Although the word is pronounced the same, saying “composer” in front of someone’s name means different things to different people. Ad jingle writers are not the same as film soundtrack writers, who are not the same as indie singer-songwriters, who are a world apart from opera composers. Or are they?
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We all feel a difference between musics — and the people who create them — in our bones. I think it’s safe to say that someone writing music for its own sake — music that doesn’t need to reference anything visual or kinetic — is working differently from someone who has to collaborate with another medium.
But when you look seriously at the process as well as the intention of musical collaboration in ballet, opera, theatre, film, or any other cross-disciplinary effort, the person who has to musically underpin a 60-second commercial is doing exactly the same thing as Giuseppe Verdi or John Williams.
Their objective is to convey atmosphere and mood in a way that will aurally complement, not contract or obscure, what our eyes see.
Those of us who focus primarily on art music don’t spend a lot of time studying or appreciating commercial collaborators. But their work is no easier, no less fraught with obstacles and compromises. And their success, when it happens, is no less satisfying.
These thoughts come from today’s Oscar nominations, in which Winniped native Mychael Danna has received a Best Original Score nod for Life of Pi.
What makes this particular film score so special is how it magically moves from idiom to idom — Western and Indian, with others mixed in — without sounding forced or fake.
This is what I imagine the indigenous music of a truly cosmopolitan city — multicultural, like Toronto, but where the cultures blend and cross-pollinate with more ease — might sound like.
Did the faculty at University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music have any inkling of what might one day become of their Glenn Gould Composition Prize winner of 1985? It’s highly unlikely. But it’s nice when things turn out the way they have for Danna, who has also received a Golden Globe nomination and many other critical accolades for Life of Pi.
Danna’s list of film credits is huge, starting with Atom Egoyan’s Family Viewing in 1987.
It took that quarter-century of experience to be able to come up with Life of Pi‘s soundtrack.
In an interview with Britain’s Classical FM before Christmas, Danna described a bit of the project, on which he spent a whole year.
He was worked with filmmaker-director Ang Lee several times since The Ice Storm in 1997. Lee called Danna, insisting that Pi was a film he had been born to write the score for — Lee had been present at Danna’s traditional Hindu wedding 11 years ago.
The filmmaker was looking for someone who could blend Western and non-Western styles and instruments seamlessly. Listen carefully, and, in the opening scenes, set in a French colonial sector of India, one hears an accordion playing Indian melodies and sitars playing French melodies.
Later on, we get an English boys’ choir singing in Sanskrit and Tibetan choir singing in Latin — perfectly reflecting Pi’s eclectic spirituality.
This is a very complex operation, yet never comes across as such.
“The music could not get too conceptual and too deeply engrossed in all the larger conceptual issues the film is dealing with,” Danna explained to his interviewer. “The film worked best when the music, while acknowledging those things, ranged above it as an emotional guide to Pi’s journey — his physical journey as well as his emotional journey. And given the richness of the experience as a whole, the music had to be simple at its core.”
Danna said that one of the keys to making the collaboration work was to exclude everything else.
He said on Classical FM, “We worked on this film inside a very intense bubble. You have to immerse yourself like that to get through work like this. Physically, it was a bubble in that we were all working together on the Fox lot in Los Angeles for the last four months.”
Danna’s room was on the Fox lot, as was the recording studio. “Nothing existed outside of it,” said the composer. He didn’t read news or watch TV. At night, he would dream about scenes and musical ideas.
“Sometimes I would wake up more tired than when I went to sleep,” he recalled.
“Film music is part of a larger experience,” said Danna. “It’s a powerful synergy between all these different people and different crafts.”
How exactly is that different from Thomas Adès writing his opera The Tempest, or Igor Stavinsky writing the score for Le Sacre du printemps?
It pays better. But what else?
Here is the opening lullaby — the first music Danna created for Life of Pi. He wrote and recorded it with Bombay Jayashri in Mumbai:
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
