Sean Wilson chats exclusively to multiple Emmy nominee Robert Duncan, veteran composer of shows as diverse as Castle, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Lie to Me, getting to the heart of the essential question: what makes a truly great soundtrack?
Robert, it’s a privilege to chat to you. To begin with, you were born into an extraordinary lineage of illustrious musicians – as I understand it, your great-grandfather composed music for silent movies, is that correct?
He did, yes, in London. He would take excerpts of classical pieces and pull out the pages of the applicable part and line them up on the music stands. He then had a little foot switch that connected to the lights on the musicians’ music stands. So he would step on the switch, the light would flicker and they would know to turn the page and start playing the chase music; then he would step on the pedal again and they would know to start playing the romantic music. And this was the process he used to put music to silent movies!
So how much of an influence has your own family been on your development as a composer?
Well I never met my great-grandfather but my grandmother, at the age of 13, was a violinist in the theatre playing to those silent movies. She married a pianist and together, I guess they influenced my life inasmuch-as there was always a musical element somewhere in my life. Having said that, they were very traditional, very disciplined, classical musicians and when I was a kid, I was not as disciplined and I was into synthesisers.
I remember my grandfather rented me my first synthesiser; he felt the keys – his sight was very bad – and he said these keys are not the right size. That this instrument was in fact a toy. So I wanted to impress upon them how interested I was in music but at the same time, they felt I took a very non-traditional approach to my interest in music. I didn’t feel like I was following in any footsteps.
Talking about forging your own path, you composed your very first piece of music when you were in the sixth grade, is that right?
Yes, I went to a school that had a performing arts factor in the curriculum, and I don’t know where it came from but it was very creative. Part of our piano course involved taking a piano apart to some degree and playing on everything except the keys.
I actually have a memory of playing something that really impressed the teacher and I wasn’t exactly sure what I did, but he seemed to love it and he called the principal in to hear my composition; I guess the second time around I played it very differently and he didn’t seem very keen! But I appreciated it, the courses and the experiences in my life. University real taught me to open my definition of what art and music is.
Hollywood then came calling and you made your big break by scoring Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is a very important show to my formative years! How important was that in your next step as a composer?
Buffy was huge for me. I had apprenticed with other composers before getting Buffy but it was really my first big break as an independent composer. Everything I had been training for was put to the test on Buffy. One of the things that was great about coming onto the show in the seventh season was that it was already very much in a groove, so I had to jump in and keep up and I learned the ropes pretty quickly as to how to handle a series. It was hard work but wonderful.
Before I worked on the show I didn’t realise what a great show Buffy was. I just saw it for the surface and didn’t realise the extent of the humour or the way in which it poked fun at its own genre; there’s also a great love story in it, too. I sometimes think what makes a show great is density of entertainment or richness, and Buffy was definitely a rich, imaginative show.
Given your extensive TV credits on the likes of Castle and Lie to Me, describe the challenges of composing an emotional arc of music across numerous episodes of a given season.
Well first off the challenge of a TV show is to work out the personality of the show. That’s the first puzzle that’s worked out at the pilot stage and it’s probably the most stressful and yet exciting period. Music is I think like a fashion statement in some cases; it informs the audience what type of show they’ll be watching and makes a comment on the genre and helps give the viewer a taste of the world, as well as the themes of the characters, if applicable. The characters evolve, the stories evolve and of course the musical opportunities evolve with them; if you establish a theme for a character effectively, you can establish their presence via the music even when he or she isn’t even on-screen.
Music has a great ability to communicate things that aren’t on the screen or in the words. Sometimes I find there’s a curious relationship between music and other subtleties of filming like camera movement and colour; music connects to all of those elements to help form your perception of that world.
It’s interesting isn’t it because Jerry Goldsmith for example, who I would cite as my favourite film composer, said that his job wasn’t to score the visuals but to score the emotions that the viewer isn’t seeing. Is that a philosophy that chimes with you?
Absolutely. I hadn’t heard that but absolutely. It’s the same thing. Our road map is always the net emotion: what is the impact? The very first lesson I think of writing music to picture is to take emotional accountability; if you write something that makes somebody feel something, you need to be in control of that and make sure it’s the target emotion.
