(photo: Dita Vollmond)
5th March 2021
Gavin Greenaway is a British Emmy® award-winning pianist, composer and conductor with an extensive catalogue of achievements: conducting over 100 feature film and television soundtracks, composing for major entertainment and cultural events, and producing and songwriting with chart-topping artists. His career in the music industry began at Sir George Martin’s iconic Air Studios on Oxford Street where he assisted on a variety of projects including Elvis Costello’s seminal ‘Shipbuilding’ with the legendary Chet Baker. Following studies at Trinity College of Music, he quickly established himself as an in-demand composer for theatre, film and television.
Commissioned to compose ‘something incredible’ to accompany the nightly firework display at Disney World’s EPCOT, Florida he created the symphonic Reflections of Earth which played there every night for 20 years and went on to win an Emmy® Award. Greenaway contributed music to numerous movies as well as writing and producing songs with Bryan Adams and Trevor Horn for DreamWorks. Additional commissions followed for projects as diverse as the Lighting of the Olympic Cauldron for the Vancouver Winter Olympics, to music for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Celebrations in 2012.
Known for having the ‘best ears in the business’, Greenaway has fostered long-standing relationships with many of the world’s eminent music creators, conducting scores for the likes of Hans Zimmer, James Newton Howard, John Powell, Junkie XL, and Daft Punk, and albums for artists including Andrea Bocelli, George Michael and Sir Paul McCartney. In 2006, he was engaged by Sir Paul McCartney to conduct the world premiere his oratorio Ecce Cor Meum at the Royal Albert Hall in London and again for the US premier at Carnegie Hall in New York.
In recent years, he has been instrumental in bringing some of our best loved soundtracks to the live stage, including world premiere performances of the live-to-picture productions of Interstellar, Independence Day and Casino Royale. In 2018, Greenaway was appointed Musical Director for The World of Hans Zimmer with concerts across Europe. Gavin, who Zimmer says he trusts ‘more than I trust myself’ conducts the large symphony orchestra and presents an immersive multi-media extravaganza.
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The Conductor’s Role in Film
When we spoke before you said that there are a lot of misconceptions about your role in film…
Yes. I think when people think of a conductor (especially non-professional musicians) they still have this idealised view of the maestro having command over the orchestra. But the challenge in the studio is that a lot of what you would normally be expected to bring to the orchestra has already been taken away from you. Firstly, no one cares about your interpretation of it, because the composer is right there – they know how it should go, they’ve just written it. Secondly, most films are now recorded to some form of click track, because the tempo and cutting are heavily scored to the movie.
In the very old days before that (and in fact John Williams will still do it) conductors would just watch the film and conduct the music to it – amazing. They would pull it around to fit the picture. But that’s a dying art, most people do a mock up using some sort of synth/sampler package or digital workstation – so they’ve heard how it fits to the film already and have made a click. You can’t really stray from that too much, so in many cases your ability to pull and push the tempo has been taken away from you. If a conductor of a symphony orchestra is like the director, then I liken being the studio conductor of a movie to being the first assistant director – the one who has to get everyone in the right place at the right time, but is artistically somewhat lower in the pecking order. There is a lot of art you can bring to it, but it’s a different job.
So what’s the purpose of the conductor? Normally in the studio you’d expect the composer to conduct their own film music, so they can communicate what they to want to the orchestra. However, a lot of composers prefer not to conduct because the most important place in the recording studio is in the control room, hearing what’s actually happening. You may think the orchestra is nicely balanced in the studio – I have a pretty good sense of it now, even with headphones on. But it’s not infallible – and as a tangent – neither is your sense of pitch. When you put headphones on your sense of pitch gets messed up, and the same is true for musicians. They are always struggling with that.
If I think something can be improved I can venture my opinion – I’ll find a way of volunteering that. I also encourage musicians to do the same to me to make their parts more playable. But at a basic level: is the room warm enough? Is there enough space between the seats? (It’s easier at the moment because with Covid everyone is two metres apart.) Are they comfortable? Is there a draught going round the back of the room?
You have to remember that being a session musician is very stressful and precarious. If you’re playing a piece in a concert orchestra, even if it’s new and super difficult you’ll have seen it beforehand and practiced it by yourself. Even if the rehearsal doesn’t go very well, you can go away and work at it. In the studio, you see it for the first time and fifteen minutes later you record the final version. It’s stressful. So if someone is strutting around on the podium giving it the big ‘I am’ and pointing out what you’re playing wrong, it doesn’t help. There’s a huge element of psychology involved.
