John Altman on film composition and collaboration - Wednesday 9 December 2009

The distinguished film composer, arranger, and saxophonist, John Altman, addressed the series with a wide ranging talk touching on his work with television and film.

In film, John argued, you are a cog within a large mechanism. You have to receive and interpret instructions, which are often imprecise. For example:
‘We want something classical’.
‘We want something with jazz in’.
‘The fourth note is too green’.

Any media composer spends half their time trying to work out what such instructions mean. The degree of success interpreting such instructions ultimately makes the difference between a score’s acceptance and rejection. There continue to be very high profile examples of fully completed scores thrown out at a late stage because of such misunderstandings.

For example, Elmer Bernstein’s (1922-2004) rejected score to Gangs of New York (2002).

John showed how he is used to listening to and responding to directors. He selected, orchestrated and produced all the period music used in Titanic (1997), in response to James Cameron’s request for authenticity. This involved researching the White Star Playlist for the Titanic’s band at the Library of Congress.

John commented that when music is adopted in film it very often is purposeful. As an illustration of this he screened excerpts from his score to Hear My Song (1991), describing in detail the way he rescored the basic thematic material for different ensembles and in different styles. So this created a unity, and opportunities for contrast throughout the picture, and also opportunities for a range of functions. An extended sequence begins with views of traditional dancing, and then completes one portion of the story - the struggle to get Josef Locke to agree to return for one final concert. The director wanted a sense of forward motion from the start of the traditional dancing to the affirmative tone of the closing part of this sequence. So instead of creating a close match between picture and sound (by using traditional Irish music) the decision was made to use a synth track which could link the different sequences together, and emphasise continuity over fragmentation. This decision, arrived at collaboratively, gives a sense of forward motion, unity and coherence to the drama which it might otherwise have lacked.

By complete contrast John described a situation which was altered from the top, and not at all the result of collaborative process. He was commissioned to write the score to an advert for Levis. The agency said ‘classical’ in its brief for the music. The director hit on Vivaldi; an arrangement was made, and the director was delighted. The advert was completed and the ad agency said that the music’s ‘not right’. The music ‘plays the story too much’. They wanted music which gives an ‘overview’ and not a ‘scored’ feeling. Inspired by Kubrick’s musical choices in Barry Lyndon (1975), John looked for something more ‘organic’. The result was an arrangement of the Handel score (Sarabande from Keyboard Suite No. 4 in D minor HWV437) featuring two cellists, Tony Pleeth and Martin Loveday. Reflecting on this, John thought that the right decision had been made: the new arrangement added depth and gravity to the ad. Success followed with awards for the advert, which is illustrated in one version here (it existed in cuts of varying lengths):


In concluding remarks, John observed that the freedom and autonomy of the Hollywood/commercial film composer are in decline. Soundtrack albums are conceived before the scored music. These albums rarely include the original music. There is a tendency to book several composers for major projects, according to their association with certain types of cues (action, love, tension etc). The result is sometimes weak because the score becomes eclectic. An example of this is Shall We Dance (2004): John was initially commissioned to compose the whole score. At a later point in the process, Gabriel Yared was brought in to compose the 'love theme' cues. John was left to handle all the dance-related material and score cues that sprang from that part of the story.

In the last few years, John commented, the music has ‘descended’ to the level of sound effects, in terms of its status, and the possibility of a creative and structural role has been circumscribed.