Wow.  Hans Zimmer has really outdone himself here.  Inception is a score that grabs your attention and rarely lets go.  Even the moments when it is a bit slower managed to keep my interest.  The overall tone of the score itself is classic Zimmer, though I can hear  some other influences in it.  Depsite all of this, the score is also very original and quite a trip from beginning to end.

The album itself is kind of weird in a few ways.  It begins with two fairly short tracks that feed into track three, which is where things really take off.  But these opening three tracks also sound like they’re one longer track and if you aren’t paying attention, you’ll probably not really notice until track three really kicks off and you just have to check the track name (“Dream is Collapsing” if you’re interested).  This is the track where the giant trombone/french horn/whatever-the-hell really kicks in.  This sound was featured in the film trailers even as early as last summer, which is part of what I think helped this score achive what it as.  According to interviews and such, Zimmer was working on this while Nolan was shooting (not unlike what they did for The Dark Knight).  This kind of lead time has helped him to really craft a unique sound for the score.

That being said, there are obivous things that will remind a listener of The Dark Knight, and the very atmospheric nature of many of the cues also remind me of David Julyan’s work on Insomnia and The Prestige…especially The Prestige.  But Zimmer takes that atmosphere and turns it into something much more.  It breathes and moves though remaining in a sort of stasis.  The guitar work, played by former Smiths member Johnny Marr, help the score find a groove that, especially in track 3, it rarely wants to shake.  As I mentioned to a friend, I predict that “Dream is Collapsing” is going to be heard in many, many film trailers in the coming years.

The two longer tracks on the album, “Old Souls” and “Waiting for a Train,” are also worthy of mention.  “Old Souls,” track 5, is almost pure atmosphere, featuring the piano theme (introduced straight away on the first track), over synth pads.  The track doesn’t really waver from this theme and only varies instrumentation and adds in some other sounds.  But despite this, Zimmer does such a good job of adding in new sounds to interest the ear that one doesn’t really notice that the track is nearly eight minutes long.

“Waiting for a Train” starts out much like “Old Souls,” the music existing in some sort of otherworldy ether, and while it also mediates on the same piano motive (this time starting out in guitar) it also explores some other material, and the distinctive trombone/french horn/whatever-the-hell call is not present in it’s natural state until the end (though the arguement could be made that some of the string swells are variations).  Though, I’d really like to know what the French song is doing in it about 3 minutes before the end.  Guess that is something the film can answer.

If there is a cue that I don’t truly care for, it’s “Mombasa.”  It’s a prototypical Zimmer action cue, and while it’s not terrible, it varies in many ways from the overall tone of the album that it kind of sticks out like [insert metaphor here]. 

Anyway, there is more I could say, but I want to see the film first before I attempt a more in-depth analysis.  Bottom line, though, this is my new frontrunner in the Oscar race.

As mentioned earlier, there have been two recent Star Trek score releases that feature expanded/complete scores.  For any fan of Trek and film music, it has indeed been a good year, a good few years in fact considering last year’s release of the complete Wrath of Khan score, and this year we have James Horner’s companion piece in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and a deluxe/complete edition of Michael Giacchino’s score for last years Star Trek reboot.  I’ll offer here a few thoughts on each release, but I can tell you right now that both of these come with my highest recommendation.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock – James Horner:  Many fans find this film troubling and hard to quantify.  It’s nowhere near as bad as Trek V, nor as slow-moving, “boring,” or esoteric as The Motion Picture (though I have always felt that MP has been misjudged and misunderstood), but at the same time The Search for Spock is nowhere near as good as the films that came before or after it, or Star Trek VI.  It is merely mediocre Trek.  For these and other reason, the score has always been judged similarly.  It builds on many of the themes and sounds that Horner established for the Trek universe in Wrath of Khan, but without many of the intense battle sequences found in that film, it lacks some of the excitement and punch of the previous score.  It has the same main theme and also features the bowed vibraphone sound that characterized Spock, and also features a new theme for the Klingon villains, and even though that theme shares similar qualities to Goldsmith’s klingon theme from Motion Picture, it is nowhere near the same level.  There is also a new theme for the Genesis planet that is at the heart of the plot of III, but truly the stand out track on this album is the nearly nine minute cue “Stealing the Enterprise.”  This cue ebbs and flows along with the action, shifting tone as the scenes changes from the Enterprise bridge to that of the pursuing Excelsior.  Also included in the set is a ten-minute cue of source music that was used in the bar scene when Dr. McCoy is trying to get a ship to take him to Genesis.  For this, as explained in the always wonderful Film Score Monthly liner notes (some twenty pages), Horner took three songs from the Paramount library and arranged them into bar muzak.  A little unnecessary, but Trek fans do tend to be completests.  Also in the set is a second disc featuring the original score album, which at times differs from what was used in the film and is found on the first disc.  It is an over-the-top, complete set that should find its way onto your score shelf.  What I really hope that this combined with last year’s Khan release indicates that FSM will be working to release all of the Trek scores in a complete/expanded edition, especially Star Trek VI and all of Goldsmith’s scores.

