Every record has two sides. Recto / Verso is a monthly radio show that alternates between a curated electronic music mix by myself, and an hour given to someone who shapes music without standing in the spotlight: a composer, a mastering engineer, a curator, a critic. One hour. Two faces. Flip it over.
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Radio residency ‘Recto / Verso’ on Retreat – Episode 2 with Eímear Noone & Clint Bajakian
As far back as I can remember, video games have always been there, somewhere.
I remember the first games I played fairly clearly. It was on Windows 95, at a time when the family computer still had something vaguely solemn about it, almost sacred, within the entire domestic setting of a modest home. But it was above all the games that came later, those installed on Windows 98, that constituted my first real video game experiences.
I can no longer remember which of my relatives had taken to buying these games, or even why. What I do remember, however, are the Gen4 magazines that piled up on a shelf in my father’s office. That stack formed a kind of involuntary little archive of the time, and each of these French magazines dedicated to video games almost always came with its CD-ROM, that shiny disc, that famous key, which promised, with a rather singular kind of generosity typical of the entertainment industry of the 90s, dozens of demos, sometimes full games (I think), and therefore the possibility of immersing ourselves, for free or almost, in universes, worlds, and settings that we otherwise would never have had access to back then.
It was also a period when point-and-click adventure games held a special status, or at least were games that attracted a great deal of interest from players. LucasArts and Sierra were two names that still have something magical about them for me today, probably because they take me back to that wonderful time when a game could ask you to click on an apparently insignificant object and unlock an entire puzzle that you had been racking your brain over for several hours.
I started with Simon the Sorcerer. Then came Full Throttle, Torin’s Passage, Sam & Max, Day of the Tentacle, Indiana Jones… All these games had something special for me; they went beyond the simple act of “playing”. In fact, they were my first encounters with interactive universes, with extraordinary characters, memorable dialogue, music that stayed in my head for hours after I had stopped playing, and they also represented places I could return to in an attempt to solve a puzzle I had left behind.
All these games occupied a somewhat uneven place in my life, because they arrived so early. What I mean by that is that they were there even before my first game console, before I even had a clear idea of what video games really were. Because for me, it all began with a family computer, a desk, stacks of magazines and these CD-ROMs, these discs that we slipped into the drive with something resembling a kind of promise.
Within that promise, there was also something else that is discussed less often, especially when we try to explain why some of these games stay with us while others disappear… I am, of course, referring to music.
Great video games almost always rely on a strong story and successful gameplay. This has become self-evident, to the point where it seems perfectly normal to us. But sound, and music in particular, constitute other elements, sometimes relegated to the background, that are probably more important than we care to admit.
Because who, years after playing a game, has not suddenly found themselves transported somewhere, into a familiar setting, by the magic of a few musical notes?
Because that is often what video game music allows us to experience: it can preserve a place that never truly existed and take us back there simply by listening to its music. A melody is enough to make a room, a setting, a character, a quest, even a game menu reappear, all without ever having to ask us whether we want to remember it.
I can still remember these themes precisely, even hum them flawlessly, from the first Zelda games to the music of Simon the Sorcerer and certain sounds from World of Warcraft. What is most striking is that these memories are not merely musical. No, entire spaces, specific emotions, periods of my life are intertwined with them, seemingly recorded somewhere behind the music, as if it had served as a time capsule.
There is a real relationship between music, video games and memory. This relationship points us towards something fundamental. It reminds us that music has never simply accompanied the action. It shapes worlds, universes. It stimulates, carries emotions. It suggests colours for spaces that, without it, would remain mere arrangements of pixels, geometries and 3D drawings. But above all, over time, this music becomes one of the main vehicles for what we carry within us from these lived video game experiences.
It is around this idea that I wanted to create the second episode of my radio residency on Retreat.
I had the honour, and I believe the word is not too strong here, of welcoming Eímear Noone and Clint Bajakian to my radio residency. They are two great composers whose careers have each contributed, in their own way, to shaping how we hear certain worlds in video games.
This invitation was not simply a way for me to talk about their compositional work in the technical sense of the term, nor even to revisit their most famous soundtracks in detail. No, rather, I wanted to understand how music manages to do something quite remarkable: give a world an identity before we are even aware of that identity.
