmur (Emmy)

Kevin Shields (BAFTA)

David Shire (BAFTA)

Carlo Siliotto (Globe)

Carly Simon (BAFTA)

Morton Stevens (Emmy)

Marc Streitenfeld (BAFTA)

Marty Stuart (Globe)

Mikis Theodorakis (Globe)

Yann Tiersen (BAFTA)

Pinar Toprak (IFMCA)

Ernest Troost (Emmy)

Bjorn Ulvaeus (BAFTA)

Eddie Vedder (Globe)

Joseph Vitarelli (IFMCA)

W.G. "Snuffy" Walden (Emmy)

Don Was (BAFTA)

Norman Whitfield (Grammy)

Kristin Wilkinson (Globe)

Nancy Wilson (BAFTA)

Christopher Young (Globe)

Geoff Zanelli (Emmy)

Sources: HFPA Award Search [2], BAFTA Awards Database [3], Primetime Emmy Award Database [4], Grammy Awards Archive [5], IFMCA Awards Archive [6]

[edit]Box office champions

The following list includes all composers who have scored one of the 100 Highest Grossing Films of All Time, but have never been nominated for a major award (Oscar, Golden Globe etc.)

William Alwyn – Swiss Family Robinson (1960)

Klaus Badelt – Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)

Tyler Bates – 300 (2007)

David Buttolph – House of Wax (1953)

George S. Clinton – Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002)

Brad Fiedel – Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

Steve Jablonsky – Transformers (2007), Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)

Alexander Janko – My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002)

Bill Justis – Smokey and the Bandit (1977)

Harald Kloser – The Day After Tomorrow (2004), 2012 (2009)

Christopher Lennertz – Alvin and the Chipmunks (2007)

Mark Mancina – Twister (1996)

John Ottman – X2: X-Men United (2003)

Heitor Pereira – Despicable Me (2010)

Trevor Rabin – Armageddon (1998), National Treasure: Book of Secrets (2007)

William Ross – Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002)

Pharrell Williams – Despicable Me (2010)

Chris Wilson – My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002)

Source: Box Office Mojo – All-Time Domestic Box Office Grosses [7], All-Time Domestic Box Office Grosses Adjusted for Inflation [8], All-Time Worldwide Box Office Grosses [9]

[edit]Production music

Main article: Production music

Many companies such as Associated Production Music and Extreme Music provide music to various film, TV and commercial projects for a fee. Sometimes called library music, the music is owned by production music libraries and licensed to customers for use in film, television, radio and other media. Unlike popular and classical music publishers, who typically own less than 50 percent of the copyright in a composition, music production libraries own all of the copyrights of their music, meaning that it can be licensed without seeking the composer's permission, as is necessary in licensing music from normal publishers. This is because virtually all music created for music libraries is done on a work for hire basis.[citation needed] Production music is therefore a very convenient medium for media producers — they can be assured that they will be able to license any piece of music in the library at a reasonable rate.

Production music libraries will typically offer a broad range of musical styles and genres, enabling producers and editors to find much of what they need in the same library. Music libraries vary in size from a few hundred tracks up to many thousands. The first production music library was setup by De Wolfe in 1927 with the advent of sound in film, the company originally scored music for use in silent film.[23] Another music library was set up by Ralph Hawkes of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers in the 1930s.[24] APM, the largest US library, has over 250,000 tracks.[25]

[edit]See also

film portal

AFI's 100 Years of Film Scores

Filmi, Bollywood film music

List of film score composers

Musivisual Language

[edit]Film music organizations

ASCAP - Performing rights organization

BMI - Performing rights organization

Film Musicians Secondary Markets Fund

Society of Composers and Lyricists

[edit]Film music review sites

Filmtracks.com

SoundtrackNet

[edit]Independent specialist original soundtrack recording labels

1M1 Records

Digitmovies AE

Film Score Monthly

Intrada Records

La-La Land Records

Milan Records

MovieScore Media

Perseverance Records

Prometheus Records

Trunk Records

Varèse Sarabande

[edit]Journals

Film Score Monthly

[edit]References

^ Savage, Mark. "Where Are the New Movie Themes?" BBC, 28 July 2008.

^ Rockwell, John (21 May 1978). "When the Soundtrack Makes the Film". The New York Times. Retrieved 2010-08-10.

^ "Bebe Barron: Co-composer of the first electronic film score, for 'Forbidden Planet'". The Independent (London). 8 May 2008. Retrieved 2 May 2010.