Star Trek: The Deluxe Edition – Michael Giacchino: Last year’s release of Giacchino’s Trek score by Varese Sarabande was at the same time a good release but also hard to get a handle on, and with this new release, I finally understand why I was a bit off-put by it: the music on the original release was too alike.  It featured all the major themes of the score, but there wasn’t enough diversity in tone, it was mainly action music and there was no push and pull to the disc.  This has all been corrected in this release.  Featuring two-discs of music from the film and presented in order, you’ll find all the tracks from the first album, including some additional music on those tracks, and all the music that was missing.  It not only gives a better feel for the score as a whole, it also further demonstrates something I commented on in my original review: not only was he purposely evoking the sound of the original series, but he was also pulling from the scores of Horner and Goldsmith (though more Horner in my opinion).  As I also pointed out in the earlier review, the track “That New Car Smell” is especially pulling from the Horner sound, as are many new tracks featured on this release.  To try and catalogue all of these and how Giacchino pulls from the earlier scores, would be quite an undertaking, but maybe someday when I have time I’ll take a stab at it.  But I’ll say this, Giacchino truly is a master of imitating period styles and synthesizing them into his own idiom.  In same ways, he reminds me of what Michael Kamen did in his Die Hard scores by interpolating a famous musical theme into the sonic fabric of the score.  For this release, we also see that Giacchino continues his tradition of humorous cue titles, which I know not everyone likes, but I find amusing and I believe fits not only his personality, but also that of much of his music.  If there is a complaint with this new set, it is two-fold, and they both have to do with packaging.  First, the booklet:  it features the obligatory write-up from the director J.J. Abrams that I assume was part of the original release (I got mine off iTunes so I wouldn’t know), and a new short piece from the founder of the original Star Trek fan magazine.  Both are well and good, but neither really delivers any real information on what went into the score itself.  And that is my big disappointment, in a twenty-some-odd page booklet, there are the two short “essays,” a personnel list for the orchestra, credits, track listing, and then pages and pages of pictures.  Seriously, we’re music fans, give us music content.  Oh well.  Secondly, the entire thing is contained not in a standard two disc case, but rather an oversized digipack that will not fit well on your standard DVD shelf.  See the picture below:

It’s a bit taller than the standard case and quite a bit longer so that it’ll most likely stick off the end of your shelf.  It’s like some of the annoying DVD packaging that has come out in recent years.  I don’t want bells and whistles in my package, I want content!  Anyway, despite the lack of truly informative content in the package and the annoying size and shape of the case, I still recommend this set to fans as it ill help to get a good feel for the scope of Giacchino’s score.

Well that’s about it for now, my laundry should almost be done so I better get to folding.  See you all a bit later this week.

