Sirp, 22.11.2019, author ARDO RAN VARRES

No one wants to be a paid plagiarist

Richard Harvey: “I don’t want to do a big Hollywood movie. It’s
heart-breaking when you do something you really believe in and it
simply gets thrown out of the film because the test audience prefers
the temp track.”
Among other film music specialists to visit Tallinn during The Black Nights Film Festival’s
special programme Music Meets Film, held from 25 to 27 November, is British composer
Richard Harvey whose more renowned works include ‘The Little Prince’ and ‘Da Vinci Code’,
written together with his long-standing collaboration partner Hans Zimmer.1 Incidentally,
Richard Harvey also has a new album to be soon released, recorded in St. Nicholas Church in
Tallinn together with the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir. The Music Meets Film
programme is curated by Michael Pärt and it is intended for composers who are interested in
writing film music.
Please tell us a bit about your childhood and parents.
My father was an amateur composer. He really wanted to be a professional, but he just never
had the ability to meet deadlines, so he missed every opportunity he ever had. He had an
enormous pile of unfinished music in his cupboard. His music was tonal, he probably regarded
Sibelius as the last great composer. He was born in New Zealand, but after the war he moved
to England where he studied composition and the recorder. His recorder teacher was Edgar
Hunt, a great name at the time, a kickstarter of early music revival. My father had a recorder
group that would meet every Friday evening. I joined it at the age of about nine. My father
became a teacher, but his pupils bullied him and he almost had a nervous breakdown. He then
went to study law instead and became a low-level lawyer. He hated it, but at least it fed the
family. When I was about 13 and it seemed I would become a professional musician, he
supported me a lot. We moved to an area which had a rather strong music school with a very
good choir. That is where my sense of hearing evolved and I gained an understanding of
harmony and counterpoint. My mother is Welsh, from a family of a great singing tradition.
You studied the clarinet. I have also done that. What were your contacts with modernist
music?
I didn’t have any, to be honest. As a clarinettist, I got to play quite a few exciting things:
Martinů, Bruneau, Ibert, Milhaud…
Eugène Bozza?
No, I haven’t played any of his works, but quite a few pieces were exciting to play, like
Stravinsky’s ‘Three Pieces for Clarinet’. I also have a great admiration for Bartók, but playing
his ‘Contrasts’ required too much work and offered little joy. In 1970–1972, I studied at the
Royal College of Music in London. My harmony teacher Stephen Dodgson, whom I greatly
admired, died a few years ago. Instead of harmony, we used to discuss composition. I would
write fragments which we would then discuss. I also studied a bit of viola da gamba with Adam
Skeaping who was one of the early music pioneers. We talked a lot. But as soon as I left the
school I sold the clarinet and used the money to buy recorders, early woodwinds, etc. and
joined the early music group Musica Reservata. That gave an enlightening experience of what
it means to play without vibrato. I’d always had the feeling that vibrato was a decoration. For
instance, 18th century viola da gamba study-books taught vibrato as a thing you used
sparingly, just at the right moment.
Richard Harvey: “I’ve done so much TV and film music that I can relax now and just write my music.”
Julian Bajzert
A special effect…
Yes, exactly. I often feel that vibrato is for building up passion that can barely be controlled.
But people don’t live their life in a state of constant nearly uncontrollable passion. Thanks to
that realisation I understood why I didn’t like romantic symphonic music. It seemed sloppy,
messy, unwieldy, and kitsch. And the 1970s was the period of transition. For instance, a choir
then meant a group of 100 people and the music tended to wobble like a huge jelly. Sorry to
say, but to me it was just unpleasant noise. At the beginning of the 1980s, the early music
pioneers just started to coming through in Britain and the Netherlands, in Eastern Europe, and
later in France, and brought along an entirely different approach. A new choir singing tradition
has emerged over the past 30 to 40 years.
I write tonal music, in a slightly neo-something style. I’m not worried about what critics think,
because the music is not for them. I mean, we live in the 21st century. Classical music used to
be run by a clique of intellectuals like, say, the editor of Grammophone Magazine, the critics
of The Sunday Times, The Guardian, and The Observer, the head of BBC Radio 3, and a handful
of concert promoters and agents. These people would either give you a chance to express
yourself or not. Now, in the 21st century, many people are crying their eyes out for a lack of
quality control. Music just comes out, leaks into the world, and mine is a part of that. A friend
of mine, a very good composer, put a hand on my shoulder and said: “I know you’re worried.
Don’t worry, you have an individual and unique voice. Every time I hear this music you’ve
written I know exactly in one second that it’s you.” I’ve done so much TV and film music that
I can now relax and just write my music.
Could you talk about the making of big motion pictures, films like ‘Death of a President’,
‘Luther’, ‘Two Men Went to War’ and ‘Adolf Eichmann’.2 How do you work, what is the
starting point? Do you make mockups?
