BLOG: The Art of The Mix

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Driving to Skywalker Ranch has become a regular pilgrimage over the past two years. The country roads north of San Francisco become ever windier the closer you get to the ranch, which was built thirty years ago by George Lucas as an idyllic creative campus.

I’ve used these country drives to plan the work to be done that day, thinking through the sound design of Alternative Energy, Mass Transmission, and Art of War during visits over the past ten years to mentor under Gary Rydstrom, the leading sound designer at Skywalker Sound.

Most recently, my visits to the Ranch have been about Philharmonia Fantastique: The Making of the Orchestra, an animated film the journeys inside instruments as they’re played. Early in the project, Gary and I storyboarded the film with animation director Jim Capobianco. Then we’d gather there to consider the musical score, the art, the motion graphics, and various other elements of the film.

The last step, the topic of this column, is mixing the symphonic score.

That’s how I ended up in the room with two of Hollywood’s best sets of ears. Gary is a legendary sound designer, having one seven Oscars for his work on Spielberg films; and to handle the mix, he brought in Shawn Murphy, who mixes all the John Williams scores.

To sit at the mixing board between these legendary listeners is quite an experience. When not figuring out how to bring out a particular instrument in the mix or accentuate a piece of sound design, Gary and Shawn reminisce so casually about mind-blowing projects (last month, it was about the upcoming Spielberg remake of West Side Story). For this project, we were mixing the studio recording of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra made the month before (see the previous column about the magic of recording an orchestra during Covid).

So, what happens at ‘the mix’?

The mix is when all sonic elements are brought together. For a pure audio release, such as my opera The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, that means integrating all the various microphones – close on individual instruments, singes, section mics, room mics. My music also comes with electronic beats and sound design, so these mixes are complex beasts. But an audio release only requires one mix – the CD or digital album.

For Philharmonia Fantastique, we need both an album mix and a film mix. That’s because people often listen to an album and a film on different systems, and because a film requires a more dynamic mix than a traditional audio album. For example, when the film’s Sprite flies inside the flute, the film mix brings up the close mic on the flute; or when the bassoon fills the entire screen like an alien spaceship, we add some low subwoofer to accentuate the bassoon’s role as the bass of the woodwind section.

At Skywalker, we mixed on the main mix stage, with Shawn and I at the board, and his assistance Erik in the editing room nearby. Erik is the master of the edit domain, the person we go to when we need to dig up a different take of a particular passage. That mostly happens when there are issues of sync: when a percussion hit isn’t lining up with something in the film, for example.

Philharmonia Fantastique presents very intricate sync issues because it features close-ups of instruments being played as we hear them. So, a year after the film was finished, thousands of miles away in Chicago a bunch of musicians had to perform exactly in sync with the fingers of a flutist. The handful of times things were slightly off, well we just called Erik in the editing room.

We finished the mix on Friday; took a lunch break; and then came back onto the mix stage to experience the film from start to finish. Conductor Edwin Outwater joined us at this point, and we both couldn’t stop smiling at hearing the full orchestra come together.

Coming together, after all, is the key thematic of Philharmonia Fantastique, a celebration of the ways an orchestra unifies its diversity of instruments and people. Perhaps we took for granted how magical an orchestra is before Covid; but now, the majesty of the medium will be especially appreciated.

I drove back through the windy roads of Marin with a smile, tapping the beats of the film’s finale on my steering wheel. Bringing this to life during the past two years has been one of the most fulfilling creative experiences of my life – and I can’t wait for Philharmonia Fantastique to premiere next season.

BLOG: Recording in a time of COVID

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So many fascinating revelations have occurred while recording  Philharmonia Fantastique: The Making of the Orchestra this month with Chicago Symphonywith conductor Edwin Outwater.  The soundtrack for this 25’ animated film, which journeys inside the orchestra to see how instruments work, is a vivid concerto for orchestra.  Recording an orchestra during Covid is no small feat – and a real-world illustration of the film’s key theme: the orchestra as a beautiful example of “coming together.”

All film scores are recorded with a click track – i.e., a metronome – to ensure tight synchronization between music and images.  For safety reasons, we’re recording in smaller groups – in this case by instrument families – and then putting everything together in post-production. Our recording engineer Shawn Murphy is a master at this, having just recorded Spielberg’s West Side Story (and several other films) in this manner.  The Jedi-knight skills aren’t only required in the studio afterwards; the engineer also needs to set up the sessions so the players are as comfortable as possible. 

photo: T. Rosenberg

So Shawn and his assistant Erik Swanson have made it possible, for example, to play back the violins while the low strings record, or play the brass when the woodwinds lay down their parts.  That’s crucial for pitch and texture.

 

While there are obvious challenges to recording in isolation, some advantages have become obvious with this project. Because the film’s Sprite flies inside various instruments as they’re playing, we need some very close mic’ing of specific instruments. (The film’s poster art shows the Sprite inside the cello, for instance.) Spreading out the recording sessions over five days allows us to take the time to capture those close-up sounds.