So you’ve been asking yourself what you should go see this holiday weekend.  Well if the idiots outside my window who have been setting off firecrackers and other explosive devices for the last MONTH are any indication, then it’s probably a nice bar-b-que and a fireworks show.  But should your plans also take you to the neighborhood cineplex, then perhaps I could help guide you…aurally speaking at least.  For today, I shall review James Horner’s The Karate Kid score and James Newton Howard’s latest efforts to salvage a terrible film from M. Night Shyamalan, The Last Airbender.

It’s a little bit funny that these films have so much in common: both are big screen remakes/adaptations of previously existing material, both deal with the martial arts in some capacity, and both have composers with James as a first name.  But where The Karate Kid is an enjoyable and entirely watchable film featuring a stellar performance from a young actor, The Last Airbender is nigh unwatchable with a terrible script that even a cast made up of all-star child actors from days gone by couldn’t save.  Seriously, I felt bad for the actors trying to deliver some of their lines with a straight face, like I felt bad for the actors in the Star Wars prequels.  In fact, if there was an award for worst script to a summer tent pole film ever, I think The Last Airbender and Star Wars – Episode II: Attack of the Clones might actually tie.  Oh wait, I forgot the sand speech in Clones.  Okay Lucas, looks like you win again.

But enough about bad scripts, if there was an area where Airbender actually somewhat beats Karate Kid it is in the music department.  Though, I do find both scores enjoyable and both have been in heavy rotation on my iPod for the past few weeks.  So let’s go to the digital tape.

The Karate Kid – Horner’s score here is not much of a stretch for James.  The opening track on the album, “Leaving Detroit,” will evoke memories of classic Horner with its lone trumpet and piano based sound.  It’s wistful and sad, though without falling into depression and melancholy.  And for most of the score, Horner never really lets one forget that it is a Horner score, his fingerprints are all over it, though mostly in a good way.  His tone matches the film well, though there are a few odd moments.  The track “Backstreet Beating” sounds like it was stolen from an 1990s Hans Zimmer score with copious electronics (seriously, think Crimson Tide, but not as good), and the tournament montage track, “Tournament Time,” sounds at times like it was made from some leftovers of Zimmer/Newton Howard’s efforts for the Batman films – especially the first minute or so.  But where Horner does shine in this score is when he beautifully blends traditional Chinese instruments into his orchestral textures.  Tracks like “Journey to the Spiritual Mountain” and “From Master to Student to Master” show Horner in careful control of his orchestral timbres (they are also the two longest cuts on the album).  The last cue, “Final Contest,” is a great ending track and builds to the final moment where our valiant hero wins the tournament.  Listening to the track on its own, you would almost think that two large armies were about to square off, Horner plays it up the epic and it works.  Having seen both this film and the original with score by Bill Conti, I much prefer Horner’s efforts.  In the original I find Conti’s panpipes overwhelming and somewhat annoying.  And, I know it was 80s, okay, but how many bad 80s montage songs could you find in one film, seriously?  Luckily, for us, in the remake the director choice to forego montage songs and let Horner play the montages instrumentally.  And while I think plotwise the original was a bit more solid, this new remake is enjoyable on its own and features a great Horner score.  It’s hard to believe that this is a score from the same person that I was so incensed by back in December for what I still feel was some blatant cultural insensitivity in his Avatar score.  And speaking of the Avatar, but not blue people, but rather Aang, let us turn our critical eye to… 

