St Edward's Chronicle October 2016

15

FOCUS ON MUSIC

ST EDWARD’S CHRONICLE

an actor who he had mistakenly thought was me from my photo in an old Spotlight directory. He asked me to read anyway and then play something. This chance meeting led to him asking me to arrange the music for Twelfth Night at Stratford. I began work but I couldn’t find a traditional setting for one of the songs to arrange, so I wrote one – which he liked and asked me to write the rest of the music. The director was Peter Gill, the hugely influential playwright and director who later opened the Riverside Studios, which became a venue of international importance in the 1970s. Peter had an enormous influence on my career. I worked on all his productions at the Riverside and with him at the National Theatre – and my first television score was for a Stephen Poliakoff play which he directed. One of Peter Gill’s greatest fans was the theatre director Michael Attenborough. Through this connection, I got my second big break when Michael, whom I didn’t know, played my music to his father Richard Attenborough, and this bizarrely led to me co-writing with Ravi Shankar the music for Gandhi . It was working on Ghandi that really changed everything for me and opened up unimaginable opportunities. I went on to write scores for four more of Richard Attenborough’s films including Cry Freedom and Shadowlands. What is the process of writing a film score? There are occasions when one is required to write music before or during a film shoot, for example for a dance sequence, but generally the process of scoring a film hasn’t really changed since silent films, insofar as the score is added to the finished picture in order to awake or inform our senses (although its original use was to drown out the noise of the projector). This order of things – the music being the final stage of a film has largely survived through the days of the great studio system and is still common now. Sometimes sooner but usually when the film reaches its “fine cut” stage the composer will meet with the director and editor and “spot” the film, which means deciding where the music should stop and start, taking into account narrative, emphasis, pacing, sound design etc. Of course in some instances like an action film the music hardly ever stops but nevertheless it is the opportunity for the director to express and discuss his or her

George in a cameo role as the conductor alongside pianist Clare Hammond as the young Dame Maggie Smith in The Lady in the Van

ambition for the film’s impact and how the score can best help the audience to respond in the right way. Did you embrace a celebrity lifestyle? Not really although I did enjoy celebrity status at my local Indian restaurant after I did Gandhi! I’ve had enormous privileges thanks to my work and met and worked with some amazing people but generally no one outside the business has ever had a clue who I am or what I do so celebrity has never been an option and I’m pleased about that. I have enjoyed my time in Hollywood and have been fortunate enough to be nominated a few times for the Academy Award so that was nice, but being a composer in film is very much a “back

room boy” job working with editors and directors and of course wonderful musicians, which is the real highlight. Even though I worked non-stop in Hollywood for a while I didn’t want to make my life there. Hollywood is a wonderfully “can do” place but one tends to get pigeonholed and for that reason I have been happier since I haven’t been based there. I feel freer in my work options. From a career full of highlights, what would be your most memorable? Without a doubt, working with Richard Attenborough – and also with Ken Loach. I’ve composed the music for the last 16 of his films. Perhaps the most significant highlight stems from a snap decision I made in 2000, which was to abandon an incredibly lucrative film I was about to start and come home and write the score for The Blue Planet , purely on the strength of the title. The Blue Planet was followed by Planet Earth and Frozen Planet . This Earth Trilogy has changed my working life. Tremendous projects in themselves, they also gave me a new musical opportunity, which was to create, in partnership with the BBC, concert programmes with the footage re-cut and with no narration, projected above a full orchestra. They’ve proved popular and as a result I have taken them to many of the world’s greatest orchestras, both in concert halls and arenas. The concerts, with or without me, are now appearing in venues as diverse as the Hollywood Bowl and cruise ships! And for the feature film spin-offs Deep Blue and Earth I had the chance to

Conducting the music for Ken Loach’s period drama Jimmy’s Hall at Abbey Road Studios