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Brief list of credits
Flash Gordon, I Want to Work for Diddy, Marvel Universe LIVE!, Mutt & Stuff
Tell us a little about yourself and what you do for a living?
I am a composer and I have an oddly wide-ranging career at the moment, dividing time between circus, film, television, and advertising projects, and now a live superhero show with Marvel Universe LIVE!. I’m from Canada and studied composition and piano at McGill University in Montreal. I toured Europe for a while with Cirque du Soleil, wrote a tap dancing show for Harley Davidson, orchestrated shows in Las Vegas and Macau, composed shows for Ringling Brothers and Cirque Mechanics, scored some TV, some silent film, some independent film, some short films and commercials and composed themes and logos for networks like PBS, CNN and Amazon. I live in Brooklyn and I’m setting up a new studio in LA right now for TV and Film projects.
You have two live shows touring right now, Cirque Mechanics: Pedal Punk and Marvel Universe LIVE!, two very different shows and subject matters. Was one
easier to score than the other?
Every show has its own challenges and coming up with musical ideas for anything from a 5 second logo to a two hour arena spectacle requires the same attention to intent and emotion. But I’d have to say that Cirque Mechanics was objectively easier in this case, just because the scope of the Marvel project was so large and every piece of music in it was some sort of orchestral electronic rock hybrid with a hundred tracks to mix. Many transitional scenes in Pedal Punk were scored modestly with a solo piano and maybe another instrument or two as support. Marvel Universe LIVE! had many production entities involved (Feld Entertainment, Marvel, Disney Theatrical), a large creative and support team, and so many points of technical integration: acrobatics, video, dialogue, flying automation, pyrotechnics, motorcycle stunts. Even though Pedal Punk is literally about gears and moving parts, there were many more moving parts to Marvel Universe Live and thus more concomitant challenges.
As an aside, I actually have two more shows on tour currently, Built to Amaze and Circus X-treme: both are Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circuses which use a few of my pieces.
The Cirque Mechanics: Pedal Punk show is obviously a lot of activity on a bikes, hence the title. How do you keep the score fresh from not being
repetitive?
The show itself has much more than bicycles going on and it also uses bicycles in unusual ways. For example, a Penny Farthing bicycle becomes repurposed as a hoop for an acrobatic aerial number, one act features two people on a single unicycle, there is a contortion act on a moving table powered by unicyclists on either side, and there is a comedy routine using an exercise bike. In fact there is only one featured act, the BMX number, which is an actual bicycle act on two wheels. So, though everything is inspired by bicycles, wheels, and gears, the show has as wide a variety of acts as any theatrical circus show. I created consistency by sourcing some of my musical sounds from the mechanics themselves: sampled bicycle sounds, trampoline springs, and squeaking gears. I also used things like industrial and junk percussion and prepared piano to suggest the physical mechanical world of the show. But with that sound palette established, I went to many different places stylistically; musical inspirations for the show run from Astor Piazzolla to Tom Waits to Nine Inch Nails.
What are your thoughts on the upcoming Avengers film?
I haven’t seen it yet. I’m looking forward to finding some time to go see it at an IMAX theatre for maximum impact.
Any Marvel film score stick out more to you than the others?
I particularly liked Bryan Tyler’s themes for Thor 2 and Iron Man 3 and Silvestri’s score for the Avengers. Also, Danny Elfman’s work on the first Spider Man movies. Those all stand out to me as iconic examples of the Marvel heroic sound. I enjoyed Zimmer’s fresh take on the Amazing Spider Man 2 – I like that he has pushed himself and his team to do new things with the superhero genre. Additionally, the movie wasn’t that well received but Chris Beck did some very cool things in his score to Elektra.
You aren’t a stranger to superheroes, you scored SyFy Channel’s Flash Gordon. What was the coolest part of that project for you?