You’re talking about a very long period of time here. I was working on my first movie before
the MIDI interface, timecode and synchronisation had been invented. At that point, I was
assisting other composers. It was unbelievable how they got music to synchronize with
picture. There were no demos, all you could do was play the piece on the piano and the
director trusted you. Thus there were many monogamous relationships between directors
and composers because you only had one budget to spend. You know, I’ve never worked on
a film with a budget big enough to have a new score written if the first one didn’t work.
Basically, my working methods have not changed. I sit at the piano and because I don’t
remember everything very well I video it all. I write ideas down and I fill a big page full of
motifs and then I divide them up into categories. I then enter them into the computer with
(Steinberg’s) Cubase software. I haven’t started using Dorico [notation software by the same
company – A. R. Varres], but I hope that these two will reach a real symbiosis so we don’t have
to double handle the work – it is such massive waste of time.
Now, the reason that I got a lot of work very quickly... I was a in a band and when that split up
in 1977 I became a session player and started working for independent films and TV. At that
point, I had about 25 instruments. My viola da gamba teacher was also a keen recording
engineer. He set up his own studio in West London where he managed an amazing thing for
that time: he synchronised four stereo tape recorders. That system allowed you to successfully
record up to four minutes of music. I moved all my instruments there and just multitracked
myself. He later had an 8-track recording system and then a 16-track one.
Did you improvise or did you have a score?
I would always make a 2- or 4-stave rough score and improve from that. For instance, if
someone ordered music for a TV commercial, they got a nearly final track from me as a demo,
with different instruments, not just the electric piano and the drum machine like in most
demos those days. So I got ahead in the game just by being a multi-instrumentalist and by
having access to a studio. Of course, there were other multi-instrumentalists, Mike Oldfield
was a prime example. I was playing drums, bass guitar, guitar, electric piano, I had an electric
pipe organ and some really weird things like a Yamaha electric harmonium. I also bought a
string machine, a xylophone and a mellotron which was ridiculous. I had a big loan from the
bank from buying these instruments. But when MIDI came along I couldn’t even use many of
my instruments for synchronising, like Minimoog, the Roland modular synth, the early Arp and
Korg synths.
Please tell us a bit about orchestration.
I always do my own orchestration unless I run out of time. I scored ‘The Little Prince’ with Hans
Zimmer and the way it turned out, I did the whole score and Hans just did the songs. I managed
to persuade my really good friend Bill Connor who is a really good composer and a really good
orchestrator to come out to LA. I was busy with getting the demos done, as at a certain stage
the director may ask for changes or a complete rewrite. Thankfully at that time Wallander
Instruments’ NotePerformer became available and we were able to adequately play music
from Avid’s Sibelius notation software, and the director would approve them or disapprove
them on that basis. It was unheard of. Even Hans was amazed by it. He didn’t really like it, of
course, because he loves to play unbelievably glossy, perfect mock-ups from Cubase, so that
directors won’t hear a difference whether there is a real orchestra or not. That was a rare
occasion when I didn’t orchestrate – I would simply not have had the time. I recently saw an
interview with Tom Holkenborg who said that the reason why film music is so great now is
that everybody who does it has to handle all the aspects of the music. I’ve done that since the
1980s. I did even more, because for 20 years I orchestrated with a pencil and paper. Printed
engraved parts are still quite a recent thing. When I was writing music for TV series I would
spend all morning composing and all afternoon and all evening orchestrating. At either side of
midnight I would deliver the scores to a copyist who woke up at 6 o’clock and started copying
the parts.
Your great orchestration can be enjoyed on various film music albums, like music for the TV
miniseries ‘Arabian Nights’.3
Thank you. The budget of that rare TV project was notable. We had two recording sessions
with full orchestra and the rest of it we did with a smaller orchestra and I played various
instruments myself. We also needed players of Indian, Arabic and Chinese instruments. I also
made a mistake: I used an orchestrator for one cue, but I had to re-orchestrate it during a
recording, because it just wasn’t convincing enough. Orchestration is really time-consuming.
When I have entered my handwritten 4-stave short score into Sibelius, it’s all put to good use.
I copy music for different instruments. It’s a shame you can’t feed Sibelius files into Cubase
and have the perfect sonic transition. I played recorder and ocarina for John Williams’ score
for ‘Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban’.4 As all the musicians had to be there throughout
the session, I was able to freely study the score during the breaks. Some people say that
Williams doesn’t do his own orchestration and other say he does. I picked up the condensed
score from the desk and compared it to the score. There was nothing missing from his 8-stave
short score, it had a treble and bass for the strings, for the brass, for the woodwinds and for
everything else. His handwriting is tiny and it is – could you believe it – written in ink. Those
short scores are absolute masterpieces. I remember sitting there and I could see two
clarinettists pick up an E-flat contrabass and a double B-flat contrabass clarinet and play a low
E-flat and a low G-flat in super pianissimo. And I thought that was probably missing from the
condensed score. Then I looked really closely and I saw the most tiny writing on another stave:
“contrabass clarinets ppp”. There was nothing missing and it was the most impressive example
of craftsmanship.
You conduct as well. For instance, you conducted Hans Zimmer’s music for ‘Da Vinci Code’.
