How Attractive is it for a Composer to Write Music for Media

When I first got fascinated by film music in the early 90s, it was a time when commercial film music was considerably different than today. Most scores for big movies were orchestral and were generally written with the attitude of writing compelling music that could often also stand on its own. To me, a big part of the fascination between the marriage of film and music came from the fact that two distinctively well crafted elements came together in a congenial way and were able to move me in a way that was more than just the sum of the two parts. Of course, I was young and didn't understand much of that "movie magic" that I felt but seeing how music that I absolutely admired on its own came together with images and managed to send shivers down my spine or move me to tears was one of the key moments where I decided that I want to become a film composer.

I put all my energy into it learning all the details and devices that my heros at that time used in their music, being constantly fascinated and humbled by how good their music was, how incredibly well written their themes were, how they treated the orchestra with all its fascinating colours, how they set up chord progressions that I listened to hundreds of times in 10 second loops and still couldn't figure out how they could ever come up with something like that, how they managed to strike one particular chord at the right time in the movie for me to completely lose it. I became obsessed with studying and learning so I could eventually at least come a bit closer to their level of writing, I invested all my energy into it, getting a university degree to finally being able to give movies my musical vision that I had nurtured and developed for many years. I stepped out into the world, shouting "Hey movie industry, here I am, I am ready now!" And I found...

Drones, Percussion Loops, 4 Chord Progression Loops, 3 Note Motifs, "Epic Music", Minimal Music, Reverby Solo Pianos, Brass Swells, Static String Staccato Chords, "Flautantissimo Strings" and Sound Design.

Now of course, this is not how it really happened and obviously exaggerated but it shows a dilemma of many film composers including myself. This is a hot take and will probably trigger a few people and is a broad generalization but while I was busy digging deep into the craft of writing film music, film music itself had become boring.

"Well okay," I thought as young and naive me, "I can still use all that knowledge I gathered over the years and work in the industry and just write music that I feel can also stand on its own doing my thing." I however wasn't prepared for the many times that my approaches were shot down for something "simpler". 

"It's too operatic, too 80s, too old fashioned, not so many notes, I don't like Oboes, make it "less Jazz", can you make it only da da daaa?, This is too much, can we loose the woodwinds?, Just make it a long note. I want to hear big drums there... boom boom, that's enough, can you make it softer.... even more... maybe take out that instrument, too... yes almost, maybe loose that element, too?"

I wish I had just come up with these quotes but at one time or the other in my professional life, I heard them and many more like these. So, equipped with high ambitions and a wealth of knowldege and craft, I entered a world that ideally wanted me to throw this all over board and write music that barely went beyond being merely functional. It was not desirable anymore to write intricate melodies or elaborate harmonic paths but it was desirable to write music that did what it needed to do by leaving out as much as possible.

Film music has become a wonderful playground for composers who love digging into sounds, shaping them to become exactly what they envision and love being caught up in manipulating them into soundscapes. It is a wonderful place for people who like to field record the sounds of objects and turn them into musical elements or people who like to spend hours programming a synth to make exactly the sound they want.

But I felt that all that somehow wasn't me. I set out to write music in a way that would use a musical vocabulary and not an exclusively textural one. I can appreciate and enjoy drones that are maticulously crafted to change their textural hue or pulse according to the scene but doing something like that as a composer bores me to death.

Normally, around this far into an article, I write something like "But then I figured out x and by doing y, I ended up living happily ever after." With this specific issue however, I don't have a real solution yet. I managed to wedge myself somehow between composing and arranging which allows me to quite regularly work for projects that focus on "music without immediate visual context" that naturally allow for the music to be a bit more expansive and... well... "musical" and that I feel challenged by. But quite often I also find myself writing music for visual context where I just think to myself "Man, I could really go all in here and do that crazy thing and use that awesome musical device but I know the client would never allow me to do that."

So the question of how attractive the industry actually still is for up and coming composers is way more than trivial. Of course, there has always been and will always be the discrepancy between the composer's ego and the task to serve the visuals. Even the greatest film composers needed and need to make compromises on their vision. And in an ideal world, these compromises and dialogue with the client spark new and exciting ideas of how to approach a certain thing leading to a solution that might be even more exciting than the original idea. But more often, the client's lack of knowledge of what music can do in an audiovisual context and the general pressure to please a broad mainstream audience that is only used to how film music sounded the last years leads to a compromise that at least from the composer's perspective often stays below what it could be.

On the other hand, I mentioned it several times already that being a composer unfortunately shifts your perception of music quite drastically and things that you find boring or clichéd might move millions of people of the "general audience" to tears. So, of course, it is absolutely desirable to have a corrective factor that prevents the music from drifting off to becoming too much of "musician's music". Also, as a composer for the media, you of course serve the images, so it is essential to put your musical ego aside and do what works best for the visuals. I see all these arguments and I absolutely agree with them. And yet, I don't feel like that is the point to be talking about.

There has been a time in film history, where almost every single mainstream movie that came out had a score that consisted of accessible music that a broad audience could understand, music that served the visuals perfectly and created a congenial unity between itself and the visuals and still music that you could transport to the concert stage and not feel like it is lacking an integral part to make sense. So yes, all these arguments from above do apply, but they do not imply that music needs to be "dumbed down".

For me, the only argument that is still standing in this regard is that movies are not like they used to be. The visual language and the way of telling stories have changed quite drastically over the last few decades. It simply wouldn't work to put the style of Elfman's Batman scores into Nolan's Batman movies anymore as they are worlds apart in regards of how they are being told. And if we go down this path, it comes to the question whether the chicken or the egg was first and even which egg was first. Does current film music sound the way it does because this is the only way how current movies can be scored or does it sound the way it does because a couple of commercially successful composers have paved that way and it has become a default approach for all other composers without questioning it?

I know, this all sounds like yet again another academically trained composer whining about the fact that film music does develop and wallowing in the supposedly good old times that are long gone and not accepting that the incredible popularity of current film music and also "epic music" with the broad audience justifies its approach. But then again, this is not really the point that I'm trying to bring across.

The development of film music effectively is no development in the sense that it pushes boundaries to explore new ways of expression but more the opposite of it. It is more like the entire color palette of a painter being reduced to just shades of the colour blue. Of course you can paint incredible pantings with just shades of blue that will not need a single additional color to be complete, it will still be a fascinating painting and feel like it is exactly like it needs to be and serves exactly the purpose that is intended. But then you see another only blue painting, and another.... and yet another. And then other painters believe that you only can use blue or even worse, there only is blue. And then clients demand only blue paintings and painters who use another color are asked to go back to blue because only that is what needs to be done these days. Of course this is not a comparison that is completely accurate in every regard but I think you get my point. Film music has been stripped of a big portion of the range of musical expressiveness and the audience and filmmakers alike seem not only content with that but actually demand it.

All this of course is a broad generalization of the big developments in this industry, there are niche genres that are completely detached from this commercial development and there are also filmmakers who consciously go against this. But looking at the mainstream of audiovisual media and their respective scores, I think this generalisation is pretty valid.

So coming back to the initial question of whether a career as composer in the media world is attractive for up and coming composers, it really depends on your personality. If you enjoy digging for sounds, experimenting with textures and exploring the possibilities of musical reduction, you will thrive in the current media music world. However, if you desire to write music that explores the entire range of musical expression hoping to write scores that ideally develop a life on their own, you might need a while to find happiness in this industry.