CBS News Plays To A New Tune
As I sit writing this to you I am at 35,000’ and being jetted through the sky at 500 mph. No, unfortunately I am not on my own private aircraft, at least not yet.
I’m on my way back from LA, though, and I thought you might enjoy one insider’s view of the music scoring process in Hollywood.
On this trip I played for two projects that couldn’t have been more different. On Thursday I spent quite a long day recording the theme and incidental music for CBS News.
Many of you will know, by this time, that Katie Couric will become the anchor of ‘CBS Nightly News’ next month. And for the first time in 20 years CBS is replacing all of the music that accompanies their national news coverage.
They selected one of this country’s finest cinematic composers to do the music, James Horner. As I have served as his concertmaster for the past 11 years I was not about to miss this historic recording event.
The music, though packaged in small segments ranging from a few seconds to around 2 minutes, covered a wide range of feeling and tempo. After all, they need a triumphant, important sounding theme for the Intro; some tense, brooding music for war stories, busy, fast paced music for campaign coverage, ‘pastoral’ music for coverage of ‘American life’, and so forth.
Some of it was literally recorded in one take. The show ‘theme music’ was afforded more time to tweak balances and adjust the orchestration. Violinistically, none of it was very challenging, just a couple of high passages with large interval leaps to negotiate. Otherwise it was just a matter of keeping the energy level high throughout the entire 7 1/2 hour day.
The next day, yesterday, I spent a day on ‘Bobby’, a star studded film which I believe is being directed by Emilio Estevez.
What a contrast. Marc Isham, another well-known film composer, comes from a jazz background. His string writing is almost purely textual; long pads of sound over which he spins out jazz informed, steam-of-consciousness melodies on piano, sax, or trumpet.
Such days go by very slowly for string players. Essentially we are taking what sounds good on a ‘synth’ and just giving it a bit more depth.
So that’s the long and short of it in ‘A Musician’s Hollywood’ for this week, folks. Now get the long and short of ’A Violinist’s Kreutzer’ for the low down on some great violin techniques.
All the best,
Clayton Haslop
P.S. For some really cool musical bits out of Hollywood, wait until you hear the scoring for ‘All the Kings Men’. The haunting violin solos will inhabit your ears for months. Meanwhile allow my finger strengthening, relaxation building, bow straightening, tone enhancing techniques loose on all the weak areas of your violin playing.