For this show, I asked them to select several pieces that are particularly dear to them.
And so, I invite you to discover them through a one-hour mix, accompanied by a double interview (one with Clint and one with Eímear).
In this Q&A, we revisit the selected pieces, but also the worlds they are associated with, their work, their relationship with composition, and that question that comes up so often, or perhaps every single time: how can a few minutes of music be enough to bring an entire world to life?
Because ultimately, that is undoubtedly what interests me most about this radio show: understanding why certain pieces of music, sometimes heard ten, twenty or twenty-five years ago, continue to play a role within us, even though the game itself has been over for a long time.
Tracklistings
EÍMEAR NOONE
- Eímear Noone & Craig Stuart Garfinkle — Keepers of the Temple — World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor (Blizzard Entertainment, 2014)
- Eímear Noone — Slowly Evolving Evocative Strings
- Eímear Noone & Craig Stuart Garfinkle — Cold Dead Hands — Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 (Paradox Interactive, 2025)
- Eímear Noone & Craig Stuart Garfinkle — Malach — World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor (Blizzard Entertainment, 2014)
- Eímear Noone & Craig Stuart Garfinkle — The Lake Has a Secret — Two by Two: Overboard! (2020)
- Eímear Noone & Craig Stuart Garfinkle — Dave’s Prologue / Two by Two Main Title — Two by Two: Overboard! (2020)
- Eímear Noone & Craig Stuart Garfinkle — This Is the Colony — Two by Two: Overboard! (2020)
CLINT BAJAKIAN
- Howard Shore — The Shire — The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
- Clint Bajakian — The Village — World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor (Blizzard Entertainment, 2014)
- Ennio Morricone — A Fistful of Dollars — Per un pugno di dollari, dir. Sergio Leone (1964)
- Clint Bajakian — The Sawmill — Outlaws (LucasArts, 1997)
- Clint Bajakian — The Kraken’s Lair — Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb (2003)
- Greg Edmonson — Refuge — Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (Naughty Dog / Sony, 2009)
- Clint Bajakian — Chase’s Theme — Uncharted: Golden Abyss (Sony Bend, 2012)
- Ennio Morricone — On Earth as It Is in Heaven — The Mission, dir. Roland Joffé (1986)
- Clint Bajakian — Eagle of Draenor — World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor (Blizzard Entertainment, 2014)
- Clint Bajakian — Mountains of Nagrand — World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor (Blizzard Entertainment, 2014)
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Clint was also kind enough to accompany his selection with a few personal remarks on the pieces he chose. These comments allow us to delve a little deeper into the reasons behind his choices, the memories they evoke, and what these pieces of music mean to him.
Clint Bajakian 30min Playlist Remarks
Howard Shore – “The Shire”
→ I’ve always viewed Howard Shore’s Lord of the Rings music as a kind of central style for a magical adventure in a Medieval fantasy world. When I was invited to write music for World of Warcraft, I immediately thought of Shore’s approach to melody, modality, the orchestra and choir. I tried to emphasize melody and emotion in everything I contributed to WoW.
Clint Bajakian – “The Village”
→ The WoW lead composer, Russell Brower, encouraged the composition team to use whatever additional instruments they wanted in their music, including world instrumental and orchestral soloists. I rented an autoharp and was playing it in my hotel room when a tune came to me and I whistled it with chords underneath, recording it on my phone. While very simple, the tune seems to have a natural, pastoral spirit that fit the WoW world. I orchestrated it very simply for color and mood. The score, featuring the work of a seven-composer team, won the Hollywood Music in Media award for Best Video Game Score .
Ennio Morricone – “Fistful of Dollars”
→ Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti western scores were the gold standard of the genre, and he was a principal architect of that style. From The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, to For a Few Dollars More, to Once Upon a Time in the West, his scores (Cinema Paradiso!?) are always full of great theme and deep emotion. He is my favorite and most influential film composer, along with John Williams.
Clint Bajakian – “The Sawmill”
→ At LucasArts in 1996, Daron Stinnet, the creative lead on Outlaws, asked me to create an homage score to the great soundtracls of Morricone. I listened to his soundtracks for a week or two, then put them away in favor of working to create original material in the same style. Being still a bit early in the evolution of video game music, it was novel – at least for us – to bring so many musicians into the studio, including myself on whistling, guitars, piano, melodica, and other instruments. If I had relied on MIDI samplers and synthesizers it would have been impossible to achieve a true spaghetti western sound.
