It’s not every day that FILMHOUNDS spends a night at the theatre, but when BBC Radio 3 invited us to sample a night of modern orchestral film scores, we couldn’t refuse. Sampling a cross-section of some of the most invigorating soundtracks this side of the millennium, conductor Robert Ames led the London Contemporary Orchestra through many of our favourites (see full list below), including some that have never before received a live performance.
Broadcast live on Radio 3, Ames took us through how the process came together, as well as what makes a modern film soundtrack iconic.
Programme order as follows:
The Echo Society featuring Robert Simonsen and Brendan Angelides
Postcard from Earth – excerpts
Bryce Dessner
Sing Sing – excerpts
Anna Meredith
The End We Start From – excerpts
Son Lux
Everything Everywhere All at Once – excerpts
Tamar-kali Brown
The Last Thing He Wanted – Connecting the Dots
Colin Stetson
The Menu – Amuse Bouche
Herdis Stefansdottir
Knock at the Cabin – excerpts
Isobel Waller-Bridge
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse – excerpts
Hauschka (Volker Bertelmann)
All Quiet On the Western Front – excerpts
Hildur Guðnadóttir
Tár – For Petra
Jung Jae-il
Squid Game – excerpts
Jed Kurzel
Monkey Man – excerpts
Max Richter
On The Nature of Daylight
Jerskin Fendrix
Poor Things – excerpts
You get the opportunity to do a Prom. Albert Hall. Big Deal. Big films, big soundtracks. How do you even begin to choose what represents 21st-century cinema?
Kind of impossible, isn’t it, really? I think there’s so much talent and so much good music happening in film at the moment. I think I just wanted to take an opportunity to shine a spotlight on composers that are not necessarily, from the traditional route into film music writing. They’re not career media composers. A lot of the people in the orchestra started off in bands, as did some composers. Hildur was a solo cellist writing experimental music and releasing experimental albums. I think a lot of the striking scores you get at the moment come from people who don’t necessarily have any ‘baggage’ or that traditional media music path. You think about somebody like Jerskin Fendrix, who did Poor Things. It’s his first soundtrack and has never written for film or picture before, and he was working out how to do it as he went along. He’s obviously an amazing musician, but the end result of that is one of the most quietly radical scores in a long time.
There’s also a general interest from me that a lot of directors now are going out and seeking a lot of composers from slightly different backgrounds. I mean, Oppenheimer, for example. Loads of Hans Zimmer, massive icons like John Williams still writing music. All of that could have been quite happily included.
Do you think it’s these things — the radical approach, the directors seeking out this new style of composer — that’s making a difference? This is called the 21st-century Soundtracks, but a lot of the program was from the last two years. From our perspective, there’s a huge change in really tapping into a score as a viewer. Do you think it’s this kind of thing that is propelling into appreciating soundtracks to a new level?
Yeah, it might be. It’s interesting. Orchestral film soundtrack listening is… the numbers are unreal. Just how much people obviously love it not only whilst they’re watching a film, but then take those soundtracks home with them and make them part of their lives. I think that could be a combination of very striking original soundtracks. A lot of these people already have fans outside of film music, and it’s kind of adding to that catalog of what they’ve already done. Think composers like Mica Levi — we didn’t play anything of his but creates really incredibly radical scores that send shock waves through film music and what it can be perceived as.
One of the most impressive things about this Prom was bringing together so many different pockets of music, style and place. You really made them all cohesive. How do you know what would sound well together, even if they’re so wildly different?
It was a fairly long process putting that together. I worked with an amazing producer at the BBC called Alice Jones. She was incredibly encouraging and patient with me and allowed more space and time than would usually happen to put it all together. I wanted to play with light and shade and have moments of calm. So think of Sing, ‘For Petra’… those pieces didn’t have any particularly fast elements to them, or big crash, bang wallop moments. I felt they shone as brightly as, Poor Things, Monkey Man or Postcards from Earth, because they were doing something quite different. I think it’s a bit like being a DJ, isn’t it? When you’re putting a program together, you want people to dance for an hour if you’re a DJ, you want the music to be cohesive, but not similar. There’s definitely personality in all of their music that feels like they speak together. Bryce Dessner and Isobel Waller-Bridge — that kind of really smart, minimalist music — Max Richter as well just being really brave with not using a lot of material and keeping it minimal, but being able to tug on people’s hearts in such an effective way. There are definitely threads throughout the night, and some big differences as well.
As soon as I read the program, I knew that Poor Things was going to be the closer. It’s just such a such a versatile piece of music. The thing I found the most intriguing was the selection for Tár. Do you get to have a bit of fun with the fact that you are a conductor playing a fake piece by a fake conductor? The layers to that just amaze me.
I know it’s pretty meta, isn’t it? That’s the piece of music that the main character was trying to write during the film, but then could never release. It was the piece of music we recorded at Abbey Road and with the same orchestra as the Prom, and it was released under Deutsche Grammophon with her as the conductor on the front. It was released in exactly the same way you’d released a really high profile piece. What it does is extends the film into it, gives the film a life after itself, which I find really interesting.
The songs featured are ones we’re so used to connecting them to the screen or something that we can’t actually be fully immersed in. How does having a live performance enhance the experience of these soundtracks?
There’s just something about live music. You know, I just absolutely love orchestras, because there’s something so primal about having a large amount of people on a stage doing something all together as one in the moment. I don’t know what it is, but there’s an energy to it that taps into something in us as human beings. It’s almost like cavemen, the kind of enjoyment we get out of it. When orchestras going full pelt together in Poor Things at the end, and the organ is going, you’re bathed in the sound. You can listen to a recording on the best speakers in the world, but you just never get that energy from anywhere else.
I know you predominantly work with film soundtracks in you know your day-to-day career — what is it about a film soundtrack, or any soundtrack, that takes it to the level of iconic, or in line with the Prom theme, “defying categorization?”
I think it can be a few things, and I think composers do it in different ways.There are films that you just think of and you hear theme tune straight away, or a little melody that’s connected to a character. To go back to Poor Things… I think just what elevates that to the next level, apart from just the sheer inventiveness of it, is that the music is so married to the film. You just couldn’t imagine anything else on that film, it’s just completely in tune with the character and the color and the and the feel of the film, and just elevates it in this kind of most incredibly harmonious way. A lot of the other composers that we played are masters of atmosphere in sound. So not necessarily rich harmony or melodies, but finding texture and ambiance electronically and orchestrally that make us question something that’s happening on the screen or makes us feel a particular way.
Prom 34: 21st Century Soundtracks will soon be available on BBC iPlayer.
