Week 2 Thursday & Friday

Thursday:

Ear Training:

Last time we talked about ear training, I mentioned how 'not exciting it is'. That remains true. However I did well enough on my entrance exam that I do not have to attend class as long as I can pass the final. I therefore plan on attending each day, I can use the practice. Ear training is actually quite important, it's how Mozart wrote, his ear was so well trained he could simply write down what he heard in his head. Of course, he was an anomaly. 

Some modern composers can write purely from ear, many train forever to fine tune their ear, while still others rely on the piano or other instrument to verify what they hear in their head is in fact what they think it is. Beethoven was well know for banging the shit out of his piano while writing, trying to get it perfect. It worked, that guy was a machine. Glen Frey claims he learned to write songs by listening to his downstairs neighbor, Jackson Browne, make tea and bang out 'Doctor My Eyes' on his piano for hours. 

I feel like I have a decent ear. I can hear chord progressions pretty easily, it's what makes it easy for me to hear a song once and be able to play it back on Ruby (my keyboard, yes, it's a personal relationship many musicians have, BB King had Lucile. I don't consider her an instrument so much as I do a collaborator, I can do what I do because she is who she is.) I may not get it note for note, but I can fake it well enough you know what song it is and somebody can sing along with it. 

I do alright with melodic dictation, if I hear a melody I can write it down, provided it's not some crazy chromatic thing or a 12-tone row. Hey, a man has his limits. I get better through practice which is why I attend a class I basically 'CLEPed' out of. 

Conducting: 

Conducting can be a power trip, many conductors are known as being assholes because of their power complex when working with an ensemble. I can see how that happens if you're not conscious of it all the time. When I was in college, I was the doorman for the Broadway Theater in SLC. I found it an exercise in human behavior to see  how people bowed to perceived authority. "I'm sorry, but you have to wait behind the rope before I can let you into the theater." And they'd do it, without question. They stayed within the velvet boundary until I lifted the rope. That was a power trip.

Conducting an ensemble, if done correctly, is more symbiotic in nature. It's give and take, you ask the ensemble to do something, and they respond. You respond to their response, and they do back, and so on until the piece is over. I've heard many people ask, "Why do you need a conductor? Don't they just wave their arms?" Well, yes, they wave their arms. What you don't see if you're in the audience is the conductor's facial expressions, the nuance of the 'arm waving'. You don't feel the way the music affects your neighbor and how you respond to that, and how they respond to you, and how the conductor responds to the ensemble, and how the ensemble responds to that, et cetera. 

This week, we were introduced by the instructor to a YouTube video of Leonard Bernstein conducting Haydn's 88th Symphony. Bernstein is widely regarded as one of, if not the best conductor ever. There is room for debate on that topic but I will not debate it here. Watch this 4-minute clip of him conducting, he doesn't move his arms at all, he influences the musicians solely though facial expressions.

Bernstein - Haydn's Symphony 88 

Some of you may say, "That's a parlor trick, he's not really affecting the way they play." Those of you who have played in a performance ensemble will know that is no joke. He is relaying important information by using nothing more than his head. It's entirely possible for a group of professional musicians to play Sousa's 'The Stars and Stripes Forever' without a conductor. You would never get any group through Beethoven's '9th Symphony' without one. 

 Finale:

'Finale OG'. That's what they called me when they learned that I have been using this notation software since version 1 came out in 1988. With the exception of the founder and 2 instructors, nobody else associated with my program was even born yet. I remember purchasing it when it came out, it came on floppies, 2 3 1/5 inch floppies to be exact. My street cred shot through the roof because I actually worked with floppies back in the 'day' as they say.

Back in the dark ages of music notation software, you needed a special interface to connect the MIDI style connectors from the music keyboard, to the weird-ass port on the back of the computer. Fortunately for me, the lovely young lady I was dating at the time, who later became and still is my fabulous wife, worked at a music store and thoughtfully procured me one of these expensive yet necessary devices. Now all you need is a USB cable. 

