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Notes on a picture: the art of screen music

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Night music … the theme for Balibo came to the East Timorese singer Ego Lemos in his sleep. David Hirschfelder's theme for Elizabeth , starring Cate Blanchett, came after a simple scene description.

November 2, 2009

As screen composers prepare for their awards ceremony tonight, Adam Fulton talks to some nominees about the sources of their music.

How to combine Hendrix and Mahler? The question was on David Hirschfelder's mind as the leading film composer worked on Baz Luhrmann's epic Australia, and it wasn't unfamiliar territory.

Some directors shoot a film and think about music only afterwards "as a way of tying it all together", says the man behind scores for Strictly Ballroom, Elizabeth and Shine. "But other directors have musical ideas … from either movies or classical pieces or rock or whatever and they shoot to that and then they sometimes say, 'Can you write something similar to that but mix this - mix up Mahler and Jimi Hendrix or something.'

"Baz was like that. He'd make references like that … which is what we ended up doing in the stampede."

Hirschfelder's menacing orchestral accompaniment to Hugh Jackman and company as they raced on horseback to stop the stampeding cattle from plunging off a cliff in Australia is a prime example of how sound can enhance screen to rousing effect in film and television.

The craft is the focus of tonight's annual Screen Music Awards for composers in 12 categories including film, documentaries, television and ad jingles.

For best feature film score, Hirschfelder's Australia is up against Lisa Gerrard for Balibo, David Bridie for Two Fists One Heart and Graeme Koehne and Antony Partos for Disgrace. Sydney's Partos has other nominations with the documentary Contact and the telemovie Saved.

There's no easy formula for screen composing. "Everyone wants to know how it's done - including me," Hirschfelder says.

But picking the brains of a film's director, or producer or writer, to find what they're after - music styles, density, feel and mood - and trying to identify a movie's needs are usually among a composers' initial steps. It helps if there's a script to read or, better, finished scenes to watch.

It's very different to solo ventures, as Bridie, a longtime screen composer who has also been a member of groups Not Drowning, Waving and My Friend the Chocolate Cake, attests.

"Film's a collaborative process. Some films, there's a lot of people involved … As a composer you're coming up with ideas and putting it to them. Sometimes it is you and the director, sometimes it's you and five people. Sometimes it's you and five people who aren't getting on."

The early work involves finding instruments and sounds to suit the project. Bridie's score for the hit TV series RAN: Remote Area Nurse reflected its Torres Strait Islands setting, using island instruments.

Early on, Hirschfelder immerses himself in a film's musical or cultural "vernacular", which for Australia was bush ballads and indigenous music and the orchestral style of old westerns. Then, he says, "in a way the film speaks to you … and you start hearing things in your head."

For some scenes, "you needle-and-thread tailor every microsecond of what's going on on the screen", he says. Other times, the music emerges from the kind of exchange he had when he met Shekhar Kapur, the director of Elizabeth, starring Cate Blanchett. "He described a scene to me and there happened to be a piano in the restaurant in Soho and I went over and played a few simple notes that I was hearing in my head and he said that was perfect for the scene," Hirschfelder says. "And that's how I got the job. That actual theme became the main love theme of Elizabeth." The soundtrack won him an Oscar nomination.

"It's almost like every film you have to discover the manual of how to score," he says. "I often find myself thinking: now, how do I do this again? And I feel like I'm doing it for the first time."

When Ego Lemos created music for Balibo, it really was his first time. The East Timorese singer was asked by the director, Robert Connolly, to write a song for the film. He read Jill Jolliffe's book Cover-Up: The Inside Story of the Balibo Five, but the song didn't come. "Then one night I woke up 3 o'clock in the morning and the whole melody is right in my head," Lemos says.

The theme is nominated for best original song for screen in tonight's awards at City Recital Hall organised by the Australasian Performing Right Association and the Australian Guild of Screen Composers.