When I first started working with another composer who was really teaching me all about this craft, he had me practice on a scene on a show and when I played it for him he said it sounds great but it’s the wrong chord. My immediate reaction was, well it’s music, surely there’s no such thing as right or wrong? So I said how could it be wrong and he said well, the heroes chase the bad guys, the bad guys got away and your final chord is majestic and victorious. And I realised he was absolutely right. Even though one person may hear a C major chord and think happiness, another person may hear it and think peacefulness; there are always variations in the way people react to the same music because it’s personal and subjective to some degree. Nevertheless we all have to navigate and find the common denominator.
Major and minor is a good point to talk about. In the past, I’ve been asked by a producer to make us cry, Rob. Once I went home and thought of the saddest thing ever – I lost my pet or whatever – and I remember thinking of a major melody that, to me in the moment, was profoundly sad yet had a sense of hope about itself. It conveyed what could have been, but ultimately wasn’t. A little bit of happiness that we wanted but couldn’t get. I gave it to them – this was for a show called Tru Calling – and their reaction was, well it sounds like this person is about to come back to life, it doesn’t sound sad! So then I went back, wrote it in minor and they loved it.
You mentioned the phrase ‘common denominator’ there and trying to find common ground. When composing for a film the musician will sit down with the director and spot the music, identifying cue points. How does the process work when it comes to television and who is your primary port of call?
Well interestingly in television, it’s very rarely the director, unless they’re also a producer as well, or with the exception of the pilot episode in which the director tends to get more involved. Given the speed at which TV shows move forward there’s usually a rotating assembly of directors. But the people who have their hand firmly on the steering wheel are the producers; they’re the ones ensuring the creative choices are consistent over the whole season.
During the spotting sessions, I’m guided by the show runner and maybe one or two other executive producers; the editor usually has something to say. Every now and then the writer is involved; I think that in film, writers don’t tend to have as much of a long-lasting involvement as they do in television. Writers will often come to give music notes and will come to final playback to see their vision through, more so than in feature films. Maybe it comes from the executive producers also being writers.
On Castle we had an interesting combination of Andrew Marlowe who was a show runner, writer and executive producer, and Rob Bowman who was an executive producer/director. Maybe that was one of the reasons why they worked so effectively together, they sat together as pilot and co-pilot yet they were also directing and co-writing so it was very tight.
Television has of course become increasingly more cinematic in recent years and more often than not has overshadowed numerous big-screen movies. How has this upsurge in small-screen quality benefited you as a composer in terms of your resources and degree of creative freedom?
Well the thing I most look forward to on any new project is seeing how it looks. I beg the makers for dailies or just some glimpse so I can put that scene in my head and start to think how the music might sound. Television moving toward cinema I think helps encourage a cinematic level of production value and although technology makes it easier and easier to sound cinematic with samples, there’s still as high a demand as ever for orchestra. It’s hard to compete with the sound of 50 people in a room who have dedicated their lives to pour emotion into a single melody; you know, a guy in his apartment with a box simply cannot compete with that.
So if you want your TV show to have ultimate production value, an orchestra is a valued asset. There was a time in which I thought Star Trek and The Simpsons were going to be the last TV shows to hire real musicians. Then in 2004 with Lost, it started to come back more and more. Such music bridges the gap between television and movies.
One of your TV shows that I was really intrigued to read about was The Last Resort, the music for which you recorded aboard a decommissioned submarine utilising a host of unusual musical effects. How important is a sense of environment and atmosphere to the recording process?
You know, something about the craft of putting music to picture is like a mental connect-the-dots. You’re presented with an image and a sound and your brain creates a connection between the two things. I find it fascinating that some subtle nuances can really make a particular sound feel at home in a certain environment. I first noticed it when I was writing music for a scene of a passenger plane in distress making an emergency landing; I noticed that if I added in some industrial metal as a percussion instrument, it somehow fit, I don’t know why. Looking at that plane and hearing metal percussion seemed to resonate for me as opposed to using Taiko drums and big timpani. I don’t think natural-sounding drums for that show would have stuck. And I think the same with the submarine; being in a metal environment and a confined space helped enormously.
That said, I never want music to be confused with sound effects. I don’t want somebody to think that someone else dropped a metal object in the hallway behind the character when actually it was supposed to be a music effect. But at the same time, if I can create that separation between sound effects and score but still have the fabric of the music be cut from the same world, I find that blend is rewarding.
