Composers and music editors have one of the toughest jobs in production, storytelling through noise and sound. How do they compose and how does it fit into a project?

Imagine the climax of a TV show, your protagonist faces their biggest obstacle, it’s an emotional dialogue, the culmination of several episodes of foreshadowing, and… it’s silent?

You may not think about the score of a TV series as you’re watching it, but there is a whole subsection of the industry that exists to complete auditory storytelling.

BAFTA winning composer Dan Jones, known for Channel 4’s Any Human Heart, said composers are, “making sure that we create a space that gets the audience as close to those characters as possible.

“There’s a lot of potential distractions and I feel slightly counterintuitively that it’s the job of film and television composers to help create a bubble where we can really focus on a story.”

The logistics

National Geographic score assistant Matthew Bouwmeester gave a rundown of the semantics of being a composer within a TV crew, and said, “Obviously on top of you as a composer there are different people who are higher ranking you in the hierarchy.” He referred to the director, the producers, an executive producer and if there is a bit of budget, they may have a music supervisor as well. “Your editor is probably one of your best friends because he’s in charge of making the cuts,” he said. 

An editor might come up with an idea for a scene that they want to present to the director so they show the musicians and ask if they can compose the music. “So that back and forth between you and the editor is really important because he’s in charge of the picture, with the director. You have to also navigate through, when you have different opinions coming from different people, creating a common ground… if you don’t understand an idea coming from someone just ask why? Have the conversation.”

Dealing with deadlines

His larger projects had some demanding deadlines, he said: “The National Geographic thing was a lot more intense. In my case, I was a score system meaning I was in charge of the whole cue sheet for all three episodes and it was absolute madness.”

He discussed the extent of the hours he worked, and how unpredictable they could be. Bouwmeester was essentially ‘on call’.

He said: “For one episode it took me four hours just to figure it out because I had to listen back to everything, and I did that for three episodes. I’d get a new version of the cut of the episode every five days or so every week. So it was kind of intense but manageable. It was pretty much: I work as soon as it came through. If it came through at two pm I would need to have it ready by the next morning.”

More artistic freedom

Bouwmeester’s experience was fast-paced and unique. Less preparation can cause a more hectic workflow. Dan Jones remarked that he is grateful when he gets more time for artistic inspiration, “more often than not these days, you get the phone call before they’ve started shooting so that you can start developing ideas. And that’s really important for me. I have quite a high shooting ratio. That’s to say I like to write a lot and then narrow it down.

“So I start writing as soon as I’ve read the script. And what I try to do is write too much, so I can then be selective about what actually ends up on the project. As soon as we start getting assemblies from the edit suite, obviously I’ll be writing musical ideas with specific characters in mind, with specific emotional impacts in mind.

Jones has just finished a series coming out on ITV called Code of Silence. He has co-composed it with Dame Evelyn Glennie, who’s a world-famous percussionist and composer and a pioneer of solo percussionists. She’s commissioned more than 100 classical works.

For the ITV project, Jones said, “we started recording before they’d even started shooting some of the episodes, but we knew from the script that there’s going to be a lot of suspense. 

“So without having the picture in front of us, there are certain things you can do. And then when we get the assemblies and the rough cuts… I would go back and re-record with her to add more fine detail on top.”

Working with music editors

Jones and Glennie worked alongside music editor Simon Birch. He would translate the improvisations that the composers recorded to fit the picture itself.

Birch said: “I don’t really know how similar my particular experience is as a music editor versus other music editors. As I understand it, most music editors will be working in the dub (post-production audio editing) with the mixes right at the end of the production.

“But in my case, I’m working throughout with Dan right from the very beginning.”

His work on the score is slightly tedious, but essential to aid the artistic development of Jones and Glennie.

He said: “I was working through hours, literally, hours of improvisations, trying to find bits that would translate well into music for TV. So it’s the case of going through all those and picking out bits that might work and then doing some experimental treatments on certain things.”

“I think of it a bit like mining.”

“The way that I work with Dan, he likes to sort of compose freely and not get too bogged down in working to picture unless he really has to. It’s often a more fruitful way of working, because if you’re working to picture all the time, it can become a bit contrived.” 

How do we get there?

Getting into composing can be a happy accident at times. If you compose a smaller project, it can lead to something a little bigger, and so forth. 

Jones recalled, “ I bumped into somebody in Bristol, and weirdly, the person I met was writing radio jingles, which I have to say really, really didn’t interest me. I had lots of pretentious ambitions to write big orchestral scores. Yet this guy had got himself a feature film score, but he said he could only write radio jingles. He asked would I help him? So I did.”

Ambitious dreams have to start somewhere, and Jones’s hard work on this feature film proved fruitful.

He said: “Interestingly, the sound team working on it was one of the top sound companies in the country. They’re called Wounded Buffalo.

“They could hear I was trying, you know, this youngster working out of his parents’ spare bedroom. And they put my music up in front of some of the most interesting and potentially influential directors working in Britain in documentaries at the time. And I got hired by three of these directors a few weeks later.”

Advice from the pros

“So, in other words, because I was doing it with passion, and I believed in it, and I was trying to learn. I got rewarded for the effort and ended up working on a series for Channel 4. I think it’s about just trying to focus on what you’re doing at any given time and do it as well as you can.”

Bouwmeester had given similar sentiments, advising prospective composers to, “just do your thing. It sounds very cliché and silly but just do the thing that it’s true to yourself because I think a natural cycle of a composer is we start out by emulating someone else. A bigger composer than we are, that we like and we aspire to be and we’re inspired by. Then with time we have to sort of grow out of it and go our own way.

“Don’t care about it that much. I mean get your production on point, get your composition on point, but don’t feel like you’re in a competition because you really aren’t.”

“The only person you should be in a competition with is yourself from yesterday.”

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