Is there anything not cool about Flash Gordon?! I find the absurdity of the entire Flash Gordon universe to be the coolest thing about it, whether in the original comics, the early film serials, the De Laurentiis movie, or the SyFy series that I worked on. That idea of finding another planet with civilizations just like ours but more exotic, magical and funky, it frees you up creatively since there is no pretense at maintaining a sober real world tone. Everything is permitted: interdimensional travel, magic potions, ray guns, flying hawk men. No excuse not to have fun with it. Musically, it was the first large scale project I scored that allowed me to fully integrate heroic orchestral and rock styles, especially in the title theme, and that’s something that has carried through my music since then, especially in the score to Marvel Universe LIVE!.
There are talks about Matthew Vaughn bringing Flash Gordon to the big screen again for Fox. Would you score the big screen version if asked?
In a heartbeat. There are so many ways to approach that character and that world (or worlds), I’d love to come at it from a different angle.
You scored the epic 1926 Greta Garbo silent film, The Temptress for TCM, after winning the 2004 Turner Classic Movies Young Film Composers Competition. Which was harder to score, a silent film or live show?
In one respect, scoring The Temptress was easier than any of my live shows because I had free rein to interpret the drama as I saw fit. The director and stars of that film are long gone so I was collaborating with them in absentia. Collaborating is always more challenging than working alone but at the same time it forces you to confront the bigger picture of a show and the needs of everyone else working towards a common goal – it forces you to grow as an artist and a craftsperson. So the live shows are more challenging but there is a reward for that effort in the electricity you get with a live audience witnessing things they’ve never seen before. Many of the live shows I’ve scored have wall to wall music with very little dialogue so they are in certain respects more similar to silent movies or opera than to modern film or tv.
You are going to be scoring a completely different subject coming up with Nick Jr’s new show Mutt & Stuff. Where did you get the inspiration for this
score?
First, I take inspiration directly from the images of the show: the colors, the puppets, the characters all suggest bright, quirky, organic sounds. My musical inspirations for this show have landed somewhere between Looney Tunes and contemporary indie rock but we’re still just getting started with the series so things may change from day to day going forward. I’m shopping for more toy pianos, slide whistles and glockenspiels to add to my studio arsenal.
Are there any audio programs or plug ins you are currently favoring?
Right now I do all my composing in Logic Pro. I use a little of everything sound-wise – Omnisphere and Kontakt are in almost everything I do. For the Marvel show I was using a lot of big percussion stuff like Soundiron APE, the 8W giant orchestra from 8dio, sound design from the 8dio Hybrid libraries and Impact Juggernaut among others. The Marvel show also has a good dose of BreakTweaker in it. I always lean on my UAD plugins especially when mixing pop and rock oriented music. I love the sound of the Soundtoys plugins too. Spitfire libraries are playing more and more of a role in my sample setups. And I just started fiddling around with the Orbit and Signal libraries which are pretty deep.
What is your “go to” instrument?
My “go to” instrument when I want to feel music is the Steinway Model L in my living room. It sings like no piece of electronic gear I own.
Any tips, hints or motivational speeches for the readers?
Maybe a couple of things I’ve learned as a composer, things I always need to keep relearning:
First, learning to listen to non-musicians when they talk about music can be the most valuable skill for a media composer. A collaborator who is not a musician (i.e. most directors and producers you will work with) often doesn’t have the musical or technical vocabulary to get across the specifics of what they are looking for but it’s essential that you learn to understand their emotional reactions to the music they hear and the emotional goals they need you to convey. Style and sound are perceived in such an individualistic way: one man’s romantic and bracing is another’s saccharine and dated; one composer’s hip electronic beat can sound as cheesy as 80’s elevator music to another. Reading and understanding your collaborators and your audience is as necessary for composing as for any other business or life endeavor and it is one thing you will never learn in music school.
Secondly, learn not to become overly invested emotionally in your music. Keep the emotion in the music itself but out of the conversation around the music. The next piece you write should be better than your last so don’t worry about throwing things out if they don’t work.
Lastly, learn to give the correct number of f*&ks for a given situation. This is a good primer: http://bit.ly/1HVfSbW