The Last Airbender – Many people say that a large part of what makes the films of Alfred Hitchcock work so well is the music of Bernard Hermann, and while I haven’t seen enough Hitchcock films to say that with any certainty, I will concede this fact for now and use it as a basis for my critique that follows.  Like Hitchcock, Shyamalan has worked with largely with one composer throughout his film tenure.  For Shyamalan, it was only his first two films that were not scored by James Newton Howard.  But where some scholars think that Psycho would have only been a mediocre film without Hermann, I doubt that even Bernard could have saved The Last Airbender.  And while Newton Howard is not Hermann, he did craft a great score here and I think it was just about the only thing that kept me from walking out of the theatre in the first ten minutes…and I sat through Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (granted, I was a teenager at the time, but that’s not an excuse).  Now, as with Hitchcock, I have not seen many of Shyamalan’s film, and Last Airbender is the first time I had seen one of his films since I saw Signs in the theatre. But despite the film, Newton Howard has created an effective score here (though, he couldn’t help but hear some borrowing a bit from David Arnold in a few places, in my opinion).  I can’t be sure, but I think one of the ways he approached this score was to create a different orchestral theme for each of the four elements.  The last track on the album, “Flow Like Water,” feature what I think is, surprise surprise, the water theme.  It would take more viewings to confirm this, but since in the Avatar world the cultures are so linked with the elements that they can command, it would only seem like a logical way to approach the score.  And should they make the second and third films of the series, it would provide some ready material for them.  Now, since seeing the film, I have been acquainting myself with the original cartoon series.  The series is American made, but borrows heavily on the Japanese style of anime.  Its score feature copious amounts of traditional Asian instruments, helping to establish the culture of the world, and while Newton Howard uses some of the same instruments, his score is pervasively Western in its orientation.  Besides “Flow Like Water,” stand out tracks include the album opening “Airbender Suite” and “Journey to the Northern Water Tribe” (which also features that water theme).  I don’t know what else I can say, really, without trashing the film itself further.  Check out the score, though, it is one of the better ones this year so far.

Now speaking of the original cartoon, watch out next week for when FSFT5 takes on animated shows and their scores.

Finally, I’ve also been listening recently to Michael Giacchino’s Earth Days score.  This documentary came out last summer and was also shown on PBS.  The score is nothing truly special, but if you enjoy his work, especially many of his best moments on Lost, you should download it from iTunes.  Well that’s all for now.  Check in a bit later this weekend for my reivew of Star Trek: The Deluxe Edition and the expanded Star Trek III: The Search for Spock release from Film Score Monthly.

I’m refraining from squealing with joy, but I just got an order in from SAE…and…well…the picture below speaks for itself:

The new deluxe edition of Giacchino’s Star Trek, the expanded Star Trek III release that was just put out a few weeks ago, and the 20th anniversary edition of Goldsmith’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture.  I’ll hopefully have a review of the first two up sometime this weekend, along with a new Film Score Friday Top 5 that is actually about…wait for it…film music.  Hopefully, I might also have some short reviews for James Horner’s Karate Kid score along with James Newton Howard’s Last Airbender efforts (though I’m not holding out hope for the Airbender film itself as Ebert has already given it 1/2 a star).  That is all for now, be on the look out this extended Fourth of July weekend for more excitement from The Temp Track.

Happy June, fellow travellers.  Here atop Temp Track Plaza in the American West the mercury has been steadily rising and once again makes me long for the days when I could afford that greatest of all sins: central air.  Alas, the life of a PhD student does not pay for such luxuries.  But one of the few pleasures I can afford is that of film, and we are now knee-deep into the Summer 2010 film season.  The next film I’m really excited about this summer doesn’t come out until July though, and you readers have probably already figured out what film I’m talking out.  Yes, it’s the seventh film from director Christopher Nolan: Inception.  If you have somehow managed to miss the trailers and such for the film, check them out here at the film’s website.

What I wish to discuss here is a bit about the films of Nolan and the music that accompanies them.  In the little over a decade of Nolan’s professional career, he has made 6 films using basically two composers (technically three, but since Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard worked on the same films, I’m counting them as one).  Wrapped up with this whole discussion is Nolan’s shift from composer David Julyan, with whom he worked with on 4 of his 6 films, to Hans Zimmer and Remote Control Productions (where James Newton Howard sometimes  works it appears) for the Batman films and the upcoming Inception (which lists only Zimmer on the credits).  I know many people in the film music community have varying and strong opinions about Zimmer and Remote Control, almost as divisive as opinions on James Horner, but rather than letting this sink to the level of modern political discourse, I would ask that we strive to keep a civil tone.

