Andrew Wallender Where Did the Music Go? Word Count: 1,460
In the last moments of the final music recording session for Lost, conductor Tim Simonec stood with the show’s executive producer, exchanging thoughts on the past 6 seasons. “This is the last of an era,” Simonec said as he glanced around the recording studio. “You’re not going to see this anymore.” What he meant was Lost’s nearly 35 piece orchestra and the fact that for 6 years the show had produced and recorded a new orchestral score each week under the direction of the show’s composer Michael Giacchino. And perhaps Simonec was right when he said that shows will never again be made the way Lost was. The truth is that music in television is changing. New technology is making it easier than ever to electronically produce television soundtrack music. Live orchestra music in
television is now only used by a very small handful of shows that usually mix together electronically-produced music with live orchestral music for the highest quality sound at the cheapest price. Even Lost had its struggles with using digitally created music. According to Simonec, J.J. Abrams, one of the creators and executive producers of Lost, had to argue every year with ABC to keep the funding for the live orchestra. “I thank God for someone like J.J. Abrams who is so committed to orchestra that he would fight the network every year,” Simonec said. Simonec added, “When I came to town in 1979 and started working on Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley, every show literally had an orchestra. And then by the mid-‘80s with the advent of MIDI Technology and as samples got better and better, I saw less and less of it.”
IT’S ALL IN THE PACKAGE One of the major drivers of using electronically-produced music is what is known in the television business simply as a package deal. It used to be that a television studio would directly pay for the expenses of utilizing an orchestra or a sound stage. Now, however, studios often pay a composer a large sum of money up-front and then make him pay directly for his expenses so that he keeps whatever money is left in the end. Composers are forced to cut as many expenses as possible to secure a stable income. And often an orchestra is the first thing to go.
“I think it’s a lot easier to use a drum machine than it is to hire a drummer,” said Academy Award nominated composer Thomas Newman. “And that’s unfortunate because I think music at its best is a collaborative medium. Getting together with a drummer and getting input from a drummer is much different than programming a drum machine.” Many up-and-coming or even established composers, however, choose to pay out of their own pocket for a live orchestra, according to Jeannie Gayle Pool, author of “A Research Guide to Film and Television Music in the United States.” Many of the composers utilized personal funds to score television shows and movies were making a smart business choice, Pool said. She said that because live orchestras gave upand-coming composers a reputation of creating high-quality music, they were making the gamble that they would make their money back with re-publishing royalties and with future job offers down the road. Even established composers such as Tyler Bates, the composer of “300,” “Watchmen,” and the television series “Californication” have to sometimes dip into personal funds to pay for their composing. Bates had to reportedly take out a 2nd mortgage on his house in order finish the music for “300,” according to “Film Score Monthly.” “I guess the biggest difference is in the old days, you would attach a budget to a creative idea,” Newman said. “The creative pass would drive the budget. Now pretty much everywhere, the budget defines the creative pass. It’s not how much you need, it’s how much you have.”
THE FAST SHRINKING WORLD OF DRAMA
The shows with the highest quality scores are usually dramas, and in the 2005-2006 television season more than 42 percent of people watching primetime television were watching dramas, according to a report by the Nielsen Company. But in 2010, a mere five years later, more than half those people had stopped watching dramas and instead most were watching reality television. The reason is not a decrease in television quality. In fact the opposite is true. Dramas are becoming increasingly higher quality in terms of writing, acting, and post-production. But because of the increase in quality they are becoming more and more rare, Simonec said. “That’s why realities shows are popular,” Simonec said. “The networks want to keep things as cheap as possible, and that translates to the music too. That’s where we’re at in television.” Therefore television networks are pushing more and more for cheaper reality shows to save money over dramas. And as a result overall music quality on television is being sacrificed. “I think that any show that is a cheap show is going to be cheap in all areas, not just musical areas,” said Ashley Irwin, the Emmy winning president of the Society of Composers and Lyricists. “I think reality television is going to have cheap music because those are cheap shows. When you look at the shows they are making for cable now, the really glossy-looking, great acting, great script, great cinematography shows, they’re not going to cheap out on the music.”
CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?
The debate over how television music is produced raises an important consideration about the quality of sound coming through television speakers. Even though televisions are becoming increasingly higher quality, the built-in speakers are not. There are no hard numbers, but most experts agree that probably less than 10 percent of American households actually contain a surround sound system. The sound that comes through people’s built-in television speakers has to be compressed. “To be honest,” Paul A. Edwards, the director of a number of episodes of Lost, Under the Dome, and Bates Motel episodes said, “I don’t want to take away from the intelligence of the audience, but I don’t think at the end of the day most will know the difference.” Therefore, even if music were to be recorded live with the most expensive sound recording systems available, the end result would be the same as something created electronically. “It’s a shame,” Simonec said, “I always thought that with high definition and big screens, maybe television would move back to some orchestra. But that hasn’t happened yet.”
AND THE BAND PLAYED ON But even with the onslaught of easily produced electronic sounds, there will always be a place for live orchestra in television. There are just some things that a score can accomplish that no popular song ever could, said Robert Duncan, the Emmy-nominated composer of “Last Resort” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Once audiences realize how easy it is to synthetically write a score, there will be a greater demand for complex melodies in television music, predicted Irwin. He pointed to the recent popularity of concerts featuring music from television and films as evidence that the trend has already started and that in the long-run orchestral music is going to become more popular. Duncan said that orchestral music has already begun to make a comeback amidst electronically-produced television scores. “I feel like there’s a little bit of a resurgence in orchestral scores,” Duncan said, “which is only afforded to the shows with the biggest budgets. I think most studios put aside some money for licensing. And licensing a song that people will recognize is super expensive. You can actually get a lot of the score of an episode played with some size of orchestra for sometimes less than the music licensing budget.” And even if live orchestral music continues to wane, electronically-produced music at the very least offers composers a whole range of new opportunities in terms of sound. “I think we’re very comfortable in this moment with having the whole range of musical possibilities for television,” Pool said. She added, “It’s a good time for television music, there’s a lot of really extraordinary things happening in TV music now, a lot of creativity. And the younger generation of composers, they’re fine with the MIDI tracks and enhancing them.” So it seems for now that orchestras in television are here to stay, even if in a limited capacity.
“There’s a warmth to real instruments that synth never can have,” Simonec said. “Synth is rather cold, even if you try to write a rather romantic cue in that it doesn’t have the human touch you will have in players. You can put your hands down on a string pad, you can sound great, but it’s not the same as real guys playing a professional melody. That involves emotion and actual feeling.” —30—