Friday:

Applied Composition & Theory:

In college, everybody thought I was nuts for liking music theory. Most other music majors 'suffered' through it, but I dug it. It's my soul's natural language. Once I had taken all the undergrad theory classes available, I got special permission from the instructor to audit the Master and Doctorate level theory classes. I couldn't get enough, I was insatiable. The Doctorate level class consisted of the instructor, myself, and 2 grad students who were as old as my father. We spent our time doing full-scale harmonic and structural analysis of Beethoven's Piano Sonatas. It's a drug, I'm not kidding! As much as a human being who is not Beethoven can understand about Moonlight Sonata, I understand. I can't find them at the moment, but when I do, I'll post a scan of one of the score pages just to give you an idea of just how out there this shit is. 

As far as class today is concerned, I hit a new point, we covered topics that though not entirely new to me, have not been explored much in my years as a composer. Which is simultaneously thrilling and terrifying!  The thing to keep in mind is the fundamental difference between 'art music' such as Bach, Beethoven, Bernstein, Bobby Brown and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. and 'commercial music' such as pretty much everything that has ever been written for a movie, documentary, television show of broadway musical, is that commercial music must be acceptable and friendly to the non-musically literate members of society. 

I hope that doesn't come across as condescending, that certainly is not what I intended. With art music, a composer can pretty much do whatever the hell they like, and if the audience doesn't like it, well, they deal with that in their own way. If you want more detail about this topic, research Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring' and the affect that piece had when it was premiered. Visual art aficionados in general don't like things they don't understand, they like predictable music in their entertainment. As a budding media composer, my job is to write exactly the music the director wants (or in some cases what they think they want). 

So the class material I'm talking about is a set of 'suggestions' to follow when you need to create 4 minutes of music before tomorrow morning. Basically a set of harmonic and melodic tools one can use to create appropriate-sounding music for a movie or to show. These 'suggestions' are not in the same vein as topics covered in basic university music theory and composition classes. So yeah, they are new and new things can be scary, however, it is thrilling to be exposed to new ideas and subjects!

Week 2 Monday - Wednesday

Monday:

This was my first day of class without the commute. So much better! 

Foundations of Film Scoring:

More in depth look at Hollywood and the film industry. Most important to the composer is the Spotting Session. The music team and production team meet with a version of the film (Preferably 'locked' which means there will be no more timing edits made to the print) and discuss which scenes need music and why.

The best example I can give you of the results of a spotting session are in Forrest Gump. Watch the scene where Forrest is called home because Momma is dying. As Forrest and Momma are talking, notice when you first start to hear music. Ask yourself, 'Why did it come in there and not earlier or later?' The answer to that question is found in the spotting session between Robert Zemeckis and Alan Silvestri.

Film music can have a profound effect on the viewer experience. It can be used to support emotion, redirect motion, support pacing, or define a location or era. It might do one or more of these at the same time. If the actor(s) on screen are not doing a good job of emoting, music can help bring the emotional context up or down to adjust. If the pacing is off, rather than reshoot the scene, there's musical trickery that can be employed to speed it up or slow it down. 

Music is commonly used to define an era, just watch any contemporary western to hear examples. It is also used to define locations. If you've watched either Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, you'll notice that many geographical locations have their own theme music, the most prominent being the Shire and Rohan. When those locations are on screen, you usually hear the theme music, even if characters are talking about that location ,you will hear the music. When Frodo and Sam mention the Shire, you hear the Shire theme is some variation.

If you have any doubt about music's ability to change the way you feel about a movie, just watch Jaws with the sound turned down. John Williams straight up saved that movie! 