A good atmosphere is really important, so I keep it moving along. Perhaps drop in a joke here and there, but not lots and not too much talking from me. Once in a while if I feel the atmosphere’s got a bit tense and we need to puncture it a bit, I’ll do that. If I feel the composer is pushing us on too fast and people aren’t happy, or there are too many wrong notes or sloppy playing which may reflect on the orchestra, I’ll slow it down and say that we really must do that again. I’ll step in to protect the orchestra. It’s a dangerous game to play because you want to get the work finished, but you also want the product to be good.
During the first run through I’ll be watching the musicians. Obviously there’ll be wrong notes or things that are missed but I won’t say anything. I might look over at someone and I’ll get a nod as if to say ‘I’ll get it next time’. If three times round there’s still a problem, I might check a part but I won’t say ‘you’re playing a wrong note in bar 7’. I’ll say, ‘can I just check you have you have a concert A on the second beat?’ If the answer is ‘yes’, you can guarantee next time that’s what they’ll play as they’ve just misread it. If it’s ‘no’ you realise that there was a copying mistake so no one gets hurt. Part of my job is to protect the musicians from the process.
The composer is putting out all sorts of fires with the director. On this side of the glass, you don’t want to say ‘oboist you’re playing flat today. What’s going on?’ because immediately everyone assumes the oboist isn’t up to it. You need to protect them to get them to do the best that they can under the conditions. I know if the musicians I work with regularly are having a tough time, I can sense it. You deflect the spotlight from them, you don’t point it at them.
I also want to create a self-empowering atmosphere. The best conductors don’t direct the orchestra or impose their interpretation, they encourage them to play at their best and bring everyone together. In that spirit – if there’s a better way of bowing a part or a rhythm that can be slightly changed to make it more playable, I want them to feel free to suggest that. Then I will decide how to approach the composer and negotiate that for them. That way, it ceases to be all of my responsibility, which makes it a hell of a lot easier! I’ve got forty or fifty musicians with a minimum of twenty years of experience. That’s a thousand years of musical experience in front of me. Why not use that? Let them solve all sorts of problems….
In sessions with musicians I know well, we know the things we can fix without making a big song and dance about it. It’s not going to make any huge difference to the overall product, sound and experience but it will make the playing better. We don’t want to be bothering the composer with every single little change. The music is secondary to the film – film music is an applied art. So, does it work with the film? Whether it’s musically correct is another matter. Sometimes on its own the music sounds like it has lost all its oomph and feels a bit weak, but when you put it to the picture it does the job perfectly. That’s what the composer and the director are doing in recording sessions: they’re worrying about how it tells the story to the picture. With concert works you’re reacting more to the auditorium, audience, the feel on the night, and things that can only happen in the moment.
The composers you have the closest working relationships with are Hans Zimmer and John Powell. Is there usually a set formula for how you collaborate with them?
Well, it depends on the project. The big thing about being a studio conductor is flexibility, you have to be able to change the way you work immediately. Hans Zimmer likes to work in what we call ‘stems’, that means recording each layer separately. Often, if there’s an ostinato part that he wants mixed differently (or have different effects and levels) we might record that as a separate stem, and we’ll certainly record the brass instruments separately too. Even within that we might record the horns as a separate stem, and it becomes like a jigsaw to piece together. So then it becomes about organisational skills, and accepting that you’re not creating pure music, but a soundscape for the film. That’s the way Hans likes to work.
A lot of scores I’ve done with John Powell have been like that, but in the more recent ones we’ve actually recorded the whole orchestra in one go, which is old school. But that has its own problems when you’re working with picture: making things fit the picture, getting all the balances right, telling the story in the right way. The brilliant thing about it is that if you are recording everything all at once, you can be free and ditch the click. For me that’s the biggest thrill in the studio – I’m allowed to get closer to proper conducting. But it has still got to fit the overall lengths of time and the hits have to be in the same place. So I’ll say either give me the click and I’ll let the orchestra follow me, or don’t even give me the click and I’ll watch the bar counter to see if we’re ahead or behind. Then I can adjust how we keep on track, which is more organic in terms of the orchestral sound.
