What is the essential musical asset a composer needs in order to be successful in the worlds of film, television, or any music for media? Is it strong orchestral capabilities, harmonic sophistication, melodic writing ability, synthesis and technical know-how? Sure, these are all important in varying amounts, but none can help you if you lack the one thing that truly puts these all to their best possible use. What is the most valuable asset a composer needs in order to thrive professionally? Flexibility (and don’t ask me to change my mind!).

Now before you run out to join a yoga class, let me clarify this a bit. All music has style and structure. Both of these come from a lexicon of musical rules created before you have written a note. Which is not a bad thing. A pop song has verses, choruses and a bridge. Any song writer who hopes to hear their music on the radio knows that they must stay within fairly rigid parameters of structure, style, instrumentation and duration if they hope to achieve their goal. Jazz, by definition, relies on a specific range of chordings and voices that come out of a long tradition spanning back to players decades ago. Classical styles have buckets of rules and traditions that define their sound. Each of us that choose to compose music in a selected genre use these rules and traditions to guide us as we bring new elements into, and perhaps leave some behind. That is artistic evolution. No artist, no matter how radical, really starts from scratch.

And what are the rules of film music? Not surprisingly, music for picture is a rather different beast. Film music is for the most part not based entirely on traditional musical structure or styles. It’s structure comes from a blend of genre and storytelling.

For example, I have met many finely trained composition students interested in film careers. But after listening to their early attempts at doing a cue, I found that they came to it with too many expectations to allow them to grasp the essential elements of film writing. Often, advanced students well versed in contemporary “classical” music become overly bound by the rules that govern other genres from film music to even the most avant garde works. It’s odd to find such conservatives among such young musicians. While pop musicians are perhaps a able to be a bit, they too can suffer from the unwritten rules of their craft as it applies to song making.

So where does flexibility come in? Many ways.

Music for film is it’s own hard-to-define genre. It borrows from, but can not be confused with other musical forms. It is not contemporary concert music that has been written to fit inside a scene. It is certainly not a jazz composition or a pop song, those we do on occasion hear those in films. Film music has it’s own sensibilities that must connect its sounds to the pictures, characters, and stories it parallels.

The very first question a film maker or composer makes before starting a score is ‘what sort of music will best suite this film?’
A film score is almost always tailored to fit the nuances of the scene. Any preconceptions you have about how a piece is structured go out the window until you can figure out the most elegant way to get the music to fit not only the scene’s length, but all the moments within it that have any kind of emotional value. The flow of film music has nothing to do with the rules of traditional musical structure.

There are some specific ways that composers can practice the zen art of flexibility in order to approach film music without becoming shackled by the rules of other musical genre:

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In order to compose music to fit the very specific duration of a scene and all the transitions within it, there are no rules that say a phrase must be four bars, or that every bar must be four beats. As mentioned above, music must flow along with the edits and action. If there is a hard transition between scenes or a specific action within a shot to hit musically, it will not bother the listener if you drop a beat, or even a half a beat, in order to stay in sync with it.

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Orchestral film scores often do borrow from the style of contemporary classic music. But the resemblance only skin deep. Extended use of highly complex counterpoint, dissonance, atonality, or the frequent bombast of concert music rarely works on film. Well written underscore knows when to draw all the attention to itself, and when to make room for other things like dialog, sound effects, or simply quiet. Concert music tends to fill it’s time pretty fully. It is designed to be complete. Film scores need to leave some room sonically.

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Composers of electronica, dance, techno, or any kind of club music know that there is a lot of that showing up in films nowadays. Artists such as BT, Paul Oakenfold, David Holmes, and others are scoring films. But there is a catch. Their music, though written for the specific project, is often restructured by the music editor to have more flow and picture specific transitions. Typical dance music grows and changed pretty slowly, and the phrases are in eights and sixteens. But a film composer might want to change tempos (what?!?!?) and cut a phrase in thirds to keep with the scene. Why not do it with the beats and grooves of dance music?
Any style of music can be the basis of a film score, but usually not be used purely as a score. Exceptions? Always. But flexibility can save the day when it comes time to take what you do as a composer and make it work to picture.
And is that enough flexibility? Absolutely not. Because as film composers we are constantly asked to rethink, redo, modify, and restructure our music. Directors, producers, and editors all ask for changes. Films get recut after they are scored. Cues get dropped, and scenes without music suddenly need a little something. And then they don’t again. It’s simply part of the process. And while it’s not the fun part of the job, it is a normal and expected part. And you have a choice here: get upset about about, or be flexible and take it as it comes.