There are basically 4 'types; of music you hear in a film:

• Dramatic Underscore - Raiders of the Lost Ark, any MCU movie, etc
• Source Music - If there is a football game on screen and you can hear but not see a marching band, that is source music. Same as with a radio, if you hear music that is obviously coming from a radio that is source music 
• Songs - 'My Heart Will Go On' from Titanic or 'Kiss From a Rose' from Batman Forever are 'songs'. Well, they're obviously dongs, but in a film score sense, they are music with words that are sung that are not performed by onscreen actors. 'My Heart Will go On' was specifically written for Titanic by James Horner and Will Jennings.  "Kiss from a Rose' was written by Seal and only used in Batman Forever, not specifically written for the movie.
• Production Music - My Fair Lady or any musical for that matter are examples of production music, as long as onscreen actors are singing / playing the music, it's production. 

 Applied Composition:

Harmonic vocabulary and richness. I'm going to get a bit nerdy here but I hope I explain it in a way those with no music background can understand.

Below are the chords available in the key of C:

There are 7 possible chords in any given key without 'borrowing' them. Above each chord is a letter,:

• T = Tonic, chords that sound most at rest, there is nothing going on with that chord that compels a listener to want to move away from it, very stable.
• SD = Sub Dominant, chords that are less stable than Tonic, there is something about the chord that the listener wants to move away from, this is the state of some tension and is how forward motion is created.
• D = Dominant, chords that are the least stable and want to 'resolve' or move to a stable chord, this is the state of most tension. 

Music is propelled forward through the use of tension and release, this creates a sense of movement or motion. Tonic chords move to Sub Dominant chords which in turn move to Dominant chords, then back to Tonic (at rest, some tension, most tension, at rest) 

Most common 'three chord' music makes use of the '1' chord, or C Maj7 in this example, the '4' chord or F Maj7 and the '5' chord, G7. You can use the 1, 4, and 5 in any key to the same effect. This is an example of 1-4-5-1 or at rest-some tension-most tension-at rest. However, hearing those same three chords used over and over again is tedious, hence the negative connotation of a '3 chord song'. 

This is where 'Functional Substitution' come in. In the music example above, there are 3 chords with a 'function' of Tonic, C Maj7, E min7 and A min7. There are 2 with Sub Dominant Function, D min7 and F Maj7, and 2 with Dominant Function, G7 and B min7(b5). Chords with the same function are interchangeable, which is how you get variety in music without changing the T-SD-D drive that pushes music forward.

So if you have this progression:  C Maj7 - F Maj7 - G7 - C Maj7 - you have the following functions: Tonic - Sub Dominant - Dominant - Tonic.  

To add some variety or flavor to those changes, you can use the following (just one example of many possibilities) :  A min 7 - D min 7 - B min 7(b5) - E min 7. Same functions as before (Tonic - Sub Dominant - Dominant - Tonic) but now with different harmony. 

 

Tuesday:

Film Music History:

I'm really starting to like this class! This week we watched The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) staring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, music by Erich Korngold. I was never in to movies made before 1970, they were just not on my radar. This film is amazing! Other than the fact that it 'looks' like it was made in the 30's, I would have never known. The score is as good as anything John Williams has produced. Korngold is considered one of the 3 'Grandfathers of Film Scoring' the others being Max Steiner and Alfred Newman. 

Now I get to watch Citizen Kane staring Orson Welles with music composed by Bernard Herrmann, who, if you follow my Patreon Musicast you will remember, also wrote the music for Hitchcock's North by Northwest. Citizen Kane was Herrmann's first film score. 

It's easy now for me to see the influence Korngold, Steiner, Newman and Herrmann have on recent film composers, they really set the foundations for what a dramatic film score should sound like!  

Week 1 - Weekend Wakeup Call

 Where did I leave off? Oh yeah! Thursday.

Thursday:

Foundations in Film Scoring:

The basics of film scoring and how it works in hollywood. Members of the filmmaking team, job descriptions, how being a composer relates to the music director and other members of the music team. 

How the role of composer relates to the director and her team, what it's like to have a music spotting session (the production team meets with the music team to map out where there will be music, where there won't, and the emotional context of that music).  This is my favorite class! The teacher is another total child of the 80's and we get along quite well.  He's a huge John Hughes fan as well as the Zemeckis / Silvestri team. 