Sometimes Hans will record the whole string section altogether – it depends on the project. Composers like him are always trying to reinvent themselves. In each film he wants to create a new sound, for some that means the music is more atmospheric and more textural – and for others it’s more thematic and orchestral. That’s the brilliant thing about working with film composers: even when you think you know exactly what they’re going to do, they will surprise you with a totally different way of using the orchestra. It also keeps me on my toes because I rarely see the music before we go into the studio. Everyone’s sight-reading – it’s the first performance and the recording all on the same day with no rehearsal. You’ll play it once, have some notes from the composer (often about dynamics or articulations), then play it again and then by around the third or fourth time everyone’s usually got it pretty locked in. Then we move on to the next cue. That’s it – in the bank. You work at it piece by piece as you go.
So you have to be a very good sight-reader.
Yes.
And what’s this I see on your website about having ‘the best ears in the business’?
(laughs) Yes! I won’t tell you which engineer said that but it’s not a lie. But there are lots of people with fantastic ears in the business.
But what was he referring to? What are you using your ears for?
Well, I’m one of those people who can look at a page of text and just point to the extra space between two words. It’s an affliction! I’ll look down a score and see a wrong note. I can also hear a recording and know precisely where the wrong note is on first listen – then I’ll investigate and fix it. It’s the same with balances and tuning. We’re all on a continuum but there’s a little bit of OCD in my behaviour that is directed at these things. It’s an attention to detail that is a little bit too much – for most people it’s a little bit wearing – but it’s great when you have a limited amount of time with new material and need to get it as good as you can.
A while back, I sat in on a recording with Vladimir Jurowski (Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto with the London Philharmonic Orchestra). In one section there were details he was picking out in the bassoon parts, concerning the exact articulation that Stravinsky had written. At first I thought he was splitting hairs, but all of a sudden it took on a whole new character. It was just this little line shimmying along beneath the violin, but he had that forensic attention to detail.
That’s interesting. What makes a good musical performance? You can argue about all sorts of esoteric or spiritual matters, but ultimately it becomes down to that precise organisation of the material in front of you. All those little details add up.
Do you think that you sometimes get to know the music better than the composers do?
Well funnily enough the hardest things I find to conduct are pieces that I’ve written or orchestrated myself. It’s bizarre, I can’t say why. Perhaps you’re not able to stand outside it and see it properly. I always find it remarkably difficult to work out what’s going wrong with music I’ve written, whereas I can tell you immediately with someone else’s. Maybe that’s why some composers prefer other people to conduct in the studio – it just gives them that different perspective.
Recording for film is a hugely collaborative process, and part of that collaboration is the orchestrator. Very few composers orchestrate their own music, not because they can’t, but because there simply isn’t time. So often in the studio there will be one of the orchestrators (often one orchestrator can’t do a whole film if there isn’t time). The turn around for the orchestration of a whole film can be something like two weeks.
!!
That’s a whole other topic! If the orchestrator is not conducting, they will also add to the discussion and point out any issues. Either the composer will say ‘no, that’s exactly what I want’, which is useful to know (because you don’t want to correct things that are a matter of taste or choice) or they’ll want you to fix it.
The first time working with any composer is always a little bit scary. You have to hope that you understand music as well as they do. There are a couple that I’ve worked with that are so phenomenal musically that keeping up with them is the challenge. That’s really fun because you’re kept on your toes. Everything is running at a 100% because when the take stops you know they’re going to come back at you with changes. They will dictate notes and changes and it will come out faster than you can relay it and faster than the musicians will be able to write it down. So you’ve got to make sure that you catch it.
When I give comments or changes to the orchestra I try to be as concise and clear as possible and speak slowly. If I’m giving a new bar of notes to someone, I’ll say for instance ‘there’s going to be four sixteenth notes on the first beat and they are A B, C sharp, D. I’ll repeat that’ and I’m really careful and slow. The skill level of these musicians is incredible, but there’s a limit to how fast you can re-write music over a printed part. They can sight-read at an amazing level, make changes, interpret parts that have not been through a hundred years of refinement, and decipher (or intuit) marks on a page that are not really clear (a lot of them can be very rudimentary).
I’m quite good at looking at the page and seeing how the phrase will go. I love long phrases – there is a tendency in film music to break up long themes (even when they’re beautiful) into shorter phrasings. I’ll always find myself saying ‘OK why is there a gap there? It’s not a one-bar phrase it’s an eight-bar phrase, let’s make it that’. I think that is probably is more akin to what you would do in a symphonic rehearsal. But that’s once everything else is in place, that’s the icing on the cake. I only start to do that sort of thing when the composer has got the music to where he or she wants it.
