and my name is bob brown i am a moderator tonight and tonight we have three of our usual panelists and a special guest janet stern marilyn campbell and our special g armstrong and it's kind of a treat for us to have people who are in the biz so to speak we discovered quite by accident that jeezy whose daughter is work with us on the show jesus actually a scorer shows that would you call yourself yefim score film score ok i'll add the caveat that i haven't actually been working in the biz ok for quite a while and it's changed a lot well that would be a very interesting discussion that because we know absolutely nothing about any of this aggressive that we would like to hear music scores and we don't know exactly how they're put to work and where they come from so my first question is have how did you get into this ok that's a good question and in high school i was certainly very interested in music i was interested in psychology and i was interested in visual art and when i went to college i started gravitating more towards music and rather than psychology and so i changed colleges and i went to berklee college of music one of the few schools that has a film score major that's interesting at that time and there weren't too many schools that actually had a major in film scoring right i'd rather get good musicians for that i say ok so we were how long ago was this if i might ask and how has this has the business of scoring changed with all of the technological advances yeah so i think i left berkeley in eighty six and that was right at the time when everything changed so i learned how to score very very old fashioned way using a digital metronome and using magnetic sound film and actually cutting a splicing real film and learning all the editing and cutting and splicing in and scoring to a stopwatch and all that kind of stuff and i don't think any of that's done as soon as i walked out the door everything changed to digital whose remarkable everything changed immediately so what happens now than there exam it's just from what i'm told it's just so much easier although to me and i'm the kind of person to have that kind of brain where i like to touch in my hands what i'm doing rather then just kind of have the concept of and type in some things and it just automatically goes there but i would have a spotting session with a filmmaker and we that's the first step we would discuss where the filmmaker wanted to have musical where we both thought users should be and that's the beginning of your keep your music cues and we also talk about the kind of music we maybe had in mind for it and then i would go off on my own and take the timings for each of those music cues i would actually with paper you'd write down the the phaeton frames of where the music is going to come in take timings on every bit of action that you're seeing on the film because maybe you want your music to sync up with a footstep or with a cut or with a dissolve or with you know so you're taking timing so that then when you go to score your music you know exactly where things are happening so you can set a tempo that maybe is going to hit a lot of those places or if you're doing of a variable kind of the time a tempo you can student called rest stop it was an arson intertainment a lot and i think oh yeah i did winner on the ward at the n y u film festival and i did some things for c b s television and that was really fun and since c b s maybe i haven't done anything since that was quite a lot so if you you're coming out of college with a degree in film or now how do you get your opportunities to work in the industry well that's another thing that's really changed at that time around eighty six it was a very closed industry it was who you know and if you go to meet a filmmaker and talk about maybe being there composer they wanted to hear your real and if they didn't hear music that was what they were thinking of for their film they assumed you couldn't write that kind of music i was taught that the job of a film score is to be able to really write in any genre that the film requires but you get tend to get pigeonholed and if they already know you can write in this kind of a style ok then maybe then he was shot so it was very close and the whole film industry has changed where you know you can make films in so many different ways on your own and and scoring music and recording music has changed so much where you can just be in a home studio with the  done so i don't know if i think it still might be happening because i heard danny elfman who did this sim seems he had a lot of trouble breaking into film scores because people thought of him as this situation comedy v score and he really had to work hard to get that first film jobs but he has done a lot of sources out there and i had a friend at berkeley who right after school she got a job wri jingle house very very lucrative and she was doing very well and made it almost impossible for her to get using you know her very difficult so are there unions involved or is it just  there's a musician's union but i don't know maybe there is now a film scoring you at least at the time it was i say yeah yeah these days i'll bet it's all mostly your own work you know i think it depends if you're working through a film studio you know then maybe you have to go you know if you're working with somebody curious about the difference for scoring in scoring for films as opposed to television i never thought about scoring for television and one of the things that struck us my husband and me with the last few years is that a lot of the documentaries we see have almost so there's a lot of annoying things in film music sometimes i think we've talked sometimes on the show about the places where this score is so insistent that you it's distracting from what's the