I’m writing this because I think – sometimes, for some people – it might seem a bit scary working with a composer for the first time:
How on earth do you describe what you want from your musical score?
I’m here to reassure you – you have all the tools and information you need. Music composers are storytellers at heart, just like all the other craftspeople and creatives in media. Why do we tell stories? So that the people we’re telling it to feel something. An emotional response is the end game. Keep that in mind and you can’t go far wrong.
If you know the tone or emotion you want to convey at any point in time for the thing you want to accompany with music (or even for music playing on its own), you don’t need to know anything else to tell your composer.
In my experience, if you don’t know the tone and/or emotion, no amount of other instruction, aside from luck, will likely give you the expected result from your composer.
Caveat: of course, if you want an unexpected result, then feel free to forego any sort of brief and let your composer have at it. I can put money on it that they’ll still want to ask you about tone and emotion, though.
What is tone?
Tone, vibe, feel, emotion… all mean pretty much the same thing for our purposes here. How do you want to feel when you hear the music? How do you want your audience to feel?
Start with the basics:
- ‘up’, ‘down’, happy, sad, angry, fear, love, hate
- steady, calm, erratic, chaotic
Then, degree or extremity:
- content, ecstatic, euphoric, elated, delighted
- sedate, lazy, determined
- racing, excited
- adventurous, perilous, danger, thrill
- still, static, moving, driving
- anxious, concerned, free
- cold, hot
Then, the journey:
This is your emotional narrative – the story that we as storytellers need to tell.
- Where does it start, where does it go, where does it finish?
Then, nuance and layers:
- quirky, sincere, serious, ambivalent, uncertain, literal or ironic, humorous, funny?
Then, when you have your emotive terms, look them up on a thesaurus site to see if you can be even more accurate or specific.
And one final suggestion – say what it is NOT.
A recent brief I received did exactly this. It’s brilliant and incredibly useful as a composer to know what you definitely don’t want upfront, if you definitely know.
Talking to your composer for the first time might be daunting, but any composer worth their salt will make sure to get you to answer the question ‘how do you want the audience to feel?’, and then guide you through the process of scoring your project easily, carefully, professionally and with a minimum of fuss.
Get ahead of the curve by answering the points mentioned here, in advance.
Any more questions? Contact me here to talk through your project’s musical requirements.
Photo: Credit