Listen to Tom talking about film music
Over the years I’ve taken part in the recording of many film scores. The
very first was more significant than I realised in 1986 when I took part. I
was then very much a new boy in the profession and had been a member
of the London Philharmonic only for some months when I turned up at CTS
studios for four days of recording. The film was Roland Joffé’s
award winning “The Mission”, with its beautiful and haunting
score by Ennio Morricone.
Many of the processes of the craft have changed since that time. For
instance, I remember the film rushes were projected onto a huge screen
at the back of the studio and nothing more than a large stopwatch-cum-clock
was used by Morricone to synchronise music to action as he conducted
the sessions. (Indeed, CTS studios themselves are no longer there – having
made way for the new Wembley stadium.) What remains the same though,
and what really struck me during those sessions is the huge difference
with playing or recording concert repertoire. Here, with film music,
the tiniest nuance was weighed and measured until it achieved exactly
the effect desired with the picture, timing could be minutely adjusted,
the orchestration subtly changed and the players asked for a seemingly
endless range of colours and tone. Sometimes the same few seconds
of music could be chewed over for hours. This was a real eye-opener
for me. I must have been struggling at the time to get used to
the torrent of music in the orchestra’s symphonic repertoire and
yet here was music that presented no real technical difficulties yet
took nearly a week to record. I don’t think I really
knew then just how wonderful Morricones’s music was. The
fact that today I can instantly recall the main melody form the score
is one thing; quite another is how the music functions with the movie,
crystallising one’s emotions without ever seeming to impose itself
over what one is seeing.
Since that induction into the film world I’ve been lucky enough
to work with many different film composers. I’ve contributed
to films as diverse as Harry Potter, The Rugrats, Borat and James Bond.
Recent highlights would be contributing a solo for Hans Zimmer’s
score for “The Da Vinci Code” and concertmastering for Howard
Shore’s score for David Cronenberg’s “A history of
Violence” and Mark Streitenfeld’s score for Ridley Scott’s “A
good Year”.
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