You actually only have to get it right once in the studio. All those times where you play it wrong don’t matter. It’s important to feel that you can make suggestions and not be made to feel stupid if you dare to do so. No music on the page is ever perfect because notation is imperfect.
Are you ever able to encourage much freedom from the musicians?
Yes. Again, the challenge is that it’s quite regimented in terms of what needs to get done in the time allowed. You don’t want to start getting too experimental every time, we do tend to play safe. But every so often… the other week a composer had written a jazzy, big band style trumpet solo. It was all notated and sounding a little bit square. We dutifully played what was on the page once, and then the composer said ‘you know Tom, just play me a solo over the music’. It was just brilliant. He completely let rip and all of those years of playing jazz and big band came pouring out. We loved it. The composer said ‘OK let’s have another one’, and we did about three or four of these solos. They weren’t notes the composer had written, but he had set it out so the player knew what to do.
There are also plenty of solos where we’ll often suggest not to play so in time, and just be free with what’s written – with solo parts you quite often have a bit more freedom. Everything’s been worked out ahead of time on a computer, it’s been played with samples and it sounds like a good but cold, non-human orchestra. This means you can get wedded into the way that sounds and things that were intended to sound free are notated really strangely because of that. Sometimes it’s better to just renotate them squarely and write in to play it freely. You have to tell the musicians – especially soloists – to put their character into it. It’s rare that it doesn’t sound better than just playing it as written. Musicians want to be able to express themselves and have so much to offer.
If you’re not careful it becomes too much like a factory and people disengage musically. If they aren’t allowed to make suggestions or play things with a little bit of life it can become what one engineer described to me as ‘data acquisition’. All you’re doing is collecting these sounds and they don’t mean anything. Sometimes the score doesn’t need to do much, it is just beautiful long notes. But playing those notes is an art.
Gareth Valentine[1] mentioned how someone he knew saw a Chinese orchestra and said that they ‘play all the notes but none of the music’. So you don’t want to lose all of that musicality in search of perfect and metronomic delivery. That’s a tough balancing act I imagine.
It is. There a thing that all musicians do with rhythms – we typically don’t play them quite as they’re written. When you’ve got a dotted quaver followed by a semiquaver repeated, oftentimes that semiquaver will be slightly late, and slightly shorter than a semiquaver.
Oh yes, that’s quite a common issue.
Yeah it is. That’s fine, you don’t want it to sound metronomic. However, it isn’t fine if you have to line that up with a lot of sequenced percussion – where it is absolutely critical that it’s dead in time. Then it actually sounds really exciting. It’s a long way from that double dotted Handel or Baroque style (or in fact any classical music) where you don’t play things dead in time. I always apologise to the musicians when we have to play rhythms metronomically, but sometimes it’s the only way it’s all going to fit together. Other times it’s better if there is a bit of life to the rhythm, and if they play it too metronomically they’ll come crashing into the last beat of a phrase when I would prefer it to land more gently. It’s only a few milliseconds but it just starts to reassert the idea of music having a shape. It’s a balance between getting precision when required and allowing the music to be organic. It’s not necessarily technically accurate but it has some meaning to it, and it says something.
Yes, it gives it style and character.
Yes, even within a prescribed click or tempo. Often with film music you’ll have tempo changes without any warning. They’re actually very hard to do at the best of times, but they’re even harder when you have to hit the incoming tempo dead on. But we cheat, we use the technology. We play up to the point where the tempo changes, then stop playing. Literally, just stop playing. We let the room ring out. Then we’ll get eight clicks into the next section and carry on from there.
The secrets are all coming out now!
Yes! But if you conduct a live orchestra to the film in a concert you have to play one of these cues that was never written to be performed live in one go – without the benefit of a second take! Sometimes we do that with a click, or with streamers and no click at all. Your tempo can be out and it’s fine for a few bars but you’re going to pay for it at some point, when you want to hit that next sync point. You’ve got to have the orchestra running at your command.
How to Train Your Dragon
How to Train Your Dragon has a lot of music, doesn’t it? It sounded like a huge orchestra.
Most animations have a lot of music but yes, it does. It was a big orchestra – over one hundred players, and a hundred singers. We recorded it in stems: the strings and the woodwinds altogether, and then the brass, and a large percussion section.
What about the male and female choruses?
