Progress made and some musings on Mickey Mouse Sunday, 11 January 2009

Friday night wrapped up with my delivery of four new demos to the Lost Book team, and the good news is that they seem to like them. I had re-written the music for the cafe scene and finished my work on the ending. My style of writing for this project has moved away from my normal approach, which is a less-is-more attitude. Through our discussions we have come to an agreement that there should be music underscoring most of the action – something I would normally be very cautious about, but I think we’ve made the right decision. I think we are all happy with the style and content of the music so far. The music doesn’t mimic every single gesture but is there to set the mood for each scene, so there’s quite a lot of it. 

There’s a term in film music, “Mickey Mousing”, which describes a very literal approach to dramatic scoring. Each on-screen event is reflected in the constantly changing music, like in the old Disney cartoons. Second-by-second, the composer responds to each nuance. When I first saw Hitchcock’s live-action classic “Rebecca” I was almost shocked by Franz Waxman’s score: every sentence the characters speak seems to cause a mood change in the orchestral music underneath. I had come expecting a similar approach to music to that of his later movies, in which Bernard Herrmann painted with much broader strokes. It was a real revelation, and the contrast with today’s trends is pretty huge. 

Here’s a photo of my studio – the place where all the notes get written and all the tea gets consumed!!