You’ve released numerous YouTube videos in which we see you going around picking up decommissioned instruments and everyday objects like metal tins that you use to create music. Where do you get your inspiration for unusual and offbeat musical sounds and textures?
[Laughs] Not having the right instrument at the right time! I was probably wandering around my studio trying to find a triangle, metal percussion or something and then ultimately going through my cupboards trying to find a substitute. Desperation fuels creativity.
Maybe just being randomly distracted by noises, too. When I was a kid, at one point I was kicked out of my guitar class because I wouldn’t stop banging my pencil against the strings. I heard my pencil fall against the strings and I really thought it had a cowboy or Western sound to it. All of sudden I was transported out of the learning environment into the world of this sound and cut to Castle some 30 years later, I was banging on an open-tuned Mandolin with wire brushes for the main theme. I think it partly helped the score getting noticed in the Emmy nominations.
Also, when I went to university it really cinched the deal for me because there was a moment of crisis where I realised anything could be music. All it takes to secure the validity of music is for someone to call it music.
You have in fact been nominated for three Emmys prior to your latest for The Whispers. What does that mean for you personally as a composer and how has that helped recognise your profile?
Well I’ve read that some composers keep their Emmys on their desk in meetings and when people reach over to hand them feedback notes, they’ll begin to polish their Emmys as some sort of defence! [Laughs] But I don’t have that luxury yet. You know I was surprised and delighted every time I was nominated.
The first time I was nominated, which was for Castle, it was a victory for that distractable kid in guitar class. The Whispers is in fact the first nomination for me in the realm of main title music and I’ve always loved main titles, it’s a very special honour to be able to compete in that category. It’s all I can hope for.
Talking about The Whispers, a sci-fi drama series executive produced by Steven Spielberg, your main title music is brilliantly eerie. How did that piece of music come together?
Thank you. Firstly, it’s a privilege to be able to have 30 seconds of main titles to work with, as opposed to the now-standard five seconds. To begin with, I was sent an animated storyboard with some preliminary concept sketches of kids in normal environments, yet there was something a bit off about each of them. So I basically went to the studio with the directive of creating something innocent and haunting whilst marrying that to something dark and malevolent representing the alien imaginary friend within the show itself.
My first goal was to come up with a melody and that was the music box melody of the show. I went back and forth between major and minor, trying to find the right tonality; I ended up with a major version of the theme and knowing that I had to contrast that with something nasty, I basically threw everything I could through distortion and electric cello, trying to create as much nastiness as I could beneath the music box.
So those were the two primary elements. And then the third was the orchestra, which starts with what I thought of as a chaotic whisper effect where it quietly churns and builds, allowing the melody to be established. Once that’s established, the orchestra then takes off for a variation and then closes the theme.
Your music has been performed by a diverse range of massively popular artists like Billy Corgan from The Smashing Pumpkins. Do you think that soundtrack music will ever attain as much recognition as its more populist rock and roll peers?
Truthfully I don’t know that soundtrack music will ever be on the same level as songs, simply because in the case of the latter, the music is the rock star. However when it comes to score, the movie is the rock star. The music is of course a big part of making that experience special but our objective as composers is rarely to point at ourselves, musically. Our objective is instead to point at the emotion. For that reason, soundtrack composers in many ways are trying not to be noticed; we’re like musical black ops, trying to get the mission done.
That said, there’s music that people are exposed to through movies that they would never otherwise listen to. Some of the contemporary atonal music of a horror film, say. Nowadays, soundtrack music is very often played on classical radio. It’s an amazing opportunity to explore a different world that soundtracks offer, so I think they complement songs but I’d say it’s hard for them to compete.
Well what you and your fellow composers do in opening our eyes and ears to that world is quite extraordinary, so thank you for that. Lastly, what have you got coming up on the horizon?
Well I have a new project called Timeless and it’s on NBC. It follows three unlikely heroes travelling through time to try and thwart somebody who’s hijacked a time machine and is trying to alter history. It’s a fun, action-filled show and the score is a mix of traditional and contemporary, orchestral and electronic; the fun and challenge will be going to a different time zone every week. So far it seems like music will be a unifying thread through the series but at this stage I’ve only done the pilot episode.
Robert, it’s been fantastic to talk soundtracks with you. Thanks so much and all the best with your future projects.
Great questions – thank you!
Many thanks to Robert Duncan for taking the time for this interview.
Sean Wilson
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