It started with a class on teaching film-makers how to listen to music - just in terms of grasping fundamentals like melody, texture, tone colour, rhythm, harmony, tonality, recording dynamics, dramatic qualities of music. It was short - only 50 minutes - but covered a lot of sounds, from theremins to Gustavo Santaolalla, from Williams to Corigliano, acoustic and electronic music, musique concrete. Focused on Munich's theme for Avner and Williams' many arrangements of it, and also on the 'Postlude' to Corigliano's Symphony No2, as haunting a piece as I've heard out the classical world in the last five years.

Then comes the bit where I spend about 3-3.5 hours lecturing on the theory of film music... if there is such a thing. The program for this time around:
* 'Bloody Christmas' (LA Confidential) - some careful observations on the moment-by-moment playout of this cue and its marshalling of the violent spirit. Aided considerably by the isolated score on the DVD.
* 'First Sleep' (Solaris) - specifically to show the musical attempt to convey the idea that the planet Solaris is reading George Clooney's mind. This led to an interesting discussion - as another teacher sitting in on the class noted that for them Cliff Martinez's approach to the scene - a kind of pop minimalism - didn't evoke nearly as strong a feeling another an otherworldly intelligence as they needed. (I agreed in part, but felt the spotting of the scene was strong enough for the genre of music to almost be irrelevant.)
* 'Balloon Music' (Enduring Love) - this classic scene always gets a great live reaction from a crowd. We followed the progress of Jeremy Sams' three note motif through the subsequent 'Obsession' scene, and talked about how a carefully chosen motif with dramatic impact can be the raw materials of an entire scoring arc.
* 'Waltz for Hope' (All the Pretty Horses) - a great example of a musically-driven montage, where fragments of many small scenes are given coherence by the underscore.
* 'Fireworks' (Bringing out the Dead) - this 15 second cue for the rescue of Cliff Curtis' drug pushing character was intended to show what can be achieved with shorter bursts of music.

Moving onto character themes, we talked about one of the greatest of them all...
* Patton - the 'Main Title' is one of the most articulate pieces of character music in any film I've heard. We talked about this for a while, and followed the echoplex trumpet motif in particular through scene where Patton inspects the ancient battleground.
* Little Women - not all thematic development has to attach to characters. We followed the 'Seasons' theme through Thomas Newman's score, looking at the 'Winter', 'Spring' and 'Autumn' transitions, taking particular note of how Newman (this is my theory) set up theme for seasons to pay off over a close-up of Winona Ryder's face about halfway through the film.
I made the remark that structured repetition is the basis for just about all film scoring, no matter how understated it need be. (Would have liked to show a scene from The Prestige to prove this - that film's score is built on structured repetition, just the repeated material is a simple harmonic idea, not a melody.)

We shifted from themes to talk about discovering the general sound of a film:
* How does the style of Martin Scorsese's The Departed call for a tango... we talked about how this snappy light music was an ideal response to the story and style Shore face...
* ... turning to Heat, we looked at the main title, and how Goldenthal's sparse electric guitar and string quartet music similarly was dictated by story and style - a cops and criminals story like the above, but with vastly different emphasis and effect.
* ... we wrapped up with the train station sequence from Once Upon a Time in the West. As one of the film scoring staff said later: "Morricone blows them all out of the water. He comes out of top every time you do this workshop."

Then to a bit of comedy scoring...
* 'Duck Dodgers in the 24th and a Half Century' - Carl Stalling and mickey-mousing
* 'Jack Sparrow Enters' from Pirates of the Caribbean - scoring a character as they think they are, all evidence to the contrary
* 'Gin Lane I and II' from Door in the Floor - Jeff Bridges mickey-moused, and scored out of proportion to his circumstances - got the biggest laughs here actually
* 'Sex Buddies' from Scrubs - music that the characters hear, and
* 'The Office' - music stays well out of the way, and the whole thing is funnier for it.

Documentaries and experimental film...
* 'Bounty Hunters' from Deep Blue - thrilling orchestral thematic scoring of a hunt for food
* 'Main Title' from The Fog of War - music for a film that's designed to make us ask questions. Philip Glass and existential dread.
* 'That's my story' from Grizzly Man - great underscoring of a monologue by Richard Thompson. Also showed footage from a documentary that followed Werner Herzog and Richard Thompson through the recording of the score. (This is the best DVD feature on a score I've ever seen - an hour long, we only watched five minutes.)
* 'Primacy of Number' from Naqoyqatsi - the first half of the cue - just to whet people's appetites to go and buy the DVD.

Even before we devoted the last two hours to studying the score of one of my short films (for application's sake, not hubris - I hated showing the film after showing so many scenes by great directors!), then to a practical scoring exercise, this was the most packed day I've done. Crucial in getting through as much as I did was the use of final cut pro timelines of scenes from the films instead of putting in DVD's every time. I didn't feel I was as on top of clear explanations as I usually am, but talking for nearly six hours straight with a handful of breaks always stretches you. My lack of formal training in music is a deficiency as always, but I think I bring other qualities to the discussion that make it both accessible to the people who want to write music for film, and the people who want them to write it. (Both are present in this workshop, of course.)

Some business to tidy up next week at the start of class:
* Comparing the use of music in the climactic scenes of The Departed and Infernal Affairs - with the intent that showing that even the same story in different cinematic hands responds to different musical choices.
* 2001: A Space Odyssey - comparing the 'Moon Rocket Bus' cue - North vs Ligeti
* United 93 - more restrained demands of docudrama. '2nd Plane Crash'

EDIT - Oh, and on the dangers of adhering too closely to temp tracks (something which came up in looking at one of my own films), what better example could I provide than... 300.

Thanks for this report Michael. I remember you commenting on one of these in the past and it was a worthwhile read; this one is better. The workshop sounds like a lot of interesting ideas and I wish the various arts facilities around Atlanta would take take advantage of a film music fan event like this. I'd love to attend something like this.