They were also recorded in separate sessions – we did two or three after we’d recorded the orchestra. So again, it all gets layered up. Is it 100% necessary to do it that way? No, but it is really useful for the filmmakers. If you recorded it altogether, you would have a limited amount of control over the level of the choir. Maybe the brass or percussion would be too loud in places, especially when you put it against the dialogue and the sound and effects of the film. If it’s already mixed there’s nothing you can do, but when you’ve recorded it in stems you can just bring that part down (even just for a couple of bars) to allow the dialogue to speak.
When you’re watching the film you don’t notice all this manipulation is going on, it just feels great. Whereas if you go back and watch an action film from the 1960s, you often hear the music as a separate discreet thing. It’s almost completely on a plane apart from the dialogue and effects. Nowadays when they do a really good surround sound mix, it all becomes integrated in a way that isn’t possible when you just record the orchestra in one go.
It seemed that most of the action scenes are quite consistent in terms of tempo, even if there’s a change in texture. There were occasional instances when it was more changeable (e.g. when Hiccup was first hiding the dragon and Astrid suspects something is going on), but seemed steady on the whole.
It sounds steady but it isn’t. Some composers will not change tempo for an action scene, but they’ll change the time signature a lot to make their tune come in at the right place. Perhaps you need a 3/4 bar to lose a beat here, or you might add a couple of beats there. But what John does (as well as many other composers) is run along at 150bpm for 16 bars and then for a bit more excitement they’ll go up just 1bpm, which will also help to fit the next bit of picture. The tempo moves around within small parameters, but it’s just enough to keep it interesting. You wouldn’t notice it, you think it’s all the same tempo, but it’s not.
It can be a challenge if you’re playing fast notes in a fast tempo, and then it gets a couple of beats a minute slower and no-one tells you. Everything is fine for about a bar and a half and then suddenly you’ve got out of time. It’s really important that scores are prepared, and more importantly they tell you the little changes in tempo as well as the big ones. If it goes from 150 to 120 you’re going to notice. But if it goes from 150 to 148, if nobody knows that’s what’s happened, that bar will be out of time. If you know about it as a musician you can just relax the tempo just enough in this bar to adjust. Studio musicians who play to click all the time have an incredibly well developed sense of tempo. They’ll spot a 1bpm tempo change more easily than if they were playing orchestral music all the time.
That’s quite commonly said. I hear a lot musicians in your line of work say that purely ‘classical’ musicians take a lot longer to realise if tempos have gone astray. I can imagine a lot of conductors I know from the opera house not gelling well with this at all.
No. You have to think of it as a craft, not an art – I’m using my musical abilities to perform a function. If my ego got too involved it would say ‘this is beneath me. It is not in full accordance with St. Cecilia’s directive on making the best music possible!’ That’s true, but there is still fun to be had, and music making to be done, within these very narrow parameters. Sometimes I finally get the chance to play off click with an orchestra. I’ve made a few albums with people where they want to record the orchestra, and you conduct them in the studio. It’s wonderful, scary and all about the music. But most of the time it’s not. You have to accept that you’re not bringing a magical new interpretation of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5. It’s a different gig.
Sure. Are there any particular scenes/extracts from How To Train Your Dragon that were interesting to work on?
I was talking earlier about how little time composers have to compose scores, but with this film John was blessed with a long lead-time and had a lot of time to write it. He was therefore able to take the themes and really work them against each other. He honed in on a style that is kind of Nordic (somewhere north of Scotland). I remember when I conducted it, I would frequently have goose bumps from the music and beautiful changes of harmony. It’s a real buzz when after just the first or second hearing the music is already affecting you.
I tell you the scene that really got me: the one where Hiccup and Toothless the dragon become friends.
Oh that’s lovely – starting with the tuned percussion?
Exactly, yes. John had already recorded that – it’s a mixture of real players, samples, and has a number of layers. We added the strings on top of that and so on, but the instant I heard it I thought that it was a classic piece. To be completely honest, I’m privileged to be in the room while this is happening. You have to be awed and wowed by this music that is written for a specific purpose. Yes, perhaps it doesn’t stand up to the analysis that any Beethoven Symphony would, it’s not rigorous in many ways. But it can still affect you, like a pop song can. I can’t be snobbish about music, I’ve done all sorts and if it affects you it’s working. I was at college with John and he always used to say ‘if music doesn’t move you or make you want to move, then it’s not doing its job’. John wants to get you rhythmically or emotionally activated.