Clint Bajakian – “The Kraken’s Lair”
→ Shortly after departing LucasArts to establish my own audio production company Bay Area Sound in 2000, I was invited to compose the score for Indiana Jones and the Emperor’sTomb. Naturally the intended style was to be in line with the great soundtracks for Raiders by John Williams. I was daunted, not only being tasked to write in the great Maestro’s style (as best I could!) but also because, in those days, MIDI samplers were good but not fantastic, so I realized the need to record at least a good part of the score with live orchestra. When LucasArts denied me the budget to do this, I used most of my creative fee to hire the Seattle Sinfonia – choosing themes and action cues to ‘go to the stage’ as slower ambient cues could largely be managed with MIDI. The score went on to win four Game Audio Network Guild awards, including Music of the Year in 2004.
Greg Edmonson – “Refuge”
→ Greg Edmonson is a very talented composer and a great guy to work with – and travel with! I learned a lot from his work on Uncharted 1, 2, and 3 and our trips to London, Los Angeles, and San Francisco to record orchestra were great fun. A highlight was our touring the tower of London with our wives. I was fortunate to add increasing numbers of additional incidental cues through those first three Uncharted PlayStation titles.
Clint Bajakian – “Chase’s Theme”
→ In 2010, I was assigned to write the soundtrack for the PlayStation PSP title, Uncharted: Golden Abyss as the principal Uncharted composer, Greg Edmonson, was too occupied scoring Uncharted 3. One thing I did to best ensure a style compatible with Greg’s original approach to the franchise was to hire his fantastic orchestrator, Eric Schmidt. We had a lot of fun working together and traveling to record the excellent orchestra in Nashville. Set in the South American jungle, I included my own guitar playing on this and a few other tracks.
Ennio Morricone – “On Earth As Heaven”
→ Simply one of the greatest pieces of music written in film history, this track features a number of exemplary compositional accomplishments. First, his melodies are superb, and moreover, the layering of ideas presented simultaneously is astounding in its brilliance, complexity, and emotive power. The oboe, the choir, the drumming, layers that crescendo to a climactic end. The approach to thematic ideas in an orchestral/choral setting by Maestro Morricone is rich and heartfelt.
Clint Bajakian – “Eagle of Draenor”
→ At the very start of the Warlords of Draenor scoring project, Blizzard Audio Director and lead composer, Russell Brower, called a phone meeting with all seven composers on the phone. He assigned us to create a 5-10 minute piece of music that would be fully produced with live orchestra and choir. He was quite visionary in encouraging us to simply write whatever we felt inspired to, based on some game concept art he supplied. I composed something of a medley of 5 thematic regions and Russell’s reaction was supportive, prompting me to develop each one into one or more pieces for the actual game. Eagle of Draenor was developed from one of these sections.
Clint Bajakian – “Mountains of Nagrand”
→ In listening to the prior work for the franchise by other composers, notably Russell Brower, Neal Acree, and Jason Hayes, I was struck by the bold and dramatic approach to the music. In Mountains of Nagrand, I tried to build an increase in orchestral power through theme and harmony, traversing many of the striking colors available in the orchestra and choir.
Interview – Clint Bajakian
On « The Village » (WoW)
You’ve said you composed this melody by whistling in a hotel room, using a rented autoharp. Does this almost accidental way of composing, far from a studio, with no initial intention of using it in the game, happen to you often? Do you keep systematic track of these moments, or is it pure chance that this one survived all the way into the final game?
Clint: I once was asked in a class what was my favorite tool for composition. And I held up my iPhone. Before mobile phones my favorite tool was the little portable dictaphone that you might take to a meeting or do an interview with. The best material comes to me, (and I suspect many others), when I’m not expecting it. When I’m walking down the street or driving my car, a melody or a musical idea can just surface and I have to capture it immediately and fluidly, without effort. Once the idea or sequence of ideas is recorded on my phone – even in very rough form – I then having something tangible that justifies my powering up my digital audio workstation.