Yes, I’ve conducted other things as well, but that was where I conducted the whole thing.
Could you describe working with Hans Zimmer? Your ‘Kyrie for the Magdalene’ is very
impressive.
Thank you. That was a strange score because Hans initially invited me to co-write, but when I
arrived in LA he had already written most of it. So he gave me a few cues to do and asked me
to write the music for the Westminster Abbey sequence. That’s how ‘Kyrie’ was born. In the
film it was only 30 seconds, but I decided to write a whole piece. There is a sequence in the
film where the mad monk whips himself. Hans asked me to write for that as well and when I’d
finished and Martin Tilton, the cellist, had played it amazingly well, Hans said – typically for
him – that the music was too good for the film and I should build it into a cello concerto. That
was in 2006 and I’m finishing the piece now and we’re going to perform it for the first time in
Switzerland in December. But for that film, I was there for the entire time and sometime would
be called out to play. If I didn’t have anything to do I would do sampling and sometimes
orchestrate someone else’s cue. I also prepared piano and did a lot of all kinds of effects: we
put microphones inside the piano, taped down the pedal and rolled the piano around the
floor, so we created all these exciting creaks and rumblings. I told Hans that he was missing an
instrument in ‘Big Secrets of Mary Magdalene’. I suggested the ukulele. Hans asked whether
I’d gone mad, but the recording convinced him.
The music from the whipping scene sounds a lot like Arvo Pärt. Is it Hans Zimmer’s music?
Yes, but it was clearly influenced by Arvo Pärt.
What do you think about the sound-alike and style-alike issues? Directors often suffer from
a condition called ‘temp love’ which derives from the term ‘temporary track’ – existing
music used in editing a film.
Oh, it’s one of the reasons I don’t do much now. If someone asks you to temp a film, you have
to flirt with plagiarism. I noticed that Peter Oxendale is giving a lecture at the Black Nights Film
Festival. He’s a leading Britain plagiarism lawyer, an ex-musician. It is worth going to listen to
his lecture. There are people who try to do as much work as possible to quickly get started on
the next movie. And there are others who work like Renaissance painters, with ten painters
under one roof. The master would paint the face and students would paint the hands, the legs,
the window frame, etc.
I’ve heard that this is how Zimmer works. Is that true?
You know, he has a whole building full of film composers. In the 1980s and 1990s, I worked as
an assistant to Stanley Myers, and so did Hans. He always had a good life-work balance, so he
seldom worked after 8 p.m. He let us youngsters work through the night. He would say: “It
doesn’t matter what happens in that car chase or that conversation between policeman and
the detective. What matters is this, this, and this.” He would choose four or five sequences to
make his own. He wanted the director to approve and love the cues. Nothing else much
mattered. I understand Hans, because he’s very much in demand. And he has the most
amazing overheads. I wouldn’t even begin to imagine his studio electricity bills and the cost of
the people working there: administration, technicians, caretakers.
Hans, like myself, learnt from Stanley that if a score is 60 minutes long, there’s about 25 to 30
minutes of it that really matters. And if you worked on a less important sequence and redid it
several times, you wouldn’t get a lot of films over the line. It may be important for the director,
but it’s not important from Hans’ point of view. Often Hans programmes a skeletal version of
a cue and then hand it over to someone like Steve Mazzaro, a genius of creating fully fledged
orchestrations from a Cubase project.
Hans is one of the few people in the world of film music who has enough money to employ a
large number of assistants. He has also created a number of competitors. In my much smaller
world here in London I had a string of assistants who clearly wanted to take my job from me
… as quickly as possible. You know, they would try to make friends with the directors, get their
e-mail address and beg for work. It’s long been the opposite in Hollywood where they’ve given
up saying: “It’s all my own work.” They say: “Look. I’ll show you the Oscar. That’s all mine.” I
don’t want to do a big Hollywood movie, I’m not up for all the stress. It’s heart-breaking when
you do something you really believe in and it simply gets thrown out of the film because the
test audience prefers the temp track. No one wants to be a paid plagiarist. It also sometimes
happens that you no longer want to work all night, and then the next day. I’ll gladly write
music for a small-budget art house movie where collaboration between two people – the
composer and the director – is at the forefront. It’s like a contract between them.
Your collaboration album with the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir is about to be
released. Which texts inspired you? I understand some of these are religious.
Some of them are, some of them are not. Like many composers, I also look for good public
domain texts, in order to avoid potential problems with copyright protection. There are nature
poems as well as Christian texts.
Are you a religious person?
No, my father taught me to be sceptical. He grew up in a very strict religious sect where he
wasn’t allowed to do anything on a Sunday except read the Bible. If he got on his bicycle, they
beat him. He couldn’t wait to be free of it. My wife is a Buddhist. Between Myanmar and
Thailand, animist maintain tribes live in the forest, worshipping the nature and, for instance,
water. There are no people on Earth who live in greater harmony with their environment.
Ironically, it’s the surrounding Buddhists, Christians and Muslims who want to destroy their
way of life. Yes, I think of myself as a spiritual person.

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