the Musical Friend

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When you are the ‘musical friend’ you end up collecting a lot of unexpected musical instruments. A family member comes back from an exotic holiday with gifts of interesting foods and wines for everyone, except of course they also brought back a supposedly authentic traditional hand drum – which is given to the musical friend. Even at christams, a peculiarly shaped percussion instrument most probably intended for age 3-5 makes a wonderful present for the musical friend.

So whilst the quality of my collection of music instruments might be quite varied, I am very grateful to be the musical friend, and especially so when a house-hold clear-out yields an unexpected banjo!

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So far I’ve spent a few minutes of youtube learning how to maintain the thing, and a few clicks on ebay finding some strings, and before too long should be able to get her into playable shape. Then all I’ll need to do is carry out the final duty of the musical friend in such situations, which is to try and learn how to play the damn thing.

Twelve-Tone Funk and Pelham One Two Three

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One of my favourite musical discoveries of the last few months is the score to the 1970s film The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. I’ve not actually seen the film, but the title music alone is enough to earn it a high rank on my to-watch list (needless to say, the same is not true of the 2009 remake….)

The score for the film was largely written for jazz and funk influenced Big Band orchestra, but using a tone row – part of an avant-garde compositional method developed by Arnold Schoenberg in the 1920s. When I first heard this piece I wasn’t quite sure what I’d heard so sat down to write out the main brass melody and confirmed that it was based on a tone row.

Pelham-12ToneRow

The 12-tone technique requires choosing a list of all the 12 different notes that exist in the western musical scale, and writing them in that specific order to create your tone row. Then when you come to write your music, you can only use the notes from the tone row in that order – so you can have any rhythms, phrasing, articulations, choice of instruments, but you can’t re-play a C# if it was played a few notes back, you’ll have to let all the other notes be played until its turn comes again1 (for an example of 12tone music: click)

David Shire’s score to the Taking of Pelham One Two Three is by no means a 12tone piece however. The tone row is very effectively constructed in blocks of 3notes, and created entirely with intervals of semitones and minor 3rds (and their inversions). But the music he wrote with it is firmly rooted in conventional tonality we’d recognise from funk and jazz, with the repeating bass riff that kicks in right from the beginning of the video above.

Pelham-Score

For the music geek in me, I just thought it was pretty cool how this score was constructed. I’m sure from David Shire’s point of view using this technique to write a funk score for an action film was a way of organising the chaos, and making some really interesting music that pushed further than using conventional jazz/blues scales without becoming completely anarchic.

  1. of course not everyone follows these rules dogmaticcally, it’s just that the explanation I gave here is the easiest way to explain it. Schoenberg himself was pretty terrible at writing music that sticks to these principles, and he was somewhat turned upon by his successors as his methods were expanded into the serialism which came to dominated a certain kind of contemporary western classical music for a few decades [↩]

3 Feb 2013, Film Music Leftovers, BBC iplayer,

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The award winning short film Buddah Boy received a repeat broadcast last week on the BBC HD channel and so is once again available to watch online via the wonder of the BBC iplayer: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01p680n/Made_in_Wales_Series_4_Buddha_Boy/

Also, the other day I was contemplating all the music I’d written for projects during 2012 that was never used. This kind of thing happens all the time in writing for film and other media. Sometimes the music doesn’t quite fit the scene and you have to re-write; sometimes the music doesn’t work so you just have to throw it away completely and start again; sometimes you write a great piece of music that fits perfectly with a scene only to find the entire scene gets cut from the film…

So I quickly went through a few old folders and compiled a collection of leftover bits of music from projects I’d worked on throughout 2012. So here’s a years worth of work that ended up on the sound cutting room floor.

5 Jan 2013, Plas Dinam, Bubbles

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I recently wrote a short piece of music for a promo video for Plas Dinam, a lovely country house in Mid-Wales. You can see the video on their homepage here.

I was lucky enough to spend a few days at Plas Dinam some years ago when we were shooting there for a short film called Bubbles. There were several scenes in which one character played the cello and piano. This meant the whole score was planned out in pre-production, and most of the music already written by the time we started shooting. I was needed on set to help work with the actor and cellist/body-double to make sure the scenes were authentic and believable, and it was a really fun experience. You can see the trailer for Bubbles here.

Buddha Boy and Made In Wales Awards

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I recently went to a premier event at the Wales Millennium Centre for a short film I composed for called Buddha Boy. The film is one of six shorts that were made for a BBC series called Made In Wales, in partnership with It’s My Shout – an organisation that selects emerging talent from across Wales to help them progress in their careers. At this event they premiered each of the films and then had an awards ceremony afterwards as well.

