I’m forever telling composers to stop listening to music.
That sounds insane, I know. But here’s the thing…
The primary purpose when it comes to scoring a movie is to serve the picture and the audience.
How can you expect to do that if you spend your entire time thinking about music?
We don’t listen to movies. We experience them.
I stumbled across this quotation from David Perell that we can learn a lot from as composers:
“The paradox of reading: The books you read will profoundly change you even though you’ll forget the vast majority of what you read.”
David Perell
The same can be applied to movies. To rephrase Perell:
The movies we watch will profoundly change our film scoring even though we’ll forget the vast majority of what we watch.
What can we learn from this?
First, don’t listen to movies. Watch them. Experience them. Watch as many as you can and embrace the fact that each and every movie (or TV series) you’re watching will profoundly change how you approach scoring.
Yes, you should still analyse specific scenes, learning about filmmaking devices and concentrating on how music has been used, but don’t get stuck on individual cues. Go deep, but also go wide. Analyse as many as you can. Once you’ve spent some time on a scene, move onto another.
Accept that you won’t remember everything that you’re analysing, but that you will learn from it. You’ll absorb the information.
The more you analyse, the bigger the variety of experiences and techniques you’ll be adding into your toolkit.
Over to you: what’s one movie that you feel has profoundly changed how you approach film scoring?
I always listen to music when wstching movies or series on Netflix or Amazon. If i like a composer i pay attention to 1)structure 2)chord progression 3)instrumentation 4)arrangement. Then i give myself a task to write something in the style of this composer. It is very good practice. I started doing it because before writing music for various projects i am often given some music reference links i need to listen. It is not copying but borrowing some elements and creating something new
Writing in the style of other composers is a brilliant way to improve your skills. I still encourage you to watch some movies/TV series WITHOUT focusing on the music though 😉
The Lord of Rings trilogy shaped the way I perceived a cinematic experience, and it made me want to create music to bring the amount of feeling that Howard Shore brought.
Definitely is one of the most amazing scores. It’s one of those scores that manages to be completely immersive (which often means it doesn’t stand out in the movie) and yet so iconic (often meaning the opposite!) at the same time. Really creates an entire world.