Onlinemagazin für Film und Filmmusik

Hello Mr. Danna. You composed music for a lot of films with a distinct ethnic or regional setting. Do you find it hard or enjoyable to dig into other’s cultures music?

Well, into the first part it is harder than a conventional film score. Especially here in l.a., there is a very finely operating machinery to turn out a traditional, orchestral film scores. And there’re the orchestraters, the conducters, the studios and the players, everyone knowes what to expect and the outcome is very predictable. Not so much musically, but it is predictable how much time it is going to take to record so many minutes of music. We already know how it is going to sound like and nobody is worried. And so it is certainly a much safer, much more predictable scenario. You when you start working with player in different countries, from different musical cultures, then certainly this whole model thrown off. You have know idea how long it is going to take, you have no idea what exactely you’re going to end up with. It could be a complete and utter failure, waste of time. There is a lot of risk associated with, especially to if you do what i do and that’s travel to the places to record, so to get on an airplane and go over to Eriwan, Armenia to record musicians there, when in L.a. there’s a large armenian population and there’s a lot of musicians here. It’s a bit of a dangerous decision, but i feel although it is risky, the outcome can although be greater than you ever can plan for and i think that’s what i hope happens most of the time.

Do you try to find the correct ethnic or historic tone for a film? Can an average film consumer bear such music?

That is an excellent question. I Think the first question that you ask when you’re writing a film score is, what is the film about, what is the theme, what are the director’s themes, hwat is the concept, what he is trying to say. Then you go on to the nexzt question, what role can the music play and how can the music help the director tell his story. And then you start with a completely blank page and you don’t want any preconceptions like I’m going to try this instrument or this kind of music, anything. You look at the movie, you speak with the director and then you decide what’s the best role for the music in there, at that point you decide what instruments you use. The reason for using instruments is not just because they sound nice, because you feel like it or because that would be cool, that’re totally not reasons to use a duduk. A reason to use an ethnic instrument is that somehow it helps the director to tell his story. So it has to be very carefully thought out and I’m very much against just throwing in - you know not choosing your instruments carefully, without some kind of intellectual concept.
For example, in “The Sweat Hereafter” the action takes place in a northern canadian town, but musically there is medieval european and persian influences. The reason is that I’m scoring the story of “The Pied Piper of Hamlin” - you know, that’s the concept of the score, that’s why those instruments are there. So what you come up with your concept, it will lead you to the correct instruments and I think the difference between me and a lot of composers is just that i have a complete open mind when it comes to time and place of music, if i’ve to go backwards in time, if have to go somewhere geographically, i have no problems doing that. And it’s all very carefully thought out, it’s not just random ethnic and world music mishmash.

Do you think the perception of ethnic influences in music has changed since lets say 30 or 40 years ago?

Absolutely! And I think that film music has a great a deal to do with thta, starting with Peter Gabrie’s score for “the last temptation of christ” and I think that’s really when the so called world music began to really be a popular part of the public conscience all over the world. And I think that’s a wunderful thing, it means the people open up to, they stand up to other cultures like they naturally won’t, and hopefully be open the cultures and the people themselves. I think this is a fantastic developement and no question that people are maybe even tired of hearing some of these instruments that have been overused and misused and used without any thought. The bottom line is that people are now very open to film scores that are they’re using non-traditional means and certainly many scores are still tradional but there is a huge amount of films that are scored a non-traditional way.

Ony very few listeners can differentiate between for example the duduk, that you used in Atom Egoyans “Ararat”, from the ney flute in you new score “The Nativity Story”. How important is it for you to make such detailed differenciation?

I have a lot of friends that have seen “A Sweet hereafter” and i got a lof of emails in which people mistake what is medieval instruments and medieval music for celtic music. And the most people, the average person can’t here the difference between the duduk and the ney. I think, they will eventually . And I think, but I go against a great deal of hollywood studio thinking, but I think you’d never do things like underestimate the itelligence of the audience. I would write scores for the smartest people i know and i just don’t think you can go wrong by doing that. Underestimating the audience is not a good idea. Even if people don’t know that they’re listening to a gamelan in ang lee’s “the ice storm”, they will subconsciously pick up certain bits of information from that. They will not know what it is, but it will them certain things. They will not tell them everything and hear everything i put into it. They don’t know exactly what a gamelan is and what it means to a village, what it means socially and so on. Those are all other lowered down layers of meanings in that choice, and i think for the highest level audience, they will get that. But film music has to work on all the levels, it has to work for a person who doesn’t know the difference between a penny whistle and a duduk. It still has to sound right, it has to fit in the picture in that way. You know, that’s the challenge of writing music for films, that it has to work on so many levels.

Do you compose film music with the thought in mind that perhaps millions of people will consume it and may connect a historic or cultural setting with your music?

Yes, in a kind. As i said I have a high opinion of the audience and i’m not trying to make a statement about myself and im not trying to have a “sound”. I’m trying to kind of bury my personality, the canadienesse of me , to not put forward myself so much but to emerge myself in the concept of the project and use whatever talent and skilles i have to tell the story in a very eargerless way, to work with different concepts that i may not have grown up with or i’ve not worked with before. Just to have a very open mind.
And also it is fun to expose people with some of these things. I love early music and i enjoy the large stage of a film like “The nativity story” and being able to expose people to early european melodies and music, that they might not normally have heard.