Conducting: Nothing exciting happened in conducting today. It's not really an exciting topic. 

Friday:

Applied Composition:

This was 4-hours of advanced music theory! OMG, I've died and gone to nirvana! This is probably the most difficult subject for non-musically-literate individuals to grasp.  Engineers talk about how the Heisenberg compensator interacts with the rasamafrat dohickymabob. Artists talk about, well, whatever artists talk about. Composers talk about how using a modaly-constructed diatonic melody over chord changes FMaj7 - D-7- C7 - FMaj7 is functionality related to A-7 - FMaj7 - E-7(b5) - D-7.  

These are my favorite conversations and being in a room with 10 students, a teacher, and the roving director is the best part of the week!

Saturday / Sunday:

Holy shit! 

I forget how much outside-of-class time it takes to be in school. I was never a great student, (Lori can attest to this, ask us about the Clearfield High School - Crown Billiards exchange program) most of the classes I've had since 10th grade are music, I can do those. I never developed time management skills to handle non music classes and homework (even though I did get an online Masters of Science in Instructional Design, that's a blog of its own). 

Sunday night at 6:34 PM and I am finally done with a weeks homework. Noted, that I spent 16 hours this week neither in class nor doing homework; my commute consumed that precious resource like Pavarotti eating a Ballpark Frank. In addition to learning all my music stuff, I am learning how to be a successful student. This is a lot for a 53-year old non-traditional student to deal with. 

This weekend was also a technology weekend. School sends me home with a Mac Mini and an iLok (USB key that holds licenses for multiple music applications such as Finale, Digital Performer, all the software I need for school). I now have my iMac Pro, my school-issued Mac Mini, 2 monitors, 2 keyboards, 2 mice and an 88-key piano at my desk. It took the better part of Saturday to hook all that up. 

 

Week 1 - Orientation, Classes Start & The Commute From Hell

What a crazy week! Twenty hours of class and 15 hours of commute. First I'll tell you a bit about the reason behind the crazy commute, then I'll get into some actual cool school stuff. There will be some technobabble, I will explain as I go. This is going to be a mind dump and there may not be much cohesion in the presentation. If you have specific questions, please ask in a comment, I'm happy to answer.

Classes started Monday September 18th. The original plan when we first moved to Seattle was to find a place close enough with a reasonable commute to school. Our apartment in Burien was about a 25 minute drive from campus. Not bad. Unfortunately, as the end of our lease approached, we started looking for a new place, and since our son was going to move to Seattle to live with us, we needed a 4 bedroom (or three with a big enough living room I could set up my studio). Well, places to rent meeting the criteria within 30 minutes of school are not cheap. So we looked to buy instead of rent and Fife was as close as we could get on our budget. Fife is a mere 30 miles from school, however, thanks to traffic on I-5, is a 2-hour commute to and an hour from.

Luckily, SFI offers a low-residency option. The first week of the year, plus the last week of each quarter requires an on-campus residency, the rest is all taught via Zoom. This was week 1 so I had to drive to school each morning. Let's just say the week could not be over quickly enough.

Despite the shitty commute, classes have been amazing! I can't believe how good it feels to be back in school and being all nerdy about music!

Here is a breakdown of the week:

Monday: Orientation, there are 10 students in the program this year, took a campus tour, (The entire music department is a single classroom in the only building on campus - Smol! so the tour didn't last long) here's the syllabi, here are the places to eat, don't eat at that place, smol fridge (keep it clean), coffee here, garbage, recycle, don't park at the QFC or they will tow your car.

Tuesday: Finale & Conducting / Ear Training

Wednesday: Digital Performer & Film Music History

Thursday: Foundations in Film Scoring & Conducting

Friday: Applied Composition & Theory

 

Alright, details.

Monday: Not much more I can say.

