Living in harmony

As he celebrates 40 years as a film composer, WSA guest of honour Mark Isham tells Dan Jolin why he loves experimenting with sound

or Mark Isham, F music came before memory. There was never a point where he decided that crafting evocative soundscapes, cinematic or otherwise, would be his life’s work. Music was always simply there. His father was an amateur violist and his mother a professional violinist, with whom he travelled as a child from New York City to Europe where he witnessed orchestra performances and symphony rehearsals.

It was during one of these European trips that he remembers falling in love with a particular instrument, a particular sound. “The trumpet was the high trumpet in those days — the clarino,” he reminisces over Zoom from his Florida home, though his base of operations is in California. “It was the most glorious sound. It hit me emotionally and made me think, ‘If I could create this effect for others, that’s something worth doing in one’s life.’ It was the call of the heroic, the call of the triumphant.”

Sixodd decades and almost 200 composing credits later, that call has, in a sense, been answered, with Isham’s honouring at the World Soundtrack Awards. He has been lauded throughout his career for his innovative entwining of electronica and jazz with traditional orchestration, resulting in memorable and impactful film scores including A River Runs Through It, Crash, The Black Dahlia and Judas And The Black Messiah — not to mention sterling TV work on Once Upon A Time and The Nevers. Now Isham’s guest of honour position has brought him right back to the instrument that started it all.

“They’ve assembled a wonderful orchestra [Brussels Philharmonic] to play a collection of my work in a way that nobody will have heard before — especially me,” he explains with a smile. “I have given myself the pressure of playing the trumpet on some of it. That’s probably got me more worried than anything else. I don’t play that much anymore, so I have to get the chops back into shape.”

Yet Isham is quick to point out that any trepidation at getting back up to speed is superseded by his joy at revisiting his prolific back catalogue — “a full 39 years of film work” — in this way. “It’ll be interesting to hear all of this stuff back to back,” says the composer, who turned 71 in September. “It really is a wonderful thing.”

‘I was cajoled into the business. I was not pounding at the door’

Mark Isham, composer

A happy accident

Isham’s film composing career began almost by accident. Having cut his teeth playing trumpet in San Francisco jazz clubs as a teenager, forming his own avantgarde jazz outfit Group 87 and playing in Van Morrison’s band, he was by the early 1980s still struggling in his career. To promote his latest experimental effort — a fusion of electronics (Isham is hugely inspired by Brian Eno) and traditional Chinese instruments — he spent the last few hundred dollars in his savings account on a cassetteduplicating machine and distributed 100 demo tapes to everybody he knew. One of the tapes, via “a friend of a friend of a friend”, he says, wound up in the hands of director Carroll Ballard, who was having difficulty finding the right sound for his 1983 Disney natureadventure film Never Cry Wolf.

“He said, ‘That’s what I’m looking for! Who is that?’” Isham recalls. “And that was my first film. Much to Disney’s dismay — they had already paid for one score, just to get the film done, but he said, ‘No, I’m going to do something else. I’m going to hire a completely unknown kid who’s never done this before.’ How about that?”

The experience of scoring Never Cry Wolf, almost entirely performed with a Prophet5 synthesiser, was “exciting, terrifying and adventurous”, Isham says. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I had never taken a class in film composition before. I knew nothing about the technical side of it. It was seven days a week, 14hour days, just trying stuff out and relying on my jazz instincts.”

His uplifting and atmospheric score was impressive enough to land an agent and, over the next couple of years, start to build a career. It had not exactly been Isham’s dream to work in film but he suddenly felt appreciated, having spent years “working in a genre that’s sort of in the cracks” and feeling unsupported by the industry. Even better, they paid him — more than he had ever earned before. “I was cajoled into the business. I was not pounding at the door,” he grins.

Unsurprisingly, Isham’s 39year journey since has seen some astonishing changes. His early electronicfocused work was, he points out, during the preMIDI era. “You had all these archaic ways of hooking synthesisers up to each other and to tape machines. It was just a very different world. Now you can do it all on a laptop in your bedroom. Everything technologically oriented is so much more accessible.” So much so, he no longer feels tied to his California home studio. “I have a small portable studio that I can bring with me and work in different locations. So that helps.”

It has also involved a lot of change for Isham himself, in terms

Caption here Judas And The Black Messiah

A River Runs Through It

of his sound and style. One of the biggest milestones, he says, was his Oscarnominated score for Robert Redford’s A River Runs Th rough It in 1992, which marked the point he fully embraced orchestration. He remembers mixing it in a tworoom studio, as the other room was being used by celebrated composer James Horner. One day, they crossed paths in the lobby. Horner politely asked Isham if his score was allorchestra. Isham confi rmed it was indeed. “Oh, I didn’t know you did that!” Horner exclaimed.

“Right there you have the perception of me as ‘the electronic guy’, so the fact I was doing an allorchestral score was a big deal,” says Isham. “It was a good turning point for me. Even though I grew up in the orchestral world, I had never studied it academically, but through exposure to it and now forcing myself into it, I could see that I could function eff ectively in it.”

Th at, perhaps, is an understatement. Isham went on to score three more fi lms for Redford, and also enjoyed “repeat business” with the likes of Robert Altman, Alan Rudolph and Gary Fleder, with whom he is again collaborating

Crash

Mark Isham revisits “a full 39 years of fi lm work” ahead of his WSA recognition

Benjamin Ealovega on an upcoming project. Isham is also as happy scoring episodic television as he is cinema — not that he sees much diff erence between the two these days. “I don’t know if you would call it TV anymore,” he says. “Th e Nevers is like a longform movie.”

He has never stopped learning along the way. While scoring 2006’s Th e Black Dahlia, for example, he studied Bernard Herrmann and Leonard Bernstein to help him nail “the mournful modern fi lm noir” sound requested by director Brian De Palma. Even now, he still asks questions. “My son [Nick Isham] is a very prolifi c songwriter. I’ll go into his studio and ask, ‘When you compress that bass drum, but you link it

to the bass, how are you doing that?’ I’m learning all the time.”

Isham’s next lesson, he reveals, is “fi guring out where I stand as a nonfi lm composer these days”. Th is is one of the reasons why he has decided to play trumpet with the Brussels Philharmonic in Ghent — “to push myself to see what I’m capable of.” He is writing “a big symphonic work for electronic music instruments”, and also “doing a whole installation system with one of my sons, who’s a fi lmmaker”, but wonders how these pieces will fi nd an audience.

“We have a very cluttered space these days which art is to be presented in,” he says. “Th erefore how do you market it? And to whom? What do you call it so that people would be willing to take a look at it?” As an experimenter who, since his fi rst few blasts on the trumpet, has rarely failed to attract attention, there’s a strong chance he will fi gure it out. ■ s

‘We have a very cluttered space these days which art is to be presented in. Therefore how do you market it? And to whom?’

Mark Isham

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