But before I tread into that minefield, lets first discuss Nolan and his films.  His filmography is as follows: Following (1998), Memento (2000), Insomnia (2002), Batman Begins (2005), The Prestige (2006), The Dark Knight (2008), and the forthcoming Inception (2010).  Setting aside music for a moment, there is a remarkable consistency in quality and style among these films.  Beginning with Memento, Nolan has always worked with cinematographer Wally Pfister (nominated for an Oscar for each of the last three released films), and with the exception of Insomnia, Nolan himself has always had a hand in writing the scripts (many times along with brother Jonathan Nolan).  Further, all of his films were produced by his wife Emma Thomas.  What is also very evident watching the films is a very consistent visual style starting with Insomnia of long shots and aerial photography that began with his working with a large enough budget to afford such things.  Along with this is what I can best describe as a coldness, an emotional distance between camera and subject.  And it is into this distance the music falls.

David Julyan first teamed up with Nolan prior to Following for some of Nolan’s short films made during and after college in London.  His style is largely ambient type tracks using a mixture of electronics and strings (either synth or live), and sometimes other orchestral sounds.  In many ways, the early film scores remind me of Mike Post-esque Law and Order score – dark and moody.  But I would make a similar argument about Julyan that I do about Nolan, that everything took a leap forward with Insomnia.  For Nolan, he retained much of his trademark storytelling techniques – non-linear, puzzle like flashes or flashbacks that keep a viewer disoriented and guessing – but adding many more to the arsenal that come with a larger budget and studio backing.  Similar with Julyan, with more money at his disposal not only did his use of electronics and live instruments become greater, but his compositional technique flourished with said greater freedom. Whereas Following and Memento featured very sparse scoring (like I said earlier, akin to an episode of Law and Order), with Insomnia Julyan wrote longer cues that attempted to fill in the distance between camera and subject with the psychological tension that the film demanded of every sunlinght-drenched neo-noir shot.  The film’s tone is as dark as the music, but since the film is set in northern Alaska where during some seasons the sun never sets, the film itself is in perpetual daylight (a key device in both Nolan’s 2002 film and the 1997 Norwegian film on which it is based).  The juxtaposition of the two is part what makes the film unsettling to a viewer.

Skipping over Batman Begins for just a moment, let’s consider Julyan fourth and so far last collaboration with Nolan, The Prestige.  Many have found this a hard score to get at because it sort of recedes into the background of the film for much of the time.  It lacks any of the activity found at times in Insomnia and is very much the “musical wallpaper” that so many deride film music to be.  Listening to the score on its own illuminates that most of the time the score is long, held chords with movement occasionally happening.  Sparse, stark, and dark.  Just like Insomnia.  Part of this I do attribute to Julyan, but I also think that it is also, partially, what Nolan wants.  The music very much fits the aesthetic distance between camera and subject that I so noted earlier.  And if you had asked me a few years ago what I thought about this score, I might have said that it worked in the film, but when divorced from the visual, it doesn’t hold up.  This feeling is still true to some extent, but in the intervening years, I have developed a greater appreciation for this ambient type of scoring that at times blurs the line between music and sound design.

Take the cue “The Transported Man” for instance, which just popped up in my iTunes (YouTube version here).  The cue begins with what sounds like an orchestra tuning in, but the clusters soon coalesce then fade away into a slow-moving cue that has a low percussive throb mixed with sustained strings and other sounds mixed it.  It’s incredibly dense music that only sounds simple on the surface.  Yes, the music may disappear for a viewer of the film, just like a slight-of-hand magic trick, but could almost be more of a case of, to paraphrase The Usual Suspects, “the greatest trick [Julyan] ever pulled was convincing the world [his music doesn’t] exist.”  If there is a ill-word to be uttered here, it is that, at times, the scores for Insomnia and The Prestige sound too much alike.

