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TAKE 8, POV BOX: SESSION MUSICIAN
FULL INTERVIEW: THOMAS BOWES
It may seem incredible that we have had to wait this long in our review of the post-production process to arrive at the musician, but, believe it or not, the musician is one of the last people to be involved in the making of film music! As we’ve seen, many others have played their role before this, from the sound recordist to the orchestral contractor and music copyist. We are finally ready to speak to a highly professional musician who has honed the skill of sight-reading a score without making mistakes over many years. Our interview here comes from Thomas Bowes, who has been playing with the London Philharmonic since 1985. Independently of the London Philharmonic, Bowes regularly records as the concertmaster for film scores after being hired on a job-by-job basis by an orchestral contractor like Isobel Griffiths. In addition to his film-music activities, Tom is also a busy as a solo and chamber music artist, having recorded extensively with the Maggini String Quartet and the London Mozart Players. He spoke to me from his home in London.
JH: Tom, what do you do in the film business?
TB: I play the violin. Playing on film scores and other commercial projects has been part of what I do for, I guess, twenty-five odd years.
JH: Impressive.
TB: Over the years, there’s been film music in different proportions of time. I started playing in orchestras that were contracted for film and so on, probably in the mid 1990s, when I was in my thirties. Gradually, it’s become a more organized part of what I do.
JH: Can you walk us through a typical session?
TB: Sure. The music is basically chopped up into music cues. You may have a piece of music that’s fitted to a piece of film that lasts, let’s say, three minutes. That would be a fairly sort of standard time. It might be a slow or fast piece of music, which has all been pre-determined by others far more skillful and interesting than me! We in the orchestra just sit there and play the music.
JH: How do you get your playing to synchronize with the film?
TB: The music has to be fitted to the film, so that the events in the music score happen exactly when they’re supposed to related to what’s onscreen. The standard way of doing that now is to use a click track. Every beat of score is heard in headset by everybody at the same time, which gets around the whole business of people playing together. You’ve got a large body of players, sometimes 80 to 90 musicians in one room at one time. In an orchestra, you learn to play together. The click track is an added skill to that for recording for film. With the click track, there can be no fuzzy edges at all and there’s no blurring of that at all, you just have to play with the click.
JH: Isn’t there the danger of things being too mechanical sounding if the click track is coming from a machine?
TB: Yes and no. You want synchronicity with the picture above all. There are degrees of slavishness to the click track. You may use the click as a kind of subconscious guide or you might need to establish that you’re using it absolutely, depends on the character of the music. If the character of the music is very lush and slow sounding, you can still play it more organically while you’re keeping a careful check on moving at the same pace as everybody else, at the same pace as the click. It shouldn't be easy for anyone to determine later that, “Oh, that score has been played to click because it sounds terribly rigid.”
JH: Do you see the film on a screen at the same time as you play?
TB: We used to view the film launched on a big screen while playing, but now, that’s basically gone. Mostly now you might not even see the film at all unless you’re right up close to the conductor who’s got it in front of him or her on the screen. To a certain extent, this takes away from the magical feeling of playing to a film. Mostly if you’re playing in an orchestra for a film score nowadays, you won’t see the film. Apart from the fact that you’re using a click track and that there may be some other pre-recorded music in your headset, you won’t be aware that you’re doing anything particularly different that would say this is a film score and not just a piece of music. Those things are often in the hands of other people.
JH: For a given score, how long does it take to record?
TB: Let’s imagine that there may be, say thirty to forty minutes of music in a feature length film. I’ve done those in the course of a couple of days, but I’ve also spent over a week doing that much music. It depends on the budget, on the level of debate amongst producers, on the finessing and nuance of the score that the director and the composer want to have. More often than not, though, it’s all pretty much fixed up with the use of demos (mock-up scores) beforehand. Like so many things, it comes back to the budget of the film. On average, I get booked for a set time of around six hours. Recording sessions will last on average two to three hours a day.
JH: With some variables, I expect?
TB: Sure. I sometimes get booked for say, a project which goes into my diary as being three days of ten o’clock in the morning till five o’clock in the afternoon with an hour off for lunch. But I won’t know what that is unless I've been tipped off that it’s a certain composer with whom I’ve worked before. If I’ve been requested to lead the orchestra as a concert master in those sessions, then I’ll have an idea. Even then, basically one turns up, there’s a folder of music on the stand in front of you, and you start recording it.
