The Art of the Scoring Session

The Art of the Scoring Session
The divergence of film and music

There are a number of accepted fallacies amongst the musical community: Firstly, and foremost, it is believed that film composers make the most money. Secondly, it is believed that film composers who use orchestrators aren’t real composers…and they still make tons of money. Thirdly, most ordinary people believe that everytime a composer steps onto a scoring stage to conduct his or her film score everything comes together and the executive producer is left so elated that he assigns more money to the composing budget.

If only this any of these points were true. In order to score a feature film, it is somewhat necessary to be informed about the hierarchy that governs the production of the score. By understanding whose strings to "pull", persay, the composers life in the frantic scoring sessions will remain un-threatened. Whilst it may appear that the Director calls the shots, a composer may well find his or herself fired at the scoring session because the Executive Producer has reservations about the lucrativeness of the on-screen music. The rejection of a score has been faced many times by most major film composers past and present, more famously with Bernard Herrmann (whose 1966 score to "Torn Curtain" for 12 Flutes, 16 Horns, 9 Trombones, 2 Tubas, 2 sets of Timpani, 8 Celli, and 8 Basses was rejected by Alfred Hitchcock, thus ending an futures collaborations) and Lalo Schifrin (whose score to "The Exorcist" was rejected) aside many others.

So success at a scoring session by the mere production of a lucratively viable "product" is vital for any single composer to earn enough money to put food on their tables., especially in a day and age where composers are faced with the task of writing music in the face of pre-existing material. I am talking here of the process of temp-tracking, whereby a composer whilst spotting (watching and deciding with the director where his/her music is used in the film) a film will be forced to listen to a temporary score of other composer’s (or sometimes their own) works that tries to describe the many styles to be used in the film…and how to make yet more money for the studios. Goldsmith on Temp-Tracking:

"On Mulan, I did a whole score, they loved it, except for a one-minute sequence that they had animated to a temp track. No matter what I did with it, they couldn't get comfortable. They had been living with this temped piece of music for five years, so they'd gotten used to it. I finally pulled off something they could live with but it took five tries."

From this point onwards. the process of scoring to film is somewhat complicated, but I will explain the basic processes from the point of view of a composer-conductor. However, I must point out that the majority of film composers today hire conductors to record their music, so that they may remain in the recording booth to check levels. Such composers include: John Corigliano (The Red Violin), his protegé Elliot Goldenthal (Titus), Marc Shaiman (South Park: Bigger, Longer & uncut), Christopher Young (Entrapment), aside from many others. Bernard Herrmann was oft-known for disappearing into the booth and leaving Lionel or Alfred Newman (the former heads of the 20^th Century Fox Music dept.) to conduct his scores.

Do note, however, that sometimes film composers turn scoring sessions upside down with the use of pioneering techniques. In much the same way as Henry Mancini had done with the introduction of multiple miking in the Sixties, For eXistenZ, composer Howard Shore (Dogma) used an avant-garde technique with the seventy-five piece London Philharmonic Orchestra, augmented by the early Russian electronic instrument, the theremin. About this score, Shore remarks:

"Even though I recorded the orchestra in sections, I sometimes played with the perception of the groups in the orchestra. When you hear an orchestra play, you hear everything in its own perspective, in the way people are set up. What I've done is altered that – you might hear sounds from the back of the orchestra that are brought right up to the front. I've changed the perspective of some of the groups in the orchestra."

A general overview of the scoring session could be constructed, thus:

Composers record cues - a short or long segment of music relevant to one scene in a film. This piece of music or "cue'" (sometimes also called a "start"') is usually separately titled as well as given an identifying number or code for organizational and administrative purposes. Traditionally, the code or number given to a cue is designed to reference that cue to the scene in the film to which it relates. So the most common numbering scheme for film 'cues' has been to identify each by the reel number and then the numerical position or sequence the cue has in relation to other cues on that reel. For example, the second piece of music or cue in reel six would be coded '6M2' (the 'M' just means 'music'). The same scheme usually applies in TV production

In order to ensure that the music is correctly synchronised to the screen, a composer will use a click-track. which is sent to the headphones of the instrumentalists. Essentially, it acts as a metronome, and it is created by the music editor who ensures, for example, that any increases in tempo in certain cues occur in the headphone mix. Supposedly, this process invented by "King Kong" composer Max Steiner for his score for The Informer (1934) – he wanted to control precisely the placement of the performance of certain musical events as written to match footfalls in a particular scene.

Traditionally, a tempo in film scoring is called a "CLICK" or "CLIX". A "click," or film tempo, though, is not the usual Maelzel Beat Per Minute. In film, tempos are expressed in terms of a specified number of frames plus "half-sprockets" (1 "half-sprocket" = an eighth of a frame) that pass a film projector's shutter. The standard U.S. colour film rate is 24 frames per second. Hence a 24-0 "click" means that an audible click is heard exactly once every second (BPM = 60).

Composers use Streamers, Punches, and Flutters to record their scores to picture, since at the recording session a composer might be conducting to a full-size theatrical screen or to a personal TV monitor.

A streamer is a colored vertical band which comes on over the picture at screen left and slides rightward for a specified duration exiting off-screen right immediately followed by a circular flash, known as a "punch". Streamers are intended to cue, signal, or to remind the conductor of an upcoming visual event in the picture, which could be "cut" or a "hitpoint" (an onscreen action that is mimiced at that exact moment by an instrument or instruments) When the conductor starts to record they usually allow about a 20 second pre-roll of picture to the downbeat of the first bar of music, so a green streamer is typically used to cue the conductor of the commencement of the downbeat of the first bar of music to be recorded so he/she will start the orchestra in the right place in the movie.

Traditionally, when scoring to film a streamer was created by the music editor who manually scribed or etched the 35mm film itself (a "work print" – an unfinised cut) in the right place terminating the scribe with a physical, pencil sized hole in the film (thus the word "punch").

Today, ever-cheaper scoring to video has become the "norm" and streamers are generated by a "black box" which composites and transits the streamers digitally and electronically "over" the video signal when instructed to do so by a controlling computer system, like a package called "Auricle".

A Flutter is a "visual metronome" for the conductor so that he or she can, in conjunction with correctly pace the performance of the music to be sure that the length of the music and the events in the music end up matching the picture as composionally intended as the performance proceeds. It uses punches (a cicular flash) to signify the end of each measure. The use of flutters in this way is named, after its inventor, and thus referred to as the "Newman System".