Insterstellar
Music seems to be used more sparingly in Interstellar…
You’ll be amazed at how many hundreds of tracks there are in the score. There’s a lot of synth work. We had a small string section recorded in a huge space: Temple Church in London. There were three conductors: the brass and the woodwinds were recorded in two different studios. I think the woodwind were recorded in the small studio at Air (London), and the brass was recorded at the large studio at Air.
Is that because the different locations lend themselves to bringing out the best in those instrument groups?
It was partly that and partly a time constraint, there was so much to do and it wasn’t possible to get the church for all the sessions. The organ was recorded in the church and is a major part of that score. It’s not a recording space and we quite often had to stop recording because you could hear people walking round outside or a helicopter overhead. One day there was a thunderstorm in the middle of the session and we just had to stop because there was nothing we could do. Another night fireworks went off in the city and the whole church became resonant with the most incredible sound. They actually recorded some of it and used it in the sound effects for the film. So in this case it was recorded much more freely – the music wasn’t recorded to picture. Music was given an elevated place in the film, because Christopher Nolan likes it to be a big element in his storytelling. Hans wrote some of the music without even looking at the picture and gave it to Nolan to work with as he was shooting.
Wow. So it’s not always the same process, chronologically.
No. It usually is but in this case Chris would quite often use the music as a sort of structural device for the scene rather than the other way round. This was more of an organic process. I think it shows. Love it or hate it, there’s something about Christopher Nolan’s process that creates something more than just a movie. His work has definitely got an Auteur vibe to it, like Hitchcock or Zeferelli.
As you said, there are whole sections in the film without music and other parts where it’s incredibly loud. We watched it at home recently with our 5.1 system turned up loud and it was a really visceral experience. When we performed it at the Royal Albert Hall, at the end of the Docking Scene the audience actually erupted in applause. It had been such an experience hearing the orchestra play it.
Obviously, we were time coded with the film and had a click track. At one point we had synchronisation issues because the bar count had gone. You have to be really cool in those circumstances – you’ve got four thousand people in front of you and it’s all about to go very wrong. Apparently I said (over the stage communication system)[2] to the engineer ‘err Geoff… just to let you know our bar count has gone. Could you sort that out if you get a chance?’ And everyone was panicking ‘oh my God, what’s going to happen?’ Luckily the next cue was just a piano cue. I knew when it was going to come in and what it was going to be – it was all fine. Then the bar count appeared again and everyone calmed down, but when you perform live music to a picture – once the movie starts you can’t stop.
In a concert if a soloist doing a concerto has a memory blip, you can often pick it up again and people often won’t even notice that something’s gone awry. But when the film goes on and the piece of music doesn’t come in where it ought to – you can’t stop the film. There’s no recovery. I’ve had a few of those scary moments where you’re relying on technology and it’s not behaving itself.
There are a lot of moments where it’s hard to hear who’s playing or the origins of the sound. For example, that very high pitched sound, almost like a high tuning fork, as well as the very low bass sound that would often be used. Where is the synth used?
Throughout. The organ plays a huge part and the lowest notes you hear are from the low end of the organ pedals. A lot of what you think might be synth is organ – played by the amazing Roger Sayer. He didn’t just play one part. In some parts of the score there are up to ten layers of organ parts, each played separately so that they could be manipulated afterwards. There’s a lot of sound production involved in that score. Hans would use synths for weird percussion and clock type sounds as well as very high synthetic sounds. It’s a mixture and sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s doing what.
If I think of music that depicts vast expansive spaces I think of something like Copland – who I spoke about with Leonard Slatkin.[3] But you’re dealing with space! Covering distances that none of us could ever possibly comprehend. Is that really hard to convey as the conductor?
Well what we have now is the technology, and artificial reverb. You can have a reverb that’s ten seconds long but controllable, so you can determine how much of it you use and when you use it. Obviously we used the church initially in that score for that particular sound, but the added reverb gives a sense of space and expansiveness. The multi channel sound you have in cinemas now wasn’t available to Copland, so he had to do it with just the notes, which is incredible. With modern film music it’s more about textures and the manipulation of those textures, sometimes to the detriment of melody and harmony. People on the cutting edge of film composing people like Hans Zimmer and Tom Holkenburg (who’s also heavily into synths, he did the last Mad Max film) use a mix of the classical orchestral approach and more pop approaches. But this hybrid of orchestra, synths and percussion with many textural layers gives us more possibilities than there ever were before.
Zimmer builds incredible suspense with music over fifteen minutes (between 1h52m45s and 2h07m00s in the film). The music starts when Cooper and Mann start fighting on Mann’s planet and ends with the explosion. It’s almost like a clock ticking, and it just builds and builds and builds.
