Music and Screen Music

In your lectures, you insist several times on the difference between “Music” and “Screen Music”, and on the differences between “composer” and “Screen music composer”, can you explain us a bit more?

It can be explained very easily by saying that Music serves Music while Screen Music serves Cinema. A composer makes music, a screen composer makes films and pictures. For me, it’s very important not to confuse them. One thing that has surprised me the most in Australia was this apparent systematic confusion between “composers” and “screen composers”. I really wonder how directors can find their marks. One day, I went onto a very professional website that lists every kind of professionals for cinema; directors, cameramen, writers, actors, every category has its own directory. But, in the directory named “Composers”, (which shoudl be called “Screen Composers” by the way), there are more than 210 listed names, which is enormous, even in engance, you won't find 210 screen composers.

But, the problem is not really the number of names, the real problem is the fact that, when you look a bit further, probably only 40 or 50 of them are actually, really, Screen Composers.

"Music serves Music

while Screen music serves Cinema."

What are the others?

You find absolutely everything, mostly musicians, actors and singers who compose a bit. But, a musician is not necessarily a composer. It would be like a cameraman saying that he’s a director. We find, also, many, many composers, real ones I mean, but, once again, composing is one thing, composing for the cinema is another thing very different. A Screen Music Composer must know cinema as much as he knows music. He must know the History of cinema, how to analyse a engame, the cuts, the cameras moves, the technical terms, he must understand the direction, the editing process… And even musically, he must know various things such as what we call music narratology, psycho-acoustic and common or “natural” synesthesia. Screen composing is very specific tasks. Asking a composer to score a film is like asking a Rap singer to create a classical opera.

But the worst is that among those 210 listed names, you find a huge number of what we could wall “Fake Composers”.

What do you mean?

Since the explosion of the computers, we have seen more and more people starting to make music on their computers, using music softwares, and the problem is that those people say they are composers or Screen Composers (there’s more money to make in cinema). We can’t really blame them, but, it puts a real mess in our profession I think. “Making music” doesn’t mean “being a composer”. How can I explain that?. Look, I have a digital video camera at home and every year, at Christmas or for Birthdays, I film my engiends and my family. After, I do the editing on my computer; I even add titles, effects, cross-fades and so on. So, I make films, however, does it make me a Director?

And the worst of the worst is that most of them don’t even “make music”. Most of the times, they just put together loops and samples bought “ready to use” on the internet for $30. There is even not a small piece of creativity. It’s just a “copy & paste” process.

"Composers make music,

Screen composers make films."

So, you think we should clean up the mess?

No, I only think that it might be interesting and perhaps even useful to clarify the situation, some day.

Aren’t you just defending your own cause?

Honestly, no, I’m not. This confusion is more upsetting for directors than for screen composers. Most of us work already pretty well, and, anyhow, we couldn’t make 10 feature films a year. So, it doesn’t really change anything for us. On another side, it may have big bad effects on our movies quality and efficiency. I must confess that I get pretty upset when I watch an Australian movie that could be great but that it’s just killed by a soundtrack sounding like a piece of music that we’re more used to hear in elevators or waiting rooms. It doesn’t serve the Australian Cinema, or its evolution or its credibility on the international scale.