Practice Apps

Yeah. That’s always extremely tricky and that’s another place where you really have to let the film do the talking and sort of try to stay out of the way and just sort of tinker. I think what you want to do is sort of tinker with the audience's subconscious without being discovered. I think that’s the overall trick of film scoring in general. Is you want to tinker with things behind the scene and remain unnoticed. That’s one of the great things about working with a director and an editor and  stuff. It’s cause as a composer you tend to lay it on kinda thick with the music cause that’s your medium and if the music is speaking too loudly of course it’s going to take away from the overall power of the scene so you just have to find the right balance of melody and rhythm and also ambiguity. You know what I mean? You can’t go too strong in one emotional direction. You know it can turn a lot of people off if the score is too saccharine-y or too scary or you know what I mean? You don’t want to distract, you want to enhance.

Usually what happens with me that if I have like say, before diminuendo I might, when I start with a very generous vibrato, very large and wide. And then when I get towards the end of the diminuendo is going to be smaller and maybe more relaxed. And then the opposite you do to a crescendo. The vibrato’s going to start small and open up as I get louder. Those are pretty standard things. And I believe in that type of playing, but I don’t know, a lot of people that play with only one vibrato and some of them make careers, so I’m sure it’s fine. But to me it’s missing something emotionally. Because if you listen to a singer, I mean, I don’t think any of them is going to use the same vibrato for the whole phrase. It’s never the case. It doesn’t work physically as in for them.

With a single change in annotation, the sentence's tone changes a fair amount. when you write anything over a passage—a fingering, a breath mark, a diminuendo—you change the passage's emotion. It doesn't matter if the change is tiny or huge; what matters is that a change inevitably happens. Your eyes, mind, and ears risk incorporating your markings so thoroughly that you may forget that the score existed in a different state before you intervened. Keep an unmarked copy of every score you study, and mark photocopies or duplicate scores instead. This allows you to go back to the unmarked score and look at it with fresh eyes. It may be a good idea to annotate a study score thoroughly, and then perform the piece using an unmarked score.