So now let us turn to Nolan’s big-budget blockbusters, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight (which will hopefully be followed in 2012 by Nolan’s third and final Batman film).  As mentioned above, these scores are done with Hans Zimmer and his Remote Control Productions (aka Team Zimmer, a phrase coined by a good friend of mine), and as mentioned elsewhere on this blog, are billed as a collaboration between Zimmer and sometimes Controlee James Newton Howard (from what I can find on the interwebs using the Google, the exact roster of composers at Remote Control is hard to pin down).  In many ways, it is obvious that the static, more ambient music of Julyan would not be a good fit for a summer action film such as that the Batman films would be, but at the same time, Zimmer/Howard composed a score that at times shares characteristics with Julyan previous work for Nolan.

Examine the opening cue on the Batman Begins score album, ‘Vespertilio.’  It begins with some ambient like effects that are meant to mimic the sound of a large bat flapping his wings and then moves into what we can identify as the Batman theme: the active string motor underneath with large brass chords sweeping up and down slowly.  If we were to take out the active motor, it would not be unlike something Julyan might write (we might also have the turn down the volume on the brass, but the principal remains).  Both Zimmer/Howard and Julyan’s scoring are athematic in a traditional sense, their scores are less melodically based and more harmonic, but if one listens closely and enough times, melodic themes to begin to emerge, such as Batman and the Joker, a love theme, etc.  This is all to say that despite the change in composers, there are aesthetic continuities between the films, and the differences can be ascribed to, rather than a change in composer, the differences between an intimate psychological neo-noir film like Memento or The Prestige and a summer action (albeit also psychological and noir-ish) film like the Batman films.  Throughout his films, Nolan has a certain type of music that he feels fits his visual language well.

Could Julyan have scored the Batman films effectively?  Maybe, but judging from his work on The Descent, I think that Zimmer/Howard were a much better fit for a more complex scoring project.  But what I’m arguing here remains, that Nolan has a certain sound for his films that he wants that fits with what he and Wally Pfister are creating on-screen.  Think of the opening sequence of The Dark Knight.  The long helicopter shots of Gotham City (really Chicago), shot in such a way to really be any city.  There is a certain feeling to these shots, that distance I’m talking about (accentuated here by the masks worn), and the music starts very soft, in many ways silent, and it takes almost 6 minutes to build up to the moment when the Joker takes off his mask and we have the descending chord that accents the gesture.  It is a great musico-visual moment and is a reason why I love using the scene in a class context.

This is all to say that while I feel that ‘auter’ theory in film studies is a tricky thing to deal with for students of film music (a future blog post), the continuity between certain elements of the scores for the films of Christopher Nolan show that he has a certain sound in mind for his films that was cultivated through his work with Julyan and has transferred into his current collaboration with Zimmer and Co.  There is also a close working relationships between Nolan and his composers, evident when you watch some bonus materials on the DVD discs in which Zimmer says, in the case of The Dark Knight, he gave Nolan a large sound file full of noise and sounds to help in Nolan deciding what kind of music and feeling he wanted for the Joker.  My wish is that all directors were as aurally aware.

I’m sorry that it’s been so long, but it was a tough semester.  I was taking a film studies class in which I wrote a 25 page paper on Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel (I’ll hopefully condense it down into a blog post sometime soon) and also made a short film for an independent study in music tech and film scoring.  It’s the latter I wish to (not-so) briefly discuss today.

I am by no means a composer, never have considered myself one, and the few experiments in composing that I’ve done, while not out-and-out failures, did not encourage me to continue it.  My previous composition experience was mainly limited to assignments in various theory classes, counterpoint, and Introduction to Composition, which was one of the required classes for my BM degree.  This is all to say that I am not a composer.  But that being said, my original project idea for my film project was around a five-minute short, surely I could write between 2-5 minutes of music, right?

Well, the film turned into roughly a 17 minute short (closer to 19 with credits).

First, some background on the independent study.  Basically, I would meet once a week (twice a few times) with my advisor and we would go over the basics of some programs used in film scoring (i.e. – Logic, Pro Tools, Audacity, Reason, Garage Band, etc) and I would mess around with them, do some basic re-scoring to a selected clip (I mainly used parts of the battle sequence in Kurosawa’s Ran), and then I would meet again with my advisor and we would discuss what I did.  At the same time, I was also reading from some books and we would also discuss that.  Roughly half-way through the semester, once I had got the basics of most of these programs down – emphasis on basics – I started planning the project.  After two or so ideas that quickly spiraled into much longer and complex projects than I had time to do, I came up with a simple, easily film-able idea that also presented a variety situations to score.