For a long time, I’ve had a philosophy about when to turn on my DAW versus when to leave it off – to simply ‘avoid the beast’. And I have the following analogy for this that has to do with buying someone a gift. There are two basic ways you can go about it – you can walk aimlessly through stores looking at merchandise and wondering if they would like this or if they might like that. That’s the difficult way. On the other hand, you can just sit in a chair and think – just sit there doing nothing – until a great idea comes to you for what they might like. Once it comes to you, you are free to manage the actual process of acquiring the item and everything is totally straightforward.
When it comes to the digital audio workstation, I will not turn it on unless I have an idea. I will not subject myself to timidly fiddling around with different instrument patches, aimlessly pushing sound around without a specific idea. The idea can be just an ‘essence’ – a few measures, a simple melody, or a non-musical idea where I’m describing the composition, the form, the orchestration, the pacing, and perhaps a dramatic story behind it. These things can be recorded to the iPhone, whistling, singing, talking, improvising at the piano and, in the case of Village, fooling around on an autoharp in a hotel room – often they come in several iPhone recordings in sequence that continue to flesh out an idea. It’s interesting to listen to some of these early warblings, and then compare them to their finished orchestral recording and see, in fact, how close they really are, despite one being a wandering unmetered thought-bubble mess, and the final result being a beautifully produced final orchestral master.
On « The Sawmill » (Outlaws, a tribute to Morricone)
You’ve explained that you listened to Morricone’s soundtracks for two weeks, then « set them aside » to compose original material. Why that deliberate choice to break away?What did this process teach you about the difference between imitating a style and absorbing its essence?
Clint: I think this question points to the difference between copying an artist, and doing an homage to an artist. I’ve often been called upon to work in homagein my career, starting with our required emulation of the John Williams orchestral style in Star Wars and Indiana Jones games at LucasArts in the 1990s. What was perhaps most educational for us was that we were confined to very primitive MIDI instruments and very few voices unlike maestro Williams, who had a 110-piece orchestra on stage at his disposal. I think these limitations helped us better work out the ‘essence’ (as you say) of his style – the structural elements or building blocks – and therefore be able to work in the style with some degree of confident originality.
This is essentially the same thing I did when called upon to write for the Spaghetti Western game Outlaws in the style innovated by the great Ennio Moriconne. Of course I had grown up with Sergio Leone’s westerns and other masterpieces like Once Upon A Time In The West so, to a good extent, his style was already internalized. I began work on the project by listening for a good week or two to all his Spaghetti Western soundtracks, then I put them aside and ventured off into the unknown searching for my own ideas within this universe. This project was probably my favorite composition project alongside those of Indiana Jones and World of Warcraft. One successful thing about the production was that much of the composition happened spontaneously during recording sessions. As opposed to a piece being fully composed then accurately produced, many musical ideas came together over the course of a piece’s production process, making the music full of fresh inspiration and invention. It was a rare privilege to enter the stylistic sound world of Moriconne’s rich Spaghetti world and then create my own ideas within it – I think it would be for any composer.
On the choice of musicians in 1996
At a time when MIDI samplers still largely dominated video games, you took the gamble of bringing in real musicians to the studio, including yourself on whistle, guitar, piano, and melodica. Were you aware, at the time, that this choice was almost avant-garde for the industry? How did the LucasArts team react to this request?
Clint: When I sat down with a large piece of paper and pencil to try to sort out how to manage and produce this project, the main question was, how could I achieve a successful outcome ? I quickly realized that there would be no way to create a successful, Spaghetti Western score using only sampled MIDI instruments. The challenge was that at this time in the video game industry, MIDI music production was pretty much the norm. I realized I needed to bring in at least a reasonable number of live instrumentalists and my colleagues and I, as in-house salaried employees, would have to performa as many parts as we could to save money. This is because LucasArts was tight with budgets in those days. For example, I recall a few years later, when I was doing sound design for an Indiana Jones game in which he could drive a jeep through the environment, I requested $500 to record a friend down the street doing various things with his World War II vintage Willys jeep. Talk about a great value and an amazing point of quality in the game, but it was denied. So I was nervous that I would be denied budget to bring in instrumentalists and spend additional employee time in the recording studio but, thankfully, a reasonable budget was approved. I suppose that it was fortunate that many of us on staff weremusicians who could sing and play various instruments, and in my case, whistle. One thing I remember fondly was the three-men choir of Peter, Michael, and myself singing, dramatic, choral parts as salaried employees, not professional singers! Big budget professional budgets would come later in the industry! I suppose it was somewhat novel at the time to emphasize so much live performance in a video game score, but necessary given the genre.
