4/29/2023 0 Comments Song in silence of the lambs![]() ![]() I’ve also written concert works for rock band and orchestra. I’ve written a ballet that was produced in Canada. Then I did radio, TV and small documentaries and nature films before I started to do features. I did many years of playing live concerts, touring on the road for four years. It’s too boring! Okay: I studied composition in Boston. Now we’re doing another one called THE NAKED LUNCH. After VIDEODROME there was THE FLY and DEAD RINGERS. Those are really the good works, the heart and soul of the work that I’ve done. We have done five movies in the last ten years. I just started doing the David Cronenberg movies. How did you start your career in film music? I like doing both, and I do both all the time. This music has a tendency to sound cold and inhuman, which was appropriate. It made sense of course to use electronic music in VIDEODROME. Many film scores sound orchestral, but they are performed on a Synclavier. I think this is the typical approach nowadays. I mean the more serious music, not just sounds and effects. In some of the scenes I would record a small orchestra with the electronic program. Then, I input the notes into the computer I made sounds of what I wanted the score to sound like. The Synclavier, at that time, was not what it is now. Did you write down a written score, or was the music the product of improvisation? Your music for VIDEODROME was performed on a Synclavier. But to me, records and movies are two completely separate media. If somebody was interested in putting my music out on a record, I’m delighted. There was a point where I thought about it – “would this be a good piece on a record?” But now I totally don’t think about it. Sometimes it stands alone, but sometimes not. I’m more interested in the music being in the picture. But I know there’s a market for them, a very small group of people who are interested. I’m not really interested in soundtrack albums. ![]() That’s the reason why there aren’t that many Shore scores on vinyl? So you think mainly of serving the movie, and your attitude is not commercially-oriented? But I don’t bother too much with the sound tracks. I think SCANNERS was more popular than VIDEODROME.īut VIDEODROME was your first soundtrack album? The other two were THE BROOD and SCANNERS. That was the third David Cronenberg movie I did. Would it be correct to say that VIDEODROME was your first “wetting of the feet” in the film business – your first “hit”, so to speak? Again, it’s not a score that will excite you if you haven’t seen the movie, but in the film, Shore’s music serves the visuals quite well. It’s actually a difficult movie to score, because it’s not traditional, it’s not in any sort of genre.” The composer wrote one hour of music, a lot of it beneath dialog. According to Shore, it’s a “dark, disturbing and sad movie. Jody Foster, Anthony Hopkins and Scott Glenn play the leading parts in this psychological thriller, based on the best-selling novel by Thomas Harris. Howard Shore and director Jonathan “Something Wild” Demme spent a few days in Munich in July 1990, recording the music for SILENCE OF THE LAMBS with the Munich Symphony Orchestra (former the Graunke Orchestra). This was a good training ground, and the best apprenticeship any film composer can get, since Shore had to deal with any styles imaginable, from Mozart to Led Zeppelin. Before Howard Shore started his career in movies with David Cronenberg’s horror films, Shore was the musical leader of one hundred and twenty SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE shows, each one 90-minutes long, each weekly show broadcast live. His shyness and modesty find their outward expression in a pale skin and a slight body. Shore’s character – at least as I perceived it – is likewise: he is very quiet, very introverted, very reserved. But they do their job perfectly within the movies. His scores tend to be unobtrusive, inconspicuous and restrained when isolated from the cinematographic context. I had a similar impression when I met Howard Shore. Think of Mancini’s soft and enchanting music in relation to the warmth and cosmopolitan charm of his character. Think of some Goldsmith scores in relation to the aloofness he used to display in concerts and recording sessions. “If it’s in the music, it’s in the man,” the late Aaron Copland once said about Bernard Herrmann. A film score can reveal a composer’s interior life. This may apply to absolute concert music, but film music?ĭespite the functional character of film music, I do think so. So it is perhaps daring to think that a film score can give us an impression of the composer’s personality of his psyche, his character and individuality. Film music depends upon the kind of movie it was composed for. It has to serve the movie without drawing too much attention to itself. Text reproduced by kind permission of the editor, Luc Van de Venįilm music is functional music. Originally published in Soundtrack Magazine Vol.10/No.37/1991 An Interview with Howard Shore by Matthias Büdinger ![]()
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