Scoring Competitions (feat. Spitfire Audio)

If you have been briefly following the composer's community on the internet over the last few weeks, you will have heard about the Westworld Scoring Competition that Spitfire Audio started. If not: a scene from the series Westworld was chosen to be scored with hardly any limitation with the first prize being the entire catalogue of Spitfire Audio's products worth more than US$20,000.

Last weekend the winner out of supposedly 11,000 contestants was announced and it seemed like at least the media composer part of the internet started to melt down after this.

If you haven't seen it, here's the winning entry:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSwWSqxuRD4 

Many things have been worded by many composers on this topic, the comments section of the announcement video that Spitfire put out is a bloodbath of people being outraged so me joining in on this discussion might be just another opinion on things that might have been said already. But I think there is way more to take away from this than meets the eye and it is mandatory to differentiate here as there is no wrong or right in such things ever.

I can see both sides of the argument having valid points here. The winning entry had incredibly big balls for pulling through with a bold concept and along the lines of his concept is well executed. And it simply is a lot of fun, the joy that was put into this can be felt.

But argueing for the fact that the music as is never having a chance in a real life situation, being distracting and the supposed ties of the winner with one of the jury members (which he publically denied), the breach of competiton rules plus the inconsistency in choice of the winner and runners-up are valid points as well.

One essential thing to understand however is that competitons are a completely different cosmos from the real life world. Now to put this into perspective, I have never actively entered into any competition, I have however paid close attention to the outcome of quite a few of these. 

The "competiton world" has hardly ever any overlap with the "media scoring world". In fact there are a few composers who seem to be winning a lot of scoring competitions without ever making any notable entrance in the actual industry. And even with active professionals being on the jury for competitions (like with this competition), it will never even get close to what happens in the real world. It's also usually no particularly valid exercise for real life to participate in such a thing (except for basic craftmanship factors like getting music to sync up to video etc) but it is one thing only: a participation in a competition. There really hardly  is anything more from this to extrapolate. And I think this is where many participants in the current competition were mislead by and where a lot of frustration comes from.

A competition like this always lacks the fundamental concept of filmmaking which is the collaboration. Having exchange with the filmmakers is one if not the most vital part for a media composer. Getting an idea of the vision and the intent plus a continous exchange about a musical approach is one of the core defining factors of the life of a media composer. However, this part is stripped away in every competition. Sure, there might be some guidelines, like Spitfire asking for creativity etc. but that does not replace a proper brief. Sure, even in real life there might be the ocassional moment of "Do whatever you like, surprise me!" but they are usually very rare and even then there always is an instance of feedback as the first approach will never end up in the final product without being validated through the client.

This is one of the most fundamental flaws in scoring competitions. Other than with film festivals where the collaborative final artistic approach is judged, a scoring competition always picks winners of a department that simply doesn't exist in empty space. It's like trying to make a competition for "best colour grading". Without a close bidirectional relationship to a director or literally anybody whose big vision is being realized there really is no point in doing such a thing. And the most important thing is that it doesn't simulate any real life situation.

Coming back to the Spitfire competition I actually appreciate that they picked a rather "unspectacular" scene to score. It was not the big climax scene or any pivotal moment where the music would be exposed anyway but a rather generic action sequence which at least got a bit closer to real life situations where as a composer you score 90% of scenes that rather need an underscore and maybe 10% that need a more bold approach from the music.

But with this competition it was absolutely predictable what was going to happen. Probably 95% of the contestants went the route of scoring it as if it was a real life job. The look and feel of that scene very much implies a "modern scoring approach" so most contestants went roughly for "staccato strings and percussion". And let's be honest, this would exactly be what would have been requested in a real life scoring situation of such a scene out of context. There supposedly is a "genre switch" story at play in Westworld (which I have never seen) which might justify a bit more courage on the concept here and is probably also the winner's approach but it was not included in the competition to score this with context. Again, here it lacked the big arc of the vision of the showrunner for the composers to work with.

I watched through a few entrances over the last couple of weeks and most of them going this route did work and would have probably made a reasonable score for this sequence.

However, it was expectable that a lot of people would go for this as the scene simply didn't imply anything where you could use drastically different approaches within "normal industry boundaries". Sure you could have played with different tempi and see how the pulse perception would change the scene perception, you could have played with a more synth or more orchestral approach, more thematic or more ostinato, more sound design or more musical approach but the overall path of the scene seemed to be pretty clear: dark, minorish, driving, dissonant, tenseful.