Buddha Boy managed to win the Best Film award, as well as our director Sarah Bickerton picking up the award for Best Director. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to recreate last year’s success with music, as the Best Composition award this year quite deservedly went to Joseph Roberts for The Mob – a film which relied heavily on music, not least for its large musical show-stopper at the end, which must have been very work intensive.

The Made In Wales series began being broadcast last Thursday and will now continue weekly. Buddha Boy will be broadcast on Thursday 29th Nov, at 11.20pm on BBC2 Wales. All the films really were great, and  the quality of this series really does seem to grow year on year. They’ll be available on BBC iplayer as well, and are all worth checking out.

21st October 2012, Hotel promos

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Earlier in the year I was commissioned to write some music for a series of short hotel promos being made by the design film company. Their website went public a little while ago so I thought I’d share one of the videos here.

All the other videos in this series can be found on the design film company’s website here.

29th September 2012, Buddha Boy, Film Festivals,

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(Photograph Copyright Mei Lewis @ Mission Photographic)

I’ve recently been finishing work on a 10minute short film called Buddha Boy. It’s being made by the production company It’s My Shout in partnership with BBC Wales. This music clip below is an early sketch that didn’t make it into the final film but gives a feel for the overall score.

Lots of behind the scenes pictures have recently been uploaded to facebook, you can check them out here. The film will be broadcast later in the year on BBC2 as part of this year’s Made in Wales series. I worked on that series last year as well for the film LoveStruck (more info about that here).

One year on LoveStruck is still doing quite well though. As well as being screened in the film festivals in Berlin and Sydney mentioned in my last post, it’s also been accepted into the Screen Stockport Film Festival, and the Colchester Film Festival, both on next month.

And finally Queensbury Rules also got another nominations, for the Van d’Or awards as part of the Cannes in a Van indie festival.

28th Aug 2012, BBC’s New Studios, Film Festivals, Online Journals

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Hi, hope everyones doing well, just a brief update post.

I’m working on a few different things at the moment. Last month I got to have a look around the the BBC’s new Roath Lock studios too, following a little meeting we had there in preparation for an upcoming project.

A film I worked on a year or so ago called Queensbury Rules got into the Portobello Film Festival. It’ll be screened on Sunday 2nd September. And LoveStruck was selected for the Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin taking place in October, as well as the Auburn International Film Festival for Children and Young Adults in Sydney Australia in September.

I stumbled across interiorsjournal the other day. It’s a little online journal which publishes mini essays on films with particular focus on the layout of a given scene.

I was also quite amused by this. It’s a software instrument that replicates a prepared piano, which was co-created by IRCAM. I’m sure it would give lots of intuitive ways to create interesting sounds, but if I had that kind of money to spare I’d be far more inclined to just spend it on a battered old piano on gumtree….

Computers and Composers

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So, my computer died…

My MacBookPro was a few years old, but was still the main machine I used for music production. And so after limited wallowing in indecision and furtive glances at the bank balance, I had to give in and just buy a new computer.

On the day my new MacBook arrived I also happened to get a call from a producer who needed some music done with only a few days notice for a short promo. I felt I could hardly turn down the job, since, well, 1) it was shot by Ryan Owen Eddleston, a great cardiff filmmaker I’ve known of, but never yet worked with, and 2) I’m not really at a stage in my life where I can turn away paid work.

So, great. New computer. New project to work on. All I had to do was get my computer up and running. It was all perfectly fine and stress free until I came to install Logic (my music production application of choice) only to find it was not compatible with my new machine… For some reason the new apple computer, couldn’t cope with apple software that was a couple years old…. Now, I’ve managed to stop myself turning this blogpost into a rant, appeasing myself by simply including a page here, about what the technical issue was and how I (eventually) got around it. Needless to say, once again I am in the debt of the mass of knowledge that is the internet.

So in the end everything worked out fine. My new computer was all up to speed, and I got the the short promo music finished in good time.

But I did learn something from this experience. Whilst stressing in the limbo of not having a functioning computer, I got bogged down worrying about how I’d be able record and edit the music. I felt there wasn’t much I could do without the tools I rely on so regularly. But it was at this point I realised that I was thinking about it all wrong. A composer isn’t just a guy who’s really good at using some music software. It’s the lifetime of studying, listening and writing music that make me a composer. Before I’d even accepted the promo job I had briefly contemplated all the less favourable practical backup plans I could call on to get a piece of music recorded and presented to the film editor in time. The technology we use today will be out of date in a few years, and within a decade or two will be obsolete. And when your stressing out about your computer, it’s realisations like these that make you grateful for what your skills really are. (… although I’m so so so relieved to have a working computer again….. )