^ Film scoring

^ The Creators

^ SoundtrackNet: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly Soundtrack

^ We Built Our Own World: Hans Zimmer and the Music of 'Inception'

^ TIMBT: Gustavo Santolalla interview

^ Kompanek, Sonny. From Score To Screen: Sequencers, Scores And Second Thoughts: The New Film Scoring Process. Schirmer Trade Books, 2004. ISBN 978-0825673085

^ Home Recording Glossary: Click Track

^ George Burt, The art of film music, Northeastern University Press

^ 2001 A Space Odyssey - Original soundtrack by Alex North, commissioned but unused by Stanley Kubrick, conducted by Jerry Goldsmith

^ SoundtrackNet: Torn Curtain Soundtrack

^ SoundtrackNet: Article - Gabriel Yared's Troy

^ Music on Film:: News:: Article in Variety about James Newton Howard's King Kong score

^ The Bourne Identity

^ leitmotif - Definition from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

^ http://www.trell.org/wagner/starwars.html

^ About The Film Music Society

^ The Functions of Film Music

^ Fairylogue was released 24 September 1908; Assassinat was released 17 November 1908

^ a b Cooke, Mervyn (2008). A History of Film Music. New York: Cambridge University Press.[citation needed]

^ De Wolfe, Warren (1988). de wolfe millennium catalogue. London: De Wolfe Music.

^ Wallace, Helen (2007). Boosey & Hawkes The Publishing Story. London: B&H London. ISBN 9780851625140.[citation needed]

^ "PRWeb July 2007". Retrieved 2007-07-20.

[edit]Further reading

Andersen, Martin Stig. “Electroacoustic Sound and Audiovisual Structure in Film.” eContact! 12.4 — Perspectives on the Electroacoustic Work / Perspectives sur l’œuvre électroacoustique (August 2010). Montréal: CEC.

Elal, Sammy and Kristian Dupont (Eds.). “The Essentials of Scoring Film.” Minimum Noise. Copenhagen, Denmark.

Various contributors [wiki]. “Films with Significant Electroacoustic Content.” eContact! 8.4 — Ressources éducatives / Educational Resources (September 2006). Montréal: CEC.

[edit]External links

Film music organizations

Film Music Society

International Film Music Critics Association

Film music review sites

Cinemanotes (cinemanotes.com)

cinemusic (cinemusic.net)

Film Music Theory (filmsound.org)

MusicWeb International: Film Music on the Web (site closed in December 2006 and remains for archive purposes only)

MainTitles (maintitles.net)

Movie Music UK (moviemusicuk.us)

Movie Wave (movie-wave.net )

ScoreNotes (scorenotes.com)

Journals (online and print)

Film Music Magazine

Film Music Review

The Journal of Film Music

(French) UnderScores : le magazine de la musique de film

[hide]v · d · eFilmmaking

Development

Film finance • Film budgeting

Pre-production

Film treatment • Scriptment • Screenplay • Breaking down the script • Script breakdown • Step outline • Storyboard • Production board • Production strip • Day Out of Days • Production schedule • One liner schedule • Shooting schedule

Production

Cinematography • Principal photography • Videography • Shooting script • Film inventory report • Daily call sheet • Production report • Daily production report • Daily progress report • Daily editor log • Sound report • Cost report

Post-production

Film editing • Re-recording • Sync sound • Soundtrack • Music • Special effect (Sound effect • Visual effects) • Negative cost

Distribution

Distribution • Film release (Wide • Limited • Delayed) • Roadshow

Others

Filmography • Guerrilla filmmaking

See also

Film • Film crew • Filmmaking • Hook (filmmaking) • Pitch (filmmaking) • Post-production • Pre-production • Screenwriting • Spec script

Categories: Film scores | Album types

Log in / create accountArticleDiscussionReadEditView history

Main page

Contents

Featured content

Current events

Random article

Donate to Wikipedia

Interaction

Help

About Wikipedia

Community portal

Recent changes

Contact Wikipedia

Toolbox

Print/export

Languages

Català

Česky

Dansk

Deutsch

Eesti

Español

Esperanto

Français

Hrvatski

Kiswahili

Nederlands

日本語

Norsk (bokmål)

Polski

Suomi

Svenska

中文

This page was last modified on 17 March 2011 at 09:26.

Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. See Terms of Use for details.

Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.

Contact us

Privacy policyAbout WikipediaDisclaimers


Flash website powered by Moto CMS