Tuesday:

Finale: 

Finale is a music notation software. Basically, play the keyboard (hopefully with more finesse than Susan Dey) notes appear on screen; clicky clicky click, add some other notation stuff, layout the staves so everything is legible, check your work, check your work again, have somebody else check your work, check it one last time, print, and viola! Sheet music. 

Notation software is a must in the film scoring world. Unless you are John Williams, you have to do your own music prep, which means after you compose, and edit, and orchestrate your masterpiece, you have to create sheet music for the studio musicians. These people get paid north of $300 an hour so you cannot afford to waste time when recording. The music must be meticulously prepared and easy to read. 

If you are not a musician, pretend you are for just a moment. When you prepare to perform, you are almost always given sheet music well in advance of the performance. You can practice, ask questions, write notes on the music, you spend hours rehearsing and preparing to perform. Studio musicians don't get that, they don't even get to see the sheet music until they show up for the gig. Most of the film / tv music you hear is recorded in 1-2 takes. They literally record as they are reading the music for the first time. So the sheet music has to be perfect, clean, easy to read, and flawless. Nothing makes a music producer turn red in the face faster than a wrong note in the flute part. Each click of the clock costs somebody money. The fact they can perform and record without practicing is why they are paid so well.

Conducting: 

One of the benefits of the program is I will get to conduct the various ensembles during recording sessions. Conducting a studio orchestra is different than conducting a performing ensemble. In a performing ensemble, the conductor can manipulate the tempo (speed) of the performance at will. He might play a passage one tempo during rehearsal, and change it slightly during a performance, the musicians watch the baton to see the tempo the conductor wants. In a studio setting, the conductor and musicians all wear headphones and play along to a pre-recorded click track. 

Let's talk about timing for a minute. Film and television scores are specifically written to set an emotional tone for the viewer. In most movies, the emotional tone changes fairly rapidly, from suspenseful, to tragic, to mournful, all in a matter of minutes. Film music is written to change when the on-screen action or emotional tone changes, and there is a strict tolerance when the music changes. In order for the music to change along with the picture, sudden changes in tone and tempo are common and set in stone, there is no room for personal interpretation on the part o the conductor. A particular emotional tone lasts for a very precise number of minutes, seconds and frames. The pre-recorded clicks follow that map perfectly, the conductor basically aids the ensemble in maintaining volume ad balance, and can indicate style, but the tempo is the tempo is the tempo.

Ear Training:

An important skill for any composer to have is the ability to identify chords, harmony, rhythms and melodies simply by hearing them. We do a lot of dictation, teacher plays intervals, chords or a melody and we have to write it down. This is a necessary evil, not particularly fun to do. Like anything else, the more you do it the better you get. 

Wednesday: 

Digital Performer:

Digital Performer is a DAW, or Digital Audio Workstation. It does many things; records and edits audio, has basic notation capabilities, but the aspect that is most useful to a film composer is its ability to sync music to film. Import a video file and record music while the video plays. It allows you to see in real time how the music lines up with the onscreen emotion or action. DAWs are fun to play with, you can import existing audio, record sounds from an instrument or voice, or play new music into it using a variety of sampled sounds. Mix everything together with the video and bang! you have a movie.

 Film Music History:

This class rocks! You watch movies and talk about how affective the music works with the film. Since this was the first week, we only watched clips instead of entire movies. The class is taught chronologically so we watched clips from Nosferatu and Metropolis to get started. NExt week, we will screen a full movie then spend 2 hours discussing the music. This makes the music nerd in me very happy! 

The best part is that even though there is a general consensus among composers whether or not a score is affective, there are always different opinions when it comes to the nuances. It's similar to watching 'At The Movies' (if you are old enough to remember Siskel and Ebert). There can be rational for opinions as to why a particular cue (piece of music) works ro doesn't work. 

Since my schedule is the same every week this quarter, I'll save my thoughts on Thursday and Friday for the next post. By then there will more personable stuff to share, I'l talk more about my partners in crime as well. All the teachers are good, some are amazing!