On « The Kraken’s Lair » (Indiana Jones)
You’ve recounted using a good portion of your own composer’s fee to pay for the Seattle Sinfonia orchestra, since LucasArts hadn’t allocated the budget for it. That’s a fairly radical financial decision. Looking back, would you make the same choice again? And is this kind of personal investment more common among video game composers than people realize?
Clint: This has become something of an age old question that typically applies to younger, up-and-coming composers. One school of thought vehemently advises against taking on work for free, or for a very small fees, on the basis that it cheapens you and your work, and sets a bad precedent for the composition community as a whole. The other school of thought says, sometimes it can be a smart strategy to take on something for free, or for a small fee, or pay for some live production out of pocket. If it is going to achieve a higher level of product quality that helps distinguish you in the industry, the nit can be worth it to further your career. This is the reason I applied most of my creative fee to hire the Seattle Sinfonia when LucasArts denied additional budget for live production.
The soundtrack did go on to win four Game Audio Network Guild awards, including Music of the Year, so it was arguably a good decision! In the end, I advise up-and-comers to carefully weigh these sorts of decisions, but remember, the goal is to grow in your success and notoriety as a composer and decisions should generally be in support of that. Once you are established, you will be sought after and the money will always be good.
On managing the budget between orchestral and MIDI cues
You’ve explained that you reserved the live orchestra for themes and action cues, leaving the slower ambient cues to be handled in MIDI. How did you learn to « hear » in advance which parts of the script would sound convincing in MIDI and which would absolutely require live musicians? Is this a skill that gets sharper with experience, or are there more objective rules at play?
Clint: I think this is a basic fact of the behavior of instrument samples – that they can’t rival the sound of human beings in live performance. This was certainly true at the time of the score around 2002 and, since then, it has become much much better but there’s still much room for improvement. The way that, say, a violin section patch begins as a recording of real violin players in a studio which are then organized into a MIDI violin patch that the composer controls in their DAW. A result of this process is that the sustained parts of the notes are true, faithful recordings of a wonderful, violin section sustaining different notes at different dynamic levels. But the problem, certainly in 2002, is that the attacks, the onsets of the notes, were limited in number and often quite similar to one another from note to note. Another way of saying this is, for a long held note, the MIDI sample was for all intents and purposes the same as an orchestral recording for an expensive film score. But the attacks, or note beginnings, were too similar to one another, so in action cues that typically have many notes in rapid succession, MIDI samples start to sound like a repetitive machine. Tak tak tak !
I decided to score the action cues with the live orchestra based on two reasons. First, overcoming the undesirable sound of fast repeated notes in MIDI, and second, the game was afterall an action game requiring a good amount of action music. The themes also needed to sound great and professional, and they tended to be shorter and easier to produce, so I included them. The slower, ambient cues often feature long sustained notes in softer, subtler, mysterious textures that MIDI samples – even at that time – actually did a pretty good job emulating.
On « Chase’s Theme » (Uncharted: Golden Abyss)
You took over from Greg Edmonson on this project and deliberately hired his orchestrator, Eric Schmidt, to ensure stylistic continuity. To what extent did you try to « sound like » Greg, and at what point did you feel you could let your own voice come through, particularly via your personal guitar playing on certain tracks?
Clint: In this game, it was my job frankly to work squarely and faithfully within Greg’s style for Uncharted. It was largely a business strategy to release a new PlayStation PSP product that had as consistent an extension of Greg’s fine scores for Uncharted 1, 2 and 3 for the PlayStation as possible. It was a pleasure working in his established style and Eric was brilliant at orchestrating the music with the same approach he applied to Greg’s, making for an even more faithful homage. As Golden Abyss took place in the South American jungle, I did bring in my own guitar, and (not too dissimilarly from Outlawsand Moriconne), I endeavored to write within Greg’s stylistic world while still innovating my own new melodies and expressing my own musical ideas.