JH: Music that you've never seen before?
TB: Ninety-nine percent of the time, it is music that one has never seen before, yeah. You’ve got to be able to think on your feet. You are expected to grasp what is being asked of you pretty much immediately.
JH: I have tremendous amount of respect for orchestra players such as yourself, the craft and skill that’s required of you to be able to do what you just described.
TB: Well, thank you. Sight reading, as it’s called, is certainly a skill in and of itself. You could be an immensely skilled instrumentalist who nevertheless would need to have days to absorb the score. That’s not going to work as a session player. You must imagine that there’s a sort of imaginary taxi meter ticking away above the studio, the whole time. And the numbers money-wise are not small when that many musicians are hired. Even at the most relaxed sessions, there is a sense that the clock is ticking, there is a meter running. Certain things just have to get done, and they have to be pretty much perfectly executed. They have to be in tune and they have to be in time, and that’s it! Then if the director, the composer and all those people who are scrutinizing how it works with the picture, if they want to change it or manipulate it in all kinds of ways, that’s out of your hands as a player.
JH: What are some of the variables that happen when you’re playing?
TB: You may play the same thing exactly with exactly the same instrumentation but with a different dynamic than the one scheduled. Things happen in the moment that affect the sound. You might play louder, slightly softer, or get louder at a certain moment or get softer at a certain moment. All minutely shaded things, in order to fit with how the film is designed to be felt. What the music is doing is crystallizing the viewer’s feelings. There might be a discussion in the recording room, along the lines of: “If we we get loud at that point, maybe that’s not working because it’s kind of giving too much away or it’s interfering with the dialogue.”
JH: Sometimes the musicians have their say!
TB: Well, the music is an underscore in the film. In other words, people are talking onscreen as well as all the other sounds that are happening on the soundtrack. The music has to be graded in such a way that it’s not demanding too much attention, but there are also those moments when it needs to demand absolute full attention. All of these things are in play and are being decided as we record.
JH: To be clear, all of this is happening during the recording session?
TB: Yes, during the session. And just to stress, the last thing that the people who are in charge want is a bunch of musicians who are not being quick enough to simply get it straight away. We can’t be tied down waiting for someone to, you know, get the rhythm in bar 74 or to understand how the chord in measure 64 has to be in tune. Everything needs to get to the point of playing the score quickly so that we can start using what we’re doing in a more creative way.
JH: As the concertmaster or orchestra leader, your job is to ensure that everybody’s ready, that there’s no delay.
TB: Right. Additionally, I have to have a sense of what the filmmakers want and to achieve that without getting in the way myself, without inserting any ego or personality. If there is something that you can hear that’s preventing that, you might very tactically say, “Might it be better if we did this or are you hearing that?” Again, this will vary from situation to situation. Sometimes the best thing to do is just sit tight and let it play out. Sometimes your opinion might be welcomed, and indeed encouraged.
JH: In general, how have things changed in your job over the last twenty-five odd years that you’ve been recording film music?
TB: The fact is that fashions change. That happens in all parts of life and all areas of craft, fashion has changed. I feel like I came in on the tail end of the kind of score that was very big on expansive melody and characterized by a really thick, big orchestral sound. Since the advent of electronic mock-up scores, composers have at their fingertips some very sophisticated means of reproducing what an orchestra sounds like. That’s the biggest change.
JH: Not all good, from your point of view?
TB: Well, ironically, sometimes one can spend an awful lot of time as an orchestra musician trying to sound like the mock-up score. Another change is that every piece of a film is often scrutinized by so many people in the process. If temp tracks are used, for example, that affects what we do. Sometimes, you feel as an orchestra that the best you can do is to sound like the mock-up! Our job nowadays is often to make an orchestral version of the mock-up that sounds a little more human.
JH: As a final question, do you still enjoy recording film music now twenty-five years later?
TB: Yeah. It’s still sufficiently varied for me that I still do. There’s enough in these scores that still keeps me interested, although less of it now that’s as new and interesting as it was. What can be a little dispiriting is—and there will certainly be no names attached to this—is doing a score that I feel has been sort of bled dry. It’s been commissioned in such a way as to be something that in itself is not very interesting, that has to religiously conform to some kind of master plan. But on the whole, I still enjoy my day job!
JH: That’s great to hear. Thanks for taking the time today, Tom.
TB: Thanks for the interview, John, it’s been a pleasure.