A summer camp with a difference in the US has lined up some big names to advise aspiring film composers on the demanding art of creating a film score, writes Jocelyn Clarke
ON A BLAZING HOT July afternoon, 6,000 feet above sea level in the middle of the Wasatch mountain range in Utah, six composers are watching a scene from a film in a large air-conditioned screening room in the Sundance Resort. Outside, people are sitting in the shaded porch of the general store eating ice cream or wandering around the small shops of the resort - with the more adventurous careening down sun-baked ski slopes on mountain bikes - but inside, the composers are spending most of their time in the screening room, taking notes and listening carefully to how the music under the action and dialogue transforms the meaning and impact of each scene with every new note they hear. And they are all hoping to learn how to do it as well, or better.
Every year during the last two weeks of July and the first week of August, six composers are invited to participate as fellows in the Film Music Lab, a summer camp cum artist atelier for aspiring film composers, which is organised by actor and director Robert Redford's Sundance Institute. The only programme of its kind in the world, the lab offers its six fellows a complete immersion in both the art and craft of film scoring for two-and-a-half weeks. They are encouraged and challenged to write original music for scenes in new films and documentaries under the close mentorship of the lab's heavyweight group of advisers, nearly all of whom are award-winning Hollywood and international film composers, and the lab's affable fortysomething director, Peter Golub.
"Music schools with film music programmes do not provide the opportunity to learn directly about the process of collaborating with a director.
"Likewise, film schools teach about many of the components of film-making - writing, directing, lighting, camera, editing, acting - but seem to leave out music. Perhaps music is left out because it is perceived to be a special and forbidding language, one that, if you don't know anything about it, can seem beyond reach. We specifically believe that a director does not require a grasp of music and its technicalities, that in fact a director is better talking to a composer in dramatic terms. Music is the last part of the post-production schedule, but yet it has a huge impact on how the film is perceived by an audience."
Like all of the Sundance Institute's other labs - feature film, documentary, shorts, and theatre (where I have participated as a dramaturge and a creative adviser) - the film music lab's emphasises process rather than product, and the six fellows are continually pushed to experiment and to take risks with their music. According to Golub, a composer for both concert hall and film ( The Laramie Projectand The Great Debaters), they are "encouraged to try new approaches, to go out on a limb. A 'failure' today may prove to be the thing one learns most from tomorrow."
Although highly-accomplished musicians and composers in their own fields, the lab's fellows have little or no experience writing music for film - previous fellows have included Will Calhoun (Living Color), Grant Lee Phillips (Grant Lee Buffalo) Stan Ridgway (Wall Of Voodoo) and jazz composer Don Byron.
EACH COMPOSER is given a workstation with up-to-date computer equipment in one of the production trailers behind the screening room to write and record music; they are also required to bring instruments and play on their own and each other's pieces.
"The lab has a dual mission - to provide a group of talented composers with valuable first-hand experience composing for film, and to enhance the musical understanding of independent film-makers participating in the Sundance Institute's film programme. We saw a gap in the training both of composers and filmmakers and, as far as we could see, there was no programme in which composers interested in learning about film scoring could work directly with film-makers."
In the first week of the lab, Golub assigns the composers the same three scenes to score from an already existing movie, with two days to complete each of the three scenes. After each deadline the composers gather for a group discussion of their work under the guidance of Golub and his creative advisers - film composers Thomas Newman ( American Beauty, Wall-E), James Newton Howard (The Sixth Sense, The Dark Knight), George S Clinton ( Wild Things, The Love Guru), and Carter Burwell ( Fargo, No Country For Old Men) as well as contemporary composers John Adams and Osvaldo Golijov. Each creative adviser also presents a selection of their own music and clips and discusses with the composers their individual approaches to scoring, and to writing for opera and theatre.
"The benefit is not only in having this critique from a master composer but also in seeing and hearing the different approaches to the same footage. A good film composer needs to have their own musical voice, while at the same time adapting to the needs of the film.
"You must be able to collaborate, take notes, make changes, work within the vision of the film-maker - all the while somehow having it be consistent with your musical voice. You also need to work on tight deadlines."
In the second and third weeks of the lab, Golub pairs the composers with the directors from the feature film and documentary labs - both were instrumental in the early development stage of Reservoir Dogs, Boys Don't Cry, and Half Nelson, as well as the recent Oscar-winning documentary Born Into Brothels. The composers meet with their directors to review and discuss the scenes that were shot during the feature film lab and the raw footage of the as-yet-unfinished documentaries.
Under tight deadlines, the composers write and record new original music for both which is then presented for a group critique with Golub and his creative advisers - a group which includes directors as varied as John Waters, Ron Shelton and Lawrence Kasdan.
Sometimes, the critiques continue over dinner in a large food tent behind the screening room, or else at the Owl Bar down by the general store - Sundance lore has it that Redford's greatest achievement is not in his acting or directing, but in getting a liquor licence in southern Utah.
From the lab's inception in 1998 (David Newman ran an earlier composer's lab from 1986 to 1989), Golub saw the pairing of composers with directors as the most important aspect of the Film Music Lab. A successful collaboration between director and composer can produce some of the most enduring and memorable cinematic moments in cinema - Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann in the shower in Psycho, Steven Spielberg and John Williams in the sea in Jaws, Sam Mendes and Thomas Newman on the ceiling in American Beauty. But it can also be an extremely volatile relationship that requires a lot of negotiation and maintenance between director and composer from one project to the next. Despite their hugely-successful collaboration on The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Peter Jackson suddenly replaced composer Howard Shore with James Newtown Howard in the last weeks of post-production on King Kong over "differing creative aspirations".
"We're trying to give people an opportunity to listen to each other, to collaborate. Music is so subjective: one person's tension or discomfort is another person's horror. Composers have to learn to listen and interpret what the film-maker says in an effort to realise the world of the film. Directors need to learn how to point the composer in the right direction, how to hear what the composer comes up with and, while getting out of the way, steer the music in the right direction for the film."
The sixtysomething composer Clinton and éminence grise of the lab's creative adviser, always offers the lab fellows the following advice: "I suggest that all composers develop people skills. It's a given in this business that you'll have to work with sociopaths, egomaniacs, and fools of every stripe, so it's important to know how to deal with them."
OVER THE LAST DECADE, the Film Music Lab's emphasis on its composers' creative process and voice has proved highly successful, with the majority of fellows continuing to compose for both films and documentaries - two recent fellows are Tyler Bates (Slither) and Nick Laird-Clowes (Battle for Haditha). Since he sat 10 years ago with his very first group of composers in the large air-conditioned screening room on a blazing hot July afternoon, Golub's guiding principle for running the Film Music Lab has remained the same.
"I want to hear better and more surprising music in films. I want to see the boundaries between different kinds of music broken down. In devising a curriculum for the Lab, I thought that if it were really interesting and inspiring to me it would be that way for the participants."
