You can download the PDF here or by clicking on the image below.

The dissertation covers a number of topics including:

- Detailed analysis of key moments in John Williams’ score including harmony, use of leitmotif and orchestration.
- A look at the diegetic music of Star Wars.
- Broader discussion on how Williams influences the narrative of the films with a look at his portrayal of the opposing Light and Dark Sides of the Force.
- Background to the use of anachronism in film music.

It’s quite a long read but I hope that some of you will find it interesting and perhaps useful!

HOW DID YOU FIRST GET INTERESTED IN COMPOSING MUSIC FOR MEDIA?

I became serious about wanting to write music for media when I was 17, studying and composing film music as part of a music technology course. But it was probably through my love of films – like the re-release of the original Star Wars trilogy in 1997 when I was nine and the Lord of the Rings trilogy later – that I first became interested in the music of composers such as Williams and Shore. I have always played piano (since the age of 5) so I was aware of the musical aspect of these films even if only at a subconscious level.

WHAT IS YOUR COMPOSITION BACKGROUND?

I have always improvised at the piano for fun (I can play by ear) so I guess that was my first experience with spontaneous composition! I began composing and arranging properly around the age of 15 when I took part in a young composers course studying with professional composers and working with live ensembles. I did not receive much formal training in composition until I attended Cambridge University to study music, where we studied tonal composition (beginning with species counterpoint and moving onto string quartet writing) and later, free composition (music inspired by 20th century styles). I studied under a number of composers including Giles Swayne (check out his music – he’s a really cool composer!). I have never actually studied composing for media, but I have learnt a lot from watching and listening as well as reading!

WHAT’S YOUR COMPOSING PROCESS? DO YOU WRITE TO PAPER OR USE A SYNTH (SAMPLES)?

A bit of everything! Often I will sketch ideas out on paper first and then play the parts into Cubase with my sample libraries. Other times, if there is detailed voice leading and counterpoint, I will write out all of the parts individually before playing them in. If the writing is very intricate, or if it is to be performed by a real ensemble, I will write the parts out in Sibelius, and then export as a MIDI file into Cubase or print off the parts and give them to players!

Other times I will basically improvise a composition and play it straight into Cubase. The one thing that all of these methods have in common is that they normally start life with me at the piano (or a string legato / staccato patch in Cubase). On rare occasions I have been known to compose straight onto manuscript without a piano which is interesting to say the least!

CAN YOU NAME SOME OF YOUR FAVOURITE ORCHESTRAL SOUND LIBRARIES?

There are too many to mention really but one library I purchased recently and love is ‘CineBrass Pro’ from the CineSamples team. Spitfire Audio’s ‘Albion’ library has some lovely legato string and wind patches and if I had to pick a favourite sample library company it would probably have to be 8Dio (who along with Sound Iron used to be called Tonehammer).

WHO ARE SOME OF YOUR FAVOURITE FILM COMPOSERS?

I’ve been enjoying the work of Alexandre Desplat recently (his score for ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1′ is a brilliant example of how effective textural underscoring of a scene can be). I really enjoyed Chris Bacon’s work on Duncan Jones’ ‘Source Code’ last year – so much so that I subconsciously borrowed a lot of his ideas for one of my own pieces! Of course, you can’t beat John Williams; technically he has no rival in the film world (just take a listen to some of the cues from Spielberg’s ‘Tintin’ movie) and he is also the master of eliciting emotional responses in an audience!

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT FREEBIE JOBS?

In today’s world, if you are starting out as a composer you have to take unpaid jobs. Unpaid work often leads to paid work (I am currently in this situation with a client); sometimes it doesn’t, but at least you still have a credit and something to show on your website. Having said that, it is not an ideal situation. It’s great that sample libraries are now (relatively) affordable and that the quality has skyrocketed in the last few years but the disadvantage is that the music media business is now flooded with start-up and casual composers who are only too happy to write something for free. It’s also a problem of perception; because many composers are happy to work for free, people assume that everyone is, and that composition is simply a hobby – not a way of paying the bills! You wouldn’t ask a surgeon to carry out an operation for free or a pilot to captain an aircraft for free but the arts, and especially music, have become so ubiquitous that composition is no longer seen as a profession.

BEING A YOUNG COMPOSER, WHERE DO YOU SEE YOURSELF IN THE NEXT YEARS? WHAT’S YOUR DREAM?

My dream is to have people ask for ‘Peter Nickalls’ to score their movie. That is when you know that you have really ‘made it’! Realistically, I want to be scoring more online shorts and adverts in the next year or so, and moving onto TV shows and films as I build up contacts and my portfolio.

Film copyright © 2004 Columbia Pictures

Featuring Omnisphere, LA Scoring Strings (Lite), EWQL Symphony Orchestra (Gold), Stylus RMX, CineSnares, Drums of War and VSL Epic Horns.

Film copyright © 2010 Summit Entertainment

Featuring LA Scoring Strings (Lite), EWQL Symphony Orchestra (Gold), QL Pianos (Gold) and more.

The first review focuses on the book, and the second looks at the Rarities CD included with the book.

Check out the site for my two reviews, plus audio clips, photos and an audio interview with author Doug Adams.

Film copyright © 2008 DreamWorks Pictures Inc.

Featuring Evolve Mutations Vol 1, LA Scoring Strings (Lite), Stylus RMX and EWQL Symphony Orchestra.

Film copyright © 2009 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

Featuring LA Scoring Strings (Lite), VSL Epic Horns, EWQL Symphony Orchestra and several Cinesamples libraries.