In a big mass of 11,000 contestants where most of them would do more or less the same and where the most professionally executed entries would still be quite a lot which would be very similar to another, only radical concepts would stand out from this "gray mass".

This is where the winning entry comes in. I'm sure that that score would have never been approved to go through in a real life situation for several reasons but this is not real life, this is competition.

The winner score clearly drags the scene into a completely different direction. If you wanted to formulate it more negatively, it hijacks the scene for its own benefit. Due to it being so incredibly outlandish, it shifts your entire perception away from the scene to that  8bit score. The score more or less screams "Look at me!" all the time. While it would most likely be hideous and presumptuous to do anything like this if this was real life, in a competition this stratetgy often seems to work. With it being technically and sonically executed well and being a bold approach there seems to be no reason to not put this in the short list. I'm sure many non professionals will most likely love this approach for being so different and fun.

But in the end, nobody said the score for this competition needs to follow the common boundaries for music that apply in real life. The jury awarded the courage to wholeheartedly go for a bold concept and didn't punish the audacity to hijack the scene.

If we want to look at the even bigger picture here there is one more factor at play here which is the tendency of recent decades in film scoring of prefering shiny "sales pitch concepts". This seems to be the benchmark for what is seen to be a good score these days and particularly Hans Zimmer and Remote Control established such a scoring approach over the last years. Bringing in an Organ (Interstellar), or using a lot of drummers (Man of Steel) or using a slowed down version of a Chanson (Inception) or using the Shepard Tone (Dunkirk) are all parts of concepts that have been talked about alot and were publically recognized for being innovative (even though they have been used before). And don't get me wrong here, those are all brilliant concepts with Zimmer's incredible ability on the production side of things and brilliant ability to spin those as pushing the boundaries while still being conventional enough that nobody is offended by it. And all these concepts were within "industry boundaries" and didn't drag as much attention on themselves as the concept of the Spitfire winner did.

But there has developed a fetish for concept in media music over the last few years that almost drifts into absurdity. Being able to sell a back story about the music often seems to be more important than the music itself. Concepts like for instance sampling the sound of household items because they appear in the movie and excessively use these sounds in the score seem to be more important and are recognized as being creative than the music actually being written well. And don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of music concepts as they really can put a unique quality to a score. "I sampled the plumbing of my apartment" is of course a more attractive concept to the average audience than "I used stacks of major ninths but also based the melodic ideas on a recurring structure" but that doesn't necessarily mean that it is more creative.

And I think this general attitude in film scoring also played a role in the outcome of this competition. The concept of the winner was so bold and so easily accessible that it caught the attention of many people and the jury. Whether it was musically the best choice or whether it actually fit the scene is debatable but the simple fact that there was a concept that everybody could hear and understand and that differed enough from the standard approach was obviously a deciding factor here.

Essentially, the outcome of this competition also has a lot to do with the current state of the media music world, independently of whether you like it or not. Spitfire as a company creates products for a generation of composers that differs tremendously from the composers just a few generations earlier. The outset but also the outcome of this competition are testimonial of a much larger development in the film scoring or maybe even film industry. And the closed off space of a competition created almost a caricature of the status quo of the media music industry.

As I said above, I feel both standpoints are valid here and not mutually exclusive. It is possible to appreciate the quality of the winning entrance and still question the execution by the initiators (who obviously got overwhelmed by the amount of entrances). However having said this, I'm not particularly proud to be part of the composer's community looking at the last few days. The tone of the discussion as well as the content of some of the comments were often repulsive and the clear display of Dunning-Kruger Effect and  inability to deal with rejection by some people is deplorable.

In the end, this whole thing seems to have been blown way out of proportion. It is what it is - a scoring competition. Not less but particularly not more. Even though the media composer bubble we live in seems huge, it is an incredibly tiny community and the overall impact on society or even the media world is insignificant.

It will however be interesting to see how this shit storm and outrage develops further and I'm not entirely sure whether this is an "any publicity is good publicity" moment for Spitfire or whether they will suffer from this.

I'd be interested in your opinion on this whole thing so let me know below.