So we can conclude that listeners became more educated in music? We can also find variuos irish, spanish, arabian or indian influences in pop music today.

Hmm,I think people are a much more sophisticated audience than it was a generation before and i think the biggest impact on film music is that people are very incomfortable now with being manipulated. All film is manipulation, but people are very sensitive to overt emotional manipulation and they are largely put of by that. In the scores of a few generations ago the music would repeat and amplify what’s on the screen. I think that’s not an effective technique now.
Well, with pop music… Over my lifetime I’ve seen this interest like the chart of the nasdaq, it is like a wave. The interest in indian culture in the west rises and falls and you can see peak moments in the sixties and in the eighties it was kind of gone. Now the revival is very strongly connected with films, like the ones i’ve worked on, “Monsoon Wedding” and some others. They made people very aware of indian culture and the fact that bollywood films are a lot of fun and they have a very secret sensibity, more than current american films. They fill a kind of different niche, they are very much musicals in the sense of old hollywood musicals. Those musicals don’t really exist any more. So I think people enjoy that in itself - the interest in indian culture kind of comes and goes in the west.

Isn’t there the danger of cultural and musical clichés?

Yes, i think there is and i think that happens with anything like this, where there is an interest in another culture. At some point you have a least common denominator. But still, I think, they are a very fun thing to watch. I’ve watched indian films for a long time, when it wasn’t particularly fashionable.
Now I see them reviewed in Variety all the time and in the industry magazines, there is always a new indian film reviewed every week. That is the new thing, there is a sense of a globalization. At first of course an economic globalization, that is continueing, but film is a part of the economic world, so I think this is a part of this story to. Studios are interested in india as a sort of economic engine, there is no question that this is also a big part of it to.

Would you agree to speak of a globalization of music?

Yeah, clearly there is and clearly that is good and bad. I see anything that helps people to understand each other and feel a connection to each other, to people who live in different countries and ways of life, is a positive thing. I think that music is very powerful and very capable of doing this, of building us bridges. The negative part is, that some of these kinds of music will disappear, that they will get mcdonaldized and end up just becoming generic. It’s the same thing when you get on an airplane and fly to Mumbay and the music you will here there will be the same as you can hear here at San Antonio. That is the fear and I think certainly there are elements of that, it happens. But I also think that the roots of the cultural identity are deep and people recognize the value of that. I don’t think that is something that will go away soon.

Do you think that film and pop music as a mass media can really contribute to a general better understanding of others cultures?

[Laughs] I would love to think that, but we are talking baby steps here. I mean there has been a slow rising of fundamentalism all over the world, in every country - here in america, being a great example of that. There is very little difference between living in a small village in america and someone how lives in a village in Iran. There are the same kind of mental processes going on, the same prejudices and closed-mindedness. I think music can be a small but powerful tool, that can make a tiny tiny difference to that.

Your new film “The Nativity Story” is a classic piece of western tradition, a retelling of the christmas story. You used instruments like the ney or Oud, which seems pretty exotic in our modern ears. Do we have to rethink our own traditions a little more?

The Story is clearly set in what is now the middle east and i wanted to play music for the roots of the story. For that time and that place. I didn’t want to repeat the cliché that people have in mind since Peter Gabriel’s scoring of “The Last Temptation”. People have been aping that and doing that world music mishmash, which at that time was absolutely brilliant but now I’m getting a little tired of. Now there is little needed for the audience to get the point that we are far away from the west in an ancient time, we don’t have to repeat that over and over again. The duduk and indian singers all over the place. I just wanted to plant the roots there, which are some persian instruments like the ney. But infact the story of the nativity is a story that came to full flower and gained meaning and power in the time of the european middle ages and the renaissance. That is really where I wanted to spent most of my time musically. I wanted to make clear the connection between us here in the year 2000 and twothousand years ago. That is a long space of time and I wanted to make clear that there is a bridge between those people and us, musically. That this story was carried by so many musicians and artists all through these years. So I quoted some melodies from the early christian church, used latin for the choir and used some early music instruments like Vielle or Gamba or medieval harp.

In film music the mix of traditional western symphonic work and ethnic music is far more common than in classical music. Why do you think this is the case?

Well, that is an interesting question. I think that is because every kind of music has connotations and they tell us things, consciously and subconsciously. Classical music has such a strong character and is
at the same time so familiar with western audiences, that is sais to much about the time and itself. It has too much meaning in it and that is really the problem, if you want to call it a problem. But I think that is why you very rarely hear this kind of approach.
Actually I tried to do that many times for films, but it’s hard. European or western classical music is so strong and rich in meaning, that it is blowing away what the picture is trying to say.

Yo Yo Ma did a lot of crossover albums like “The Silk Road Journeys” or several tango projects. Is this a way in your eyes to bring ethnic music in the concert halls of the world and build a bridge between these two genres?

Yes. This is really something I haven’t been really involved with in my career. I’ve just had perfomances of music of “The Ice Storm” with a gamelan and orchestra. It becomes more and more difficult when you try to do that, again the machinery is set for a conventional orchestra or some standard makeup of a band. When you start adding ethnic instruments to the performance it quickly starts to get more complicated. I think clearly people are hungry for these sounds, these meetings of the different parts of the world of music.

Mr. Danna, thank you very much for this interview.

Jan Zwilling / 03.04.07