Thus was born The Last Beer – a film with no real script, just loose scenarios for each scene and dialogue made up on set.

(I cannot upload video or music to this blog as I don’t want to pay the $60/year, though if you are friends with me on Facebook, you’ll find it uploaded in my videos section.)

The basic idea was to adapt the Rashomon technique of multiple, conflicting flashbacks of one central mystery.  In this case, the question of who snaked the last beer?  The film itself is in six scenes, each between 2-3 minutes long, of which three are webcam testimonials of the main characters detailing what they remember happening.  And in having these three sequences, I could try some different techniques and sounds, but the end result was slightly different in that I actually have a mostly unified score in terms of thematic material and instruments.

The actual filming only took about five hours, and then another couple of days to cut and edit the footage for a rough cut (of course, the editing process was spread out over a few weeks in reality).  After having the rough cut assembled, the first actual “scoring” was for a trailer I also edited together to an excerpt from David Arnold’s Stargate score, but for the actual score I had no illusions of duplicating his sound.  The first thing I did was pull out my bassoon and just sort of noodle around until I came up with a theme (in g minor) which I could mold my score around.  I thought about actually writing for bassoon which I could then record and integrate, but again, because of time and other limitations I decided to scrap such a plan.

From there I actually scored the film scene-by-scene, in order, using Logic Pro.  Most of the score is for piano and classical guitar, with some other guitars, bass (both electric and upright), jazz piano, and glockenspiel.  My instrument choices were mainly made using the criteria of what actually sounded good in the computer, which is why I only used strings and voice in the very last cue where I deemed it necessary for dramatic reasons.

When I actually sat down to being scoring, I felt overwhelmed quickly.  I played through the first scene a few times, playing along on piano until I hit upon the rather sparse opening of simple low piano fifths that lead into the very ending of the theme.  After searching through instrumental patches, I found that I liked the basic classical guitar sound and decided to use that for the first complete presentation of the main theme (though, there are two basic versions with slightly different rhythms used in the film), this then segues into a more raucous presentation as the main title cards come up, presented on what I call “James Bond guitar” but is called in Logic “Beatnik Guitar.”  I prefer my name.

While scoring that opening, I came up with the idea of the basic guitar loop that underpins the first full scene.  This is actually how I scored most of the film.  I would come up with a basic accompaniment that I could record once and then loop under a melody.  Sometimes the melody (usually related in some way to the main theme), would come first, but most times I would write the accompany figure first. The melody for the first scene I was quite happy with as I found it very insipid and annoying, which I thought would work well with the promise of an evening hanging out with friends.  I bring the minor mode back in, along with the main theme when one character remarks on the Rashomon poster, the plot source for the film. Following a full statement of the main theme, the insipid melody comes back in, but remains in the minor.

The three central testimonies were scored based partially on the actors themselves.  When I got to them, I had already developed a sound of sorts for the score and a few variations of the main theme.  For Bob, since the actor plays jazz bass, I decided to have a bass ostinato as the basic loop.  I then wrote a basic melodic figure that I could transpose easily up and down, much like the melodic figure from Scene II.  But as the scene moved on, I did some very basic improv and at times just used chords.  This actually led me to the way I scored Doug’s testimonial.  For some reason that I’m still not sure of, I decided to write a 3/4 base for this scene, a waltz-like accompaniment.  Over it, though, I decided to just improv in g minor.  The actor plays jazz sax and is a great improviser, unlike myself, but I felt it would be appropriate.  I recored and looped the waltz patter and then just began recording some improvs.  When I started to think I had “lost it,” I would go back to the last good point, delete what I didn’t like, and start from there.  It took about 3 or 4 times through to get a performance I liked.