Yes. The thing about recording that (from my point of view) is that you don’t have to do it in one go. We just work in sections. We pick a 2-minute section and get that bit right. Boom. Then we get the next bit done. You need to make sure that when you start the second section, the intensity matches the first section and you haven’t gone too far one way or the other. You can fix it a little bit in mixing but you still want the timbre to be to be following on. In any case when you’re recording sections, you need to be sure they join up musically and it makes sense (in terms of the intensity of the playing if nothing else). It’s all a cheat really!
So the building suspense and making sure it works dramatically is ultimately Hans’s job.
Yes, the heavy lifting has been done by Hans already. He’s already worked out the structure and where it needs to get to – and what he wants is some of the realism of real players. I think it’s very easy to think that you’re doing more than you are. The orchestrators and conductors are just polishing what is already an amazing achievement by the composer. It’s teamwork and as I said, I’m often just grateful to be standing there in front of incredible musicians playing amazing music. And getting paid! I mean that’s amazing. But if you start to think ‘I really did something amazing for this film’? No. The composer did, and the director. It’s the vision of the composer and director that has created this music and is giving you something to do!
Well, that’s very modest of you.
Oh, but its true.
With Insterstellar where there any scenes that were particularly interesting or difficult?
The one that really sticks in my mind is when Cooper takes off from Earth for the first time in the spaceship. There’s this huge Wagnerian string theme over a pedal note. It eventually gets taken out by the sound of the rocket. When we first played that I was really undecided and I thought it sounded a bit ‘Late Romantic’. I couldn’t believe it would work because I wasn’t watching the picture at this point. They kept it very secret. Sometimes we get to watch the picture and that makes it much easier to match the way the musicians should be playing. Should I be playing short staccatos here, or slightly longer, or is it playful? Well you look at the picture and think ‘oh I know exactly what should happen’.
We didn’t have that on Insterstellar. We were playing this very high string music, and I wasn’t sure it was enough (although of course I didn’t say that to anyone). When you see it with the final picture it’s amazing, it’s got this incredible longing to it, and it’s almost operatic. It is not what I would have written for that scene but when I heard it I thought that nothing else would work. That happens twice in the movie.
So do you mean it seems that there is not enough music (and it doesn’t have much movement) but as it’s such a huge scene it actually works perfectly in combination?
Exactly. The music is moving so slowly that you think it can’t be right. What Christopher Nolan was after was something that works over this much longer arc or timescale. It’s more like an opera than a chamber sonata, and I think that’s a very valid use of music.
Psychology
When we spoke before the interview you mentioned how much you’ve worked on your own thoughts and behaviour as a conductor. Is there anything in particular that has really paid off, and gives you an extra edge professionally?
Well, because I have good ears I was quite arrogant to deal with when I was younger. ‘No this is wrong, this is the way it goes, that’s out of tune’ – that sort of mentality. Obviously, this doesn’t win you any friends. It doesn’t allow for the more spiritual experience of music if everything has to be so technically correct and you’re so sure of yourself. I would feel things very keenly and think I was right a lot of the time – trying to appear to be more together than I was.
If you get completely caught up in the emotion, you’ve stopped doing your job, but you need to allow for that side of the music and accept that you don’t know or hear everything. You have to respect (as I said earlier) all of those many, many hundreds of years of collective musical experience of the musicians in front of you. If I’m not hearing what I think I should be hearing, it’s not because they’re playing it wrong. It’s because they don’t have what they need in order to play it in the way it ought to be played.
If there’s a wrong note – maybe their part is wrong. Maybe they’ve misread it, or it’s not in tune. But maybe they can’t hear what they need to be able to hear for it to be in tune. So let’s just check: can you hear across the room? Are the balances of the headphones right? Let me change the conditions that we’re in. I’m certain that if the conditions were correct you would play it perfectly. That’s about having trust in the musicians in front of you. When you’re working with the level of people I’m working with – if they can’t play it, it’s not their fault.
So I’ve switched from saying ‘I know what the problem is, you’re doing it wrong’ to ‘I see that there is a problem’. I love solving problems, that’s what’s so much fun about studio conducting. But you don’t solve it by saying ‘listen to me I know how to solve this’. You need to say ‘hmm let me think. What conditions do I need to change to enable this to work better? Maybe the click is too slow. It’s 40bpm and we’ve got an intricate part. If we have two clicks per beat, it’s going to be easier to play’. Musicians will often suggest that eventually, but it’s better if I have already thought of that.