Music for films can be employed in an anachronistic fashion to enable and improve audience understanding of the characters and events of the narrative. Anachronistic film music comes in many forms: older style of music could be used for a film with a more modern setting, such as in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which Romantic music (ranging from Richard Strauss’ opening fanfare from Also sprach Zarathustra to Johann Strauss’ Blue Danube) and its cultural baggage is juxtaposed with the science-fiction setting, creating conflicting meanings for the viewer.

Copyright © 1968 Turner Entertainment Co. All rights reserved.

Alternatively, a style of music could be more modern than the film’s setting such as in Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film Marie Antoinette, in which pop music dominates the soundtrack (although contemporary pieces by Rameau are also used), inviting the audience to share the heroine’s present with ours. Because the anachronistic relationship between setting and music is very clear in a film such as this, the music allows the audience to consciously draw connections between the cultural associations of the music and the on-screen action.

The two films mentioned above have scores which are very obviously anachronistic but other examples can be more subtle. These scores tend to be based on the ‘default’ style of late 19^th century romantic music; audiences are so used to this style that they tend to accept its use in all but the most contrasted contexts (such as 2001: A Space Odyssey). For example, Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard’s music to the Ridley Scott ancient-Rome epic Gladiator largely employs a late 19^th century Romantic style, with hints of Middle-Eastern modality and instrumentation. Although this style is anachronistic with the film’s setting, its emotive connotations are familiar to audiences, thus helping the audience to empathise with the plight of the protagonist. A score employing only authentic instruments from the time period in which the film is set would have been far less effective in achieving this.

Copyright © 2000 Universal Pictures. All rights reserved.

Another interesting example of anachronism is the music of the original Star Wars trilogy which straddles the line between calling attention to itself and being harmonious with the events on screen. There is a clear dissonance between the time setting of the music and that of the film but because of the audience’s familiarity with the 19^th century Romantic idiom the effect of this anachronism is softened. The music for A New Hope (1977) could be said to have been anachronistic not only with the setting of the film but also with contemporary practice as pop songs had dominated soundtracks of the 1960s and 1970s after the use of Romantic music in films had fallen out of fashion. Thus for movie-goers in 1977, the effect of the anachronism would have been greater than for us today, now that regular use of Romantic music in many genres of film has lessened the impact of such anachronisms.

In future blog posts I’ll be exploring the anachronism of Williams’ Star Wars music in greater detail. In the meantime, are there any particular anachronistic film scores which stand out for you? Let me know in the comments section below!

All strings: LA Scoring Strings (Lite)
All winds: EWQL Symphony Orchestra (Gold)
Horns: VSL Epic Horns
Harp: Cinesamples CineHarp

The function of film music has sometimes been compared with the function of music in opera. In Joseph Kerman’s famous book, Opera as Drama the author identifies three ways in which music functions in opera that I would argue also hold true for music in films.

1) To flesh out details concerning a character’s deeds and emotional state
2) To articulate actions – ‘deeds done, steps taken, events arranged, and “psychological actions” such as deciding, renouncing, and falling in love’.
3) The way in which music creates atmosphere, establishing a particular world or area where certain thoughts, feelings and actions may occur.

Implicit in Kerman’s discussion is that music instils meaning to the narrative in conjunction with the on-stage action. This idea is different to what Kathryn Kalinak (in her book Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film) calls the ‘Classical theory’ of film music, which assumes that meaning is found in the visual image and that the accompanying music can only support or change what is already there.

However, the ‘Classical theory’ of film music seems to stand in opposition to our experience. For example, in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws an otherwise peaceful scene featuring a women swimming is transformed into a menacing situation (for the audience) through John Williams’ music. Here the music does not reinforce the suspense in the scene but is in fact largely responsible for creating it (along with the suggestive shark’s eye view camera angles). Today, most people now understand music as having a more fundamental role in the interpretation of a film then that suggested in the ‘Classical theory’.

Copyright © 1975 Universal Studios. All rights reserved.

The crucial difference between the way music functions in opera and films is that, unlike in opera, where music functions at the foreground level, the music for film is nearly always a background element that surreptitiously influences how we understand and interpret the film. In Claudia Gorbman’s book Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music she describes the way in which we are exposed to music in a film:

‘Now, in watching a conventional film whose dialogues and visuals are telling a story, we devote our concentration to its successive events and the meanings that are constantly accruing to them. Most feature films relegate music to the viewer’s sensory background, that area least susceptible to rigorous judgement and most susceptible to affective manipulation’.

Because average movie-goers are not fully aware of the music when they watch a film, it is harder for them to ponder the effect that the music is having on them, and thus the music becomes ‘a wash of sound to which we respond but whose meaning lies just beyond conscious recognition’ (Kalinak). Most people who watch a film do not listen critically and those who do (like fellow composers for example) have to step outside of the confines which normally bind the spectator into the fictive reality of the film. For this latter group, as Gorbman would suggest, the ‘game’ is over because they are aware of music’s ‘presence as part of the film’s discourse’.

Thus for most of the movie-going public, a lot of film music actually bypasses consciousness, functioning – according to Gorbman – as the ‘hypnotic voice bidding the spectator to believe, focus, behold, identify, consume’. Gorbman claims that in such a state there is a ‘greater disposition for the subject to accept the film’s pseudo-perceptions as his/her own’. This is one of the reasons why music is so crucial to many films as it provides a way for audiences to enter into the world of that film.

Of course, there are also moments in scores, where rather than bypassing consciousness, the music clearly draws attention to itself, often at points of high drama or at the introduction to a new scene. And in some films – particularly those employing a compilation score of pop songs – the music is often quite prominent.

What about you? Are you always aware of the music in a film and how it is functioning? And how do you feel about being guided or perhaps manipulated through a film’s narrative by music which you are often not even aware of? Let me know in the comments section below!