On working with seven composers (WoW, Warlords of Draenor)
Russell Brower gave you a great deal of creative freedom from the start, simply asking you to draw inspiration from a piece of concept art. How is overall stylistic coherence negotiated when seven composers are working almost in parallel with no strict constraints? Were there moments of friction, or conversely, happy redundancies between your respective themes?
Clint: This is a very good question because it gets to the heart of: how does a composition lead or indeed a producer of a score who may not be writing any of the music coordinate multiple composers. There are two sides of it. First there is the challenge of achieving a cohesive score despite the fact that you are working with different individuals who have their own individual voices. But the second side is that that’s actually a positive in that you gain wonderful variety and can associate different musical voices with different areas of the game to give different regions and environments their own musical personality. It takes great care to strike a balance between these two things – not putting pressure on the composers to write in some sort of unified style but rather encourage them to express their voice faithfully guided by their own personal inspiration while still ensuring an aethetically cohesive soundtrack in the end.
Before talking about Russell’s direction style, I will talk a little bit about my own approach I took at Sony PlayStation to producing scores with multiple composers.
My music development team and I would play the game and work closely with the development team to delineate different game areas, locations, characters, and story points. This would lead to a list of separate musical cues that were needed form the composers. Then that list would be distilled into a master cue list of very specific individual musical cues with detailed information and approximate durations. Then the cue assignments were distributed among the composers in a way that played into each individual’s own compositional strengths. This maintained some degree of control over what was written and how it would be used in the game, after all, music production is very expensive and there are limits to how much music can be produced for any given gain, but we did not go so far as to dictate to the composers how they should approach the creative aspects of their assigned cues.
So where maximum freedom was given is how the composer addressed that assignment creatively. Let’s say it was a theme for a giant in a castle in God of War. I would send concept art, describe some qualities of the music that we felt we needed, and then leave the rest of the composer to invent on their own. Then when the music was received back, we tried to maintain as flexible and accepting a reaction as possible, only calling attention to certain aspects that may need a revision or two, but on the whole, generally affording a lot of freedom to the composer to invent in their own way.
For some games or situations within them, there were at times particularly intricate adaptive musical schemes with transitions and alternate endings, mood shifts, and the like. These musical segments needed to be connected in real time as the game was played. One thing I did try to avoid – unless it was necessary – was assign these connective segments to the composers as cues. IN rare cases the adaptive scheme required connective cue assignments but generally we wanted to protect them from this tedium in favor of encouraging them to just write music they were excited about. Then through multitrack editing we would manufacture the various connective segments from the single large cue that the composer had delivered. That was somewhat in line with the freedom that Russell employed on World of Warcraft but nowhere near the actual degree he afforded it – he granted even more freedom to his composition team.
Russel Brower afforded what I might call a maximum level of freedom to the composers individually and collectively. At the outset of the project he simply provided us with some concept art and deliberately withheld more detailed information about the game, the story, the ‘lore’, etc. – there were no elaborate descriptions of what he was after musically from us, there was no specificity in any assignments given to any of us individually. He simply wanted us to write in whatever way we were moved. This created a wonderfully rich variety of results coming from the seven composer team.
I would say there were two brilliant aspects that stood out in Russell’s compositional leadership. One, in affording so much freedom to his composers, he leveraged their vision, their inspiration, their excitement for the project, and their own personal treatment. I have found anytime a contributing artist is afforded freedom, their results come out better. Once equipped with all the cues, Russell and his Blizzard in-house music team could make edits and design how and where all the music would go in the game.
On « Eagle of Draenor » and thematic development
You describe having submitted a medley of five thematic regions, one of which was later developed into a standalone piece following feedback from Russell Brower. What was it about the initial material that signaled it deserved to be developed further, unlike the other four regions? Did you sense that yourself, or did it come clearly from his feedback?
Clint: Actually, Russell approved all five sections and encouraged me to develop each into longer additional pieces. They were entitled respectively, Eagle of Draenor, Mountains of Nagrand, Army Life, Mobilize, World Expo, and Mystic. The initial ‘concept’ piece of roughly 6 minutes was indeed built of five distinct sections that flowed into one another. I remember Russell’s gratifying words, «There is nothing in the piece I do not love.» It turned out to be a great way to proceed for a couple reasons. First, as the five different pieces began their life flowing into one another in one larger concept piece, they were already related to each other on some level. Second, it gave me solid concrete material to exploit in development, rather than confront a completely ‘blank canvas’. As I said earlier, having a good idea totally advantages the composer going into a new piece – depending on the idea if the composer allows it, the piece can almost write itself after that point.