If a woodwind chord is out of tune, maybe a player is not having the best day. Swap a part and suddenly you’ve changed the layout of that chord in the woodwind section. They can hear each other better, fixed. Perhaps the choir are coming in after a really tricky bar, it’s a 7/8 bar and they always come in late. Why can’t they do it? The first thing I do is try and give a more emphatic beat, and do three movements on 1, 3, and 5. It’s still too late. Why don’t they come in together? Oh I know, there’s too much information coming at them. So I just give an upbeat 4 clicks before the chord, and just forget about the 7/8. And in they come altogether the first time. They couldn’t do it because I was giving them the wrong information.
You have to analyse in the moment and not get caught up in the fear, the stress and the ego. Being able to analyse as it’s going on is a really useful skill, because you can often solve problems that could have turned into a real drama with egos being bruised (in a professional sense). Don’t single people out. Perhaps the composer has written a chord that is just never going to sound good. You don’t say there is a problem with this chord (depending on how well you know the composer) you suggest, ‘could we maybe try changing this note to that note, or to this inversion, or make a small change to the orchestration?’ That’s all you can do.
If you do it in the right way, you don’t need to have a big discussion about it because in ten seconds you’re going to hear it and you can decide. If they don’t like it we can go back – it’s a spirit of play and discovery. If there’s an option of doing it two ways rather than have a big discussion about it, I like to demonstrate that as quickly as possible to the composer. It’s not a question of right or wrong. I’m very keen on that sort of problem solving and keeping my own God complex in check. If you’re the conductor of the orchestra – people are looking to you to direct and solve whatever problems arise to enable the best performance. It’s quite easy for that to go to your head when you do solve problems and get a good performance, or clutch victory out of what could have been a disaster.
I did a concert once where the soloist came in a couple of beats out, and I had to make a split second decision: do I go with what’s right or do I follow the person who’s going to be most exposed if it goes wrong? I thought that as the conductor I had to take the blame for whatever happened. I’m going to make the soloist look in the right – whatever was about to happen, they would not appear to be the problem. So I shifted the whole orchestra two beats in the space of one beat – all this happened within a tenth of a second. I did a ridiculous upbeat/downbeat, clearly in the wrong place, and looked at everyone around – a quick sweep around the room as if to say ‘come with me now, no questions asked, and we’ll be fine’. We did it and the soloist didn’t even notice that they’d skipped a beat! The alternative was to stick to my guns and the soloist come unstuck. There’s something you can take from that in terms of not taking the credit, but actually saying ‘if it goes wrong, it’s my fault’.
When you’re conducting, most of what you do doesn’t actually help the musicians – I think that’s the honest thing to say. Any conductor who thinks that the musicians played better all the time because of them is not being honest with themselves, because you inevitably do things that make it harder to play and that maybe make it your way but don’t necessarily make it better. What you’re doing is managing the orchestra to create an organism that works together. Sometimes you need to pay attention to some part of the organism that’s not functioning very well. You might think it is at the expense of another part of the organism but it’s fine because they don’t need you as much as the other part does at that time.
When you start out it’s formidably scary. The first time I ever stood in front of an orchestra I was 26 or 27. I’d never had any lessons and I was conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra for a recording session for George Martin.
WHAT?!
I was absolutely bricking it – I was so freaked! The only thing that saved me was the fact that I had orchestrated what I was conducting and the musicians recognised that they weren’t bad orchestrations. My conducting and my manner was so appalling – again, it was fear. That is not a good place to be in front of an orchestra. It’s incredibly daunting, so it’s not surprising we put up these barriers. But that’s exactly what doesn’t make good music. It definitely gets easier as you get older.
It’s been extremely interesting to hear how you find ways to break down any walls between you (or the composer) and the performers when something isn’t working. It sounds like you have a whole arsenal of ideas that you can call upon to make sure the situation doesn’t escalate.
Have you ever had a conductor say to you: 80% of what I do is psychology and 20% is music?
Yes, I have.
That
is what it is. The best conductors know that.
[1] For the interview with Gareth Valentine on Chicago, click here.
[2] Geoff, the engineer, was at the back of the Royal Albert Hall, tens of metres away. It was advantageous for him and Gavin (the conductor) to communicate during the performance given the complexity of the set up.
[3] Click here for the interview with Leonard Slatkin on Copland’s Symphony No. 3.