 

 

 

Passion & Purpose

In 1977, I sat in a sold out darkened theater waiting to see Star Wars. I heard the 20th Century Fox Fanfare and the screen went blank. Suddenly, the title sequence erupted onto the screen and the audience was blasted with a raucous orchestral chord, signaling the opening of John Williams' infamous score, as well as opening the future to the most exciting, emotional and eclectic film music ever conceived. I was totally blown away! 

That event set in motion my musical journey. I knew nothing about the music or film industries, all I did knew is I wanted to be involved in the creation of such music. 

I spent my formative years playing Saxophone and Piano and listening to every film score I could lay my hands on. I had drive and passion, yet was unfocused. I didn't even think about college until I was a senior in high school. I was the first member of my family to attend college and didn't have guidance on what that would look like. Fortunately for me, my high school music teacher took me under his wing and made sure I was registered for college shortly after graduating. 

Precious few of the courses I took in college prepared me for a future in film scoring, it simply wasn't a focus of the composition department. However, life went on as I waded through uncharted musical waters. I met success as a Marching Band arranger, working for many of my fellow music students as they became music teachers. 

Then I met a gentleman who had produced an independent film and was looking for someone to write an original score for it. It was an unpaid gig but I took it anyway. It was worth it for the experience as well as being able to see my name on screen at the premiere at the Tower Theater in SLC. 

Not long after, I discovered a program in Seattle (The Pacific Northwest Film Scoring Program) run by Hollywood Film Composer Hummie Mann. At the time, it was a mere certificate program, yet was hugely popular and did a fantastic job of introducing students to the ins and outs of the film music industry. I attended a 2-week intensive program in 2009 and ended up taking a weekly course for 2 years, traveling to Seattle from Salt Lake City each Wednesday while holding down a full-time job and raising a family.

The 2-year program was far more instructive in aspects of film composing with the final project being the music students teamed up with film students to score some or all of their student films. I watched as Hummie conducted a 30 piece volunteer orchestra record my contribution to a student film.

As amazing of an experience as that was, it was not enough to secure me work in the industry and simply packing up the family and moving to Los Angeles to 'beat the street' was too scary a proposition. I had a good career with steady pay and benefits. Giving that up to 'maybe' break into the industry was just too frightening a prospect. I figured my dream would die with one student film and one indy under my belt. Not bad, just not how I dreamed things would turn out.

Fast forward to 2021, a year into the pandemic. My wife and I decided to rent our house, buy an RV and travel the country for a year. After pulling our daughter out of school, we traveled the country from San Diego to Seattle, Moab to Virginia Beach and Washington DC. We spent October at a beautiful park in Oceanside California; one of our favorite places we stayed. Jennetta and I sat in the resort's hot tub talking about the amazing adventure we were on. By this point, the  PNWFSP has become an accredited degree program offered at the Seattle Film Institute. Its 10 month highly intensive Masters Program turned out graduates who immediately went to work in Film, Television, Video Games and Sound Design. It is rated the #2 school in the world for film composers, right behind USC.

As we soaked our pandemic cares away, I told Jennetta that I was giving serious thought to applying to the program and asked her what she thought. Without hesitation she said 'yes! it's time for you to follow your dream'. So I applied, was accepted, and in July of 2022 relocated to Seattle. We took a year to establish residency and for Jenn to find a job as she was now going to be supporting the family as I went back to school full time.

Classes started September 18th 2023. The class load is extensive and heavy, I will be instructed in all industry-standard software, theory, orchestration, conducting, songwriting, marketing, business and contracts, and everything else needed to navigate Hollywood and the film music industry. Over the course of 10 months, I will compose and either produce or record 10 individual cues for existing student films. At least 2 of these will be for orchestra. This time however, it will be me on the conductor's podium, conducting 55 professional union musicians as they perform my music!

The journey begins!

New to this

 Never ran a blog before, however, I'm committed to documenting my experiences of the Masters Program I'm undertaking this year. More to come...