On the cross-influence of Shore / Morricone / Williams
You cite Howard Shore as your central stylistic reference for fantasy, but Morricone and Williams as your deepest influences as a composer. How do these three very different sonic worlds (modal and choral for Shore, thematic and stark for Morricone, classically symphonic for Williams) coexist within your own compositional language?Have there been situations where these influences came into conflict in your writing?
Clint: Your descriptive words for each of these composer is spot on. I can try to describe what lessons and wisdom I’ve learned from each composer.
With John Williams, I have been inspired by the insistence on melodic discourse. Even in interstitial sections that aren’t technically thematic, there is some sort of melodc conduct. Also his mastery of orchestration is a lexicon of lessons in itself. How different instruments or sections are used to lock into the emotion on screen – harp glissandi with high violin passagework for ‘wonder’ (think introduction of Harry Potter main theme), or rapid repeated moving chords in the brass for excitement (Star Wars : ‘Here They Come !’, or woodwind riffs against an atmospheric background for wonderous adventure (Superman main theme)– his massive library of orchestrational devices and techniques has been hugely educational.
Your word modal for the Fantasy genre is exactly right. Howard Shore’s Lord of the Rings score is particularly demonstrative of a solid imaganitive treatment of fantasy. One of the most useful – even cliche – modal and harmonic gestures denoting a fantasy adventure world is a minor chord progressing up a fourth to a major IV chord, in which the fifth of the chord moves up by whole step to the major IV chord and back. When a melody follows this recipe with woodwinds, harp, and choir (perhaps brass in more dramatic treatments), you can’t help but feel a sense of fantasy and adventure. I would say my WoW music was a kind of combination of Shore and Williams inspired modal melodicism and orchestration.
Ennio Moriconne holds a special, in a way, unrivaled place in my heart as acomposer. His devotion to melody is exemplary amid all the greatest film composers in history. The Cinema Paradiso main theme is one of the most tender and profound melodies ever written, as is his main theme for Once Upon a Time in the West, featuring a high soprano vocal solo. What I gained from Maestro Moriconne is the apprecition for a melody not just having to be good, or serviceable, but needing to have a kind of inner almost abdominal urgency and importance. I say this as the origins of melody are no doubt vocal. Note movement in the melody involve different degrees of diaphragm, lung, and vocal chord effort. This is why so many emotive melodies such as arias in opera or many of Williams’ and Moriconne’s themes involve dramatic intervalic leaps at the outset (such as Princess Leia’s theme or Once Upon aTime in the West opening vocal leap). I’ve been mostly inspired by Moriconne not only in melodic invention, but insistence on a good melody or theme possessing a dramatic urgency to whatever extent possible.
On the role of personal performance
Your own playing (whistle, guitar, melodica) appears on several iconic pieces throughout your career, from « The Sawmill » to « Chase’s Theme. » Is this a deliberate signature, a way of leaving a personal, recognizable imprint on projects where the composer often remains invisible behind the orchestra or production team?
Clint: I wish my reasons for performing on my own compositions were somehow self-serving but it’s actually quite a mundane set of reasons for doing this. Not only am I generally not paid to provide a guitar, piano, or voice part, there’s no budget for it anyway so it is really driven by necessity. I include my own playing because there’s no budgetary impediment to doing so. In the case of Outlaws my guitar, piano, whistling, alto recorder, melodica work was not only free to the company (except for my time on the clock as a salaried employee), it was invaluable as it helped infuse more live elements into the soundtrack. While Sony probably would have agreed to some budget to bring in a professional guitarist for Golden Abyss, it was easier for me to just bring my guitar into work and lay down the parts. While rusty as a classical player at least I had earned an undergraduate degree in classical guitar performanceyears earlier ! I would say most composers have various instruments on hand that they can record into their compositions – it’s an efficient way to gain live elements without eh added administration and cost of budget approvals.
Interview – Eímear Noone
(Coming very soon…)