story is i want to mention that because that's i think a debate some people probably say there's no debate there it's this way but i feel it's a debate as a matter of fact i just i wrote down a quote was a bernard herman who said film music should be able to stand on its own on its own legs and you know be on its own and i kind of i know he's been our herman but i disagree with that film music is subordinate to picture it's job is to support a picture and that's that's what i was taught number one rule is that it's not that it's not the focus it's a post when hance picture which is the focus it's both i do everything to  enhance the slave to the picture and so i mean if you take out just one cue from a film it all films are going to have a cue cues here and there where it would stand on its own you wouldn't listen to that on a recording just to listen to it but with picture it may be absolutely perfect so your job is to do what's appropriate for the film and for the picture not show off your skills i saw a documentary about a sober ation of  john williams and all of the actors and producers who were lavishing with praise were saying oh the picture wouldn't be you would it is without your you me the picture what it is as though you aside from him it was one of the ones my friend and i chose to go to and they had a panel at the end but it was hey geographic i mean it was john byrne are herrmann and john williams had only one other person i can't remember  them and at the end they had a panel because winston salem this was at the university of north carolina they have a film scoring studio they actually do what berkeley did and they have a whole studio just to teach film scoring it's astonishing they took us on a tour after that i asked the panel the question that i thought marilyn was going to ask it was yours was better but here is mine anyway not just insistent but when the film seems to be manipulated that the music seems to be manipulative and then that it's geared to make you want to cry to make you get excited to make you get tense sometimes when that happens you have to wonder this is what i asked the panel whether the director didn't know what to do and whether they resorted to the film score to help them i think there's no way i'm going to tell you what the p had a filmmaker say in this one scene you know i don't think i'm mostly what i was trying to put across came across can you do something that kind of brings out more of the whatever it is right right yeah well i think there's there certainly  speaking of john williams enjoys that shark theme is crucial because it gets they had a lot of problems in that film with the mechanical shark right and so they didn't have the mechanical shark doing what they wanted the mechanical shark to do in a lot of scenes because it it did like cold water it didn't like salt water it just wasn't you know acting sufficiently scary but that you don't have to share the shark or you have to do is go through again and everyone goes probably work better and it works better and that's true too i once went to a lecture from their musician that i think he does both right here in west minister choir college as a faculty member and he didn't talk on film and he played that and of star wars the first star wars where they're going up to receive their awards or whatever they have to go and he showed it without sound and it's the most boring scene you know and then you have the music was you know this sort of perception all music and it totally emotionally manipulates you do think that this is something that's right and have been about ten years ago they did at the oscars they were in the category being awarded was score but before they awarded it they took the five or ten  best picture films and showed parts of them with the music whoa you do some important work and that's what i do say that if you know if while you're watching a film you notice the music trying to manipulate you and then i don't that is bad i do yeah exactly the filmmaker the film score did not quite do they should manipulate you without you noticing it exactly and you should leave the theater not really remembering the music at least the first time you see a film i women remember the high and i that's a big thing but what i really want to enjoy the film if i now sometimes there's a reason why you might really notice because it's part of the film it's part of the story but a lot of times you should leave the theater having not really remember too much of the music because then you really got in there it did its job you think styles of composing have changed i'm thinking of films of the forty's and fifty's where a lot of the business now seems to have a kind of favoring a music that's much more soft and i want to grow and i do think one of the things that's a little bad for people who are professional bookstores is there's a lot of films now that are i stitched together popular songs yeah and that's the whole film like yeah we just saw a baby driver where of course it's all it's all good hostetler songs but it's very very keyed to the action that is right and we were talking about the beat the beat is absolutely key to the action on screen so they did that much work for me to pick the right song to go with that right piece of action but there's i don't think there's any original music in the film and does you can tell why they they chose to do that and it makes sense especially for crooklyn so did baby drive or did it make sense that they chose that musical wasn't just easier to do that well it's a plot point in a sense because the getaway driver this is that heist sort of a heist movie the getaway driver uses the music he wears earphones all the time he uses the music to sort of pump himself up outrageous thanks always part of the plot yeah well