Additionally, it’s interesting for the cello section to lay down its part without the brass blasting over them, allowing the cellists to really focus on their sound. One possible pitfall is precision obsession: in some orchestral tutti passages, players lean into their instruments more aggressively than they do when isolated. The orchestra rages euphorically at the climax of Philharmonia Fantastique, and we’re encouraging players to add grit to their sound at those moments.  The accumulation of those intense instrumental textures are what makes a climax so thrilling.

After a year without orchestras, I found myself overwhelmed with emotion during the first session with violins.  Just hearing them tune provoked a visceral emotional reaction; it’s been so long since I’ve heard a section tune.  The lack of public discussion about the plight of the performing arts – especially when compared to, say, restaurants – has made the pandemic especially challenging for so many artists. It’s nice to be back with an orchestra I love, finding creative ways to make music again.  Let’s hope orchestras look to September 2021 as a time to come back together in big ways.  While that may be a challenge, it’s so crucial to the well-being of our collective cultural psyche. Orchestras are defined by the act of coming together, so let’s look to them as we emerge from this long year.

Photos by T. Rosenberg

BLOG: A Mythological Zoo

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The vampire bat stumbles through the eerie blue darkness, walking on its strange umbrella-like arms like the Landstriders in The Dark Crystal. It drags itself next to a tin of cow blood and begins lapping it like milk. And then the cameraman says, Perfect – stay right there and start talking.

I’m at the Philadelphia Zoo to shoot a video about my symphonic work Anthology of Fantastic Zoology, a concerto for orchestra in the guise of a bestiary of mythological creatures. This month the amazing Yannick Nezet-Seguin conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra in three concerts here and a one at Carnegie Hall, and someone had the brilliant idea to bring me to the zoo to examine the closest relatives to the creatures depicted in the symphony.

Anthology brings to life the dark fantasy of Jorge-Luis Borges, a master of magical realism and narrative puzzles. Through eleven interlocking movements, the piece showcases different sections and soloists with the vividness of Russian ballet scores, a major inspiration for the piece. Written for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2015, the piece was the culmination of a 20-year fascination with the prospect of mythological creatures animated in imaginative and theatrical ways.

I first came across Borges’ slim volume while a student of comparative literature at Columbia College. With his unique mix of dry scientific description and fantastic elements, the Argentine writer has often drawn me into compositional What If’s. Turning through pages that include nymphs, sirens, gryphons, and several creatures of his own creation, I found myself asking What if this was a concerto for orchestra?

Created by Bela Bartok, the ‘concerto for orchestra’ is an ingenious symphonic form.  Instead of showcasing just one instrument as in the standard concerto, why not feature everyone?  It’s like the finale of a Broadway musical, where everyone pops up for a moment.  I embraced the concept of a mythological bestiary as the perfect vehicle for a concerto for orchestra. The basic compositional challenge was to create highly vivid themes associated with each instrument and creature, ones that would be so memorable that I could reprise them all at the ‘witching hour’ at the very end and have the listener recognize each one.

Creating memorable ideas is not a strong suit of contemporary music. The process-based focus of serialism and minimalism favors textures and surfaces, not melodies. That focus was an understandable move away from the traditional melody-and-accompaniment approach, but like all new things it became old at some point. In both the symphonic realm and now in opera, I look to create ‘craveable’ material that grabs you and won’t let go.

To make the themes even more vivid, I hard-wired dramatic elements to many of the them. The Sprite, for example, comes with the bracing new element of symphonic choreography. The tune hops from music stand to music stand, even bouncing offstage. For a few years, I’ve looked at the violins and wondered whether I could shoot music across them, stand by stand. I imagined a motif spinning from the concertmaster outwards, something like a miniature relay race at high speeds.  Sit in the balcony and you can watch patterns zig-zag across the string section like lighting.

Another creature, the serpentine A Bao A Qu, is conjured by a reptilian tune in the double reeds that is a palindrome. Borges describes a creature that slithers up a tower; gloriously molts at the top; then slides back down – and I wanted this movement to mimic that mirrored life cycle.  I spent a vast amount of time searching for material that could be perceptively reversible on both the micro and the macro level. So there are miniature cells that work in both directions, but also big interruptions that return in the reverse. There is a ridiculous gong that announces the creature that, in the end, swooshes backwards.

Other creatures include a flying lion (the Gryphon, illustrated by brass and a vicious array of 13 timpani) and a creature that is an island (the Zaratan, which consumes the entire orchestra like a musical black hole). The lyrical core of the piece is inhabited by the Sirens, those beautiful creatures who lure sailors to their deaths. Using the offstage violins, I passed a melody between them that lures each of the onstage strings, soloist by soloist. The movement climaxes with a tapestry of a dozen soloists undulating among each other.

This week I’ve been in awe watching Yannick bring this piece to life. Like Riccardo Muti who premiered the work, Yannick is equally at home in the opera house. Having the skills of a ‘musical dramatist’ well serves this piece, which is as Technicolor a symphonic experience I’ve ever created. Having worked together on Alternative Energy a few years ago in Philly and now looking ahead to a new opera at The Met, Yannick and I are learning a lot about the way we approach musical theatrics together.  The Carnegie performance marks the New York premiere of this piece, my largest work to date – my own special zoo.