For the third testimony, Steve’s, I had a tougher challenge.  During the course of filming and editing, it became somewhat clear that Steve was the heart of the film.  Originally meant to be comic relief, the actor playing him so nailed the role that he practically stole the film.  It was also around this time that I started getting ideas for a trio of films with the same characters, of which this would be part one.  And as I developed the idea in my mind, Steve became the lead character.  I knew then that the main theme I had written a few weeks prior was not just The Last Beer Theme but also Steve’s theme.  And because of this, I knew I had to try and compose a fully realized version of the theme for use during his testimony.

To accomplish this, the first thing I had to do was actually harmonize it.  When I first wrote the theme, it was just melody since I wrote it while playing bassoon.  A curious thing happened though, while the theme starts on tonic, the first down beat could not be a I chord, which made it awkward to bring in the melody since I had to plan the loop around an awkward pick up measure.  Once I had the harmonic structure done, I went about writing a counter-melody to fill in the temporal holes in the theme where there is just a held note.  From these three elements – theme, counter-melody, harmony – I then just began layering them.  Starting out very sparsely, then thickening the texture, and then thinning it back out, until only the piano, which starts the cue, remains.

The final scene was the last hurdle, then.  I first tried doing it using only loops provided in Logic, the idea being that I wanted some bigger orchestral sounds for this climatic scene, but after finishing it and viewing the film with all the music, I jettisoned the idea and started over.  I spotted the scene with three different moments for music, but I was determined to actually use strings this time, no matter how bad they sound (though I did actually use them in Steve’s cue, albeit quite softly and only for harmonic support).  For the first sequence, I decided to use a 6/8 arpeggio support figure with a mournful violin solo, to which the classical guitar is then added.  This is all to set a slightly ominous feeling leading up to the moment of discovery that there is no more beer.

That discovery is made by Meg, whose scene at the fridge is a mash-up of Peter Gunn and James Bond, or at least that was the original idea in my head.  I was messing around with bass sounds and stumbled upon one called ‘Liverpool Bass,’ which is fat sounding bass.  Playing around with figures I actually started playing the bass line from Mancini’s Peter Gunn theme and decided that was it…though not.  Instead of having a third as the first interval, I widened it to a fifth and went from there.  The guitar melody, played by my erstwhile James Bond guitar, is still derived from the ever-varying main theme, and most closely related to the violin melody heard in the previous cue.

The last cue of the film was very tricky, and is basically made up of two small sections.  The first section is a sort of conflation of Bob and Doug’s testimonial music, using a waltz rhythm basis with the bass and piano from Bob’s cue, and a melody played by glockenspiel that takes its cue from Doug’s music.  The second section is for string and chorus and is a final statement of the main theme that crescendos to a mighty g minor chord as the film fades to black.

The end credits features what I call “The Last Beer Blues” and stands apart from the rest of the score.  Originally I was going to pull a Bourne Identity and have Moby’s “Extreme Ways” but decided to go another direction just to keep clear of copyright law.  For this, I used a slow blues template in Garage Band, took out most of melodic instruments and had a friend improvise over it with an electric piano sound.  I wrote some lyrics for it, but again I didn’t have time to record vocals.  Maybe for the sequel.

I mixed the film as I composed it, and this was also quite tricky.  I was writing the score in the labs at school using Logic, but I was editing the film and doing the final mix on my PC at home using Corel Videostudio Pro X3, which only has 3 music tracks to play with.  I would export the individual tracks from Logic and take them home where I would dump them into Audacity and do a mix there.  I would then downmix that into a .wav file that I would import into Videostudio where I would do the more complex mix of making it fit with the film’s audiotrack.  I know, a rather convoluted process, but I had to work with the tech I had.

Anyway, it was a enjoyable process and as soon as I can afford to buy my own camera, and finish writing the script for Part II, I think I may just have a new hobby.  I harbor no illusions of actually becoming a filmmaker, but this, I think, can make for a fun way to keep my sanity as I work on my dissertation.  As long as it’s better than Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, I think I’ll be doing well.  That film is now my benchmark for awfulness in film.