that brings up and i mean have you heard of the terms xander score oh and source music ok so when you're watching a film and suddenly there's music and there's no reason for the music to be in there it's just kind of emotionally that's underscore when you're seeing a seeing and the scene takes place in a restaurant let's say and there's a little jazz combo playing in the restaurant that source music ok if the case if the camera actually pay ends over and i you see the musicians then that's a reason for the music they're hearing if the camera doesn't actually pan there but you're still in a restaurant you hear that kind of music that's called implied source by that there's a source of the music are all interesting  oh yeah have you ever met a filmmaker you i think you said in the beginning that you meet with the filmmaker and you decide you know you listen to what this person has been if you ever met somebody who has nothing in mind and just says go to it i don't think you know i think they i think what you're more likely is they're going to say i i have some definite things in mind and you're going to say oh i have some definite other really just came to just too much of a disagreement over time sorry couldn't work they couldn't work together actually at this not to keep belaboring this but at this panel that i was that in winston salem somebody asked about the kind of movie let's say like not graduate because that is all simon and garfunkel but that kind of thing where it's one song after another is scoring and the panel said no that's not good we do not consider that a scored movie i think there is some sort of oscar academy motion picture academy rule that you cannot get best score for that kind of for the movie even though it's very important to them is there or is there or choir at length of time i knew you were going to ask that and i had people do ask me that and i don't have a favorite film score or a favorite film score well i think the first thing that comes to mind is elmer bernstein and  mockingbird and some people just see i think there's some cues in that and that film that are just so delicate in the music in some cues it does not stand on its own i wouldn't necessarily buy the the soundtrack to that movie although there are some areas where he starts off with a very very delicate little theme that turns into this big orchestral thing and it's gorgeous and i would listen to that but like i said the job is to serve the film so that we don't even know you're doing that right i think i agree with you because i saw to kill a mocking rumor it first came out and you know the ice age and because it was one of the first movies i saw in the theater worst well i have seen some bad ones i just don't know i guess i block yeah yeah you know the one that intrigues me there's a couple of really intrigue me and one is risky business with the tangerine dream music because i love the teen dream dream music and yet i can't i i haven't read up on this but i get the sense that the filmmaker originally was going for something different i get the sense when i see the scenes that they were going for a more comical thing but the tangerine dream really goes wait in worded it did brings out something way different as kind of psychedelic and in word and i wonder if maybe they started out thinking it was going to be much more light hearted music and oh witness when was the score to win yeah yeah but that was riches are maurice r and b and that was during his where he was experimenting with electronics electronic music and i thought how interesting the film takes place in you know  it's like you could have ten artists come in and draw the popcorn on the table a still life and you could get ten different beautiful renditions you could have ten different film scores come in to film score a movie and you get ten very different versions and they shouldn't be remembering the score and i absolutely understand what you're saying but there was one film we saw recently last year where i really felt the score i did remember it i thought it was gorgeous and to me it ok but when you get that the combination of that score with what was happening on screen was just overpowering to me i could see that director maybe you know showing a scene with one of the women looking at it through a rainy window to go i'd like something a little bit so it said yeah yeah yeah there was this guy i wanted yeah and then there's the thing that happens with films that they want to strongly in one direction to have a genre i don't know well somebody is in charge of the sound at some point and probably did you know who did you work with when you were  but other than that and i was working close with the director who wanted to make sure they liked what i was you know how do you feel bad when they said we had we didn't usually i didn't have too many disagreements but sometimes like on important things like the end credits i think this music should be used in court no i think this music all right whatever i'm but you never had anybody come right out and say i don't like this well if they said i don't like this it would probably be indicative of the whole your whole concept so see if that was the concept that they were probably going to like each individual q because it went it was part of the cause that's really interesting well this is a fascinating convers library student film festival had had a two night session in july but thanks to the garden fair and the garden theater is going to have a third night on september twenty eighth when they're going to show a selection of student films bad some of which already show showed but some which did not show i think the true i event so if you were interested if you liked enjoyed the student films they're really some of them are brilliant you should go