Finding Your Unique Composing Style

How can a film composer create something original?

Your own music is a reflection of your personality, a result of your culture, education, and life experience.

Finding your own style and being able to express it is a process. The creative state constantly in flux and transformation. You won’t find an answer in one book, from one class, or from one teacher.

When film composers are hired, our fee is not only for the score we write.

We are remunerated for the years of experience we acquire in order to arrive at our level of skill and ability to express our creativity - not just to recuperate the costs and upkeep of physical the tools and instruments we use.

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INTRODUCTION

I’m going to tell you about how I became a film composer.

The story will take you through a part of my personal story from before my actual career started. This article is separated into 10 brief portions.

As you’ll see, each life experience, no matter how small, brought a few more skills into my current game.

When I was little, I wanted to be either a ballerina or a famous conductor.

I would dance and twirl about, pick up a twig from the driveway, and wave it at an imaginary orchestra while I waited alone for the yellow school bus to pick me up in the morning.

After 2 years of ballet lessons and 2 years of piano lessons, my parents informed me that they couldn’t afford for me to take both kinds of lessons anymore. Luckily for all of us, I chose to continue with just music.

1. CREATIVE ORIGINS

I spent my early years taking the free musical instrument lessons offered in my town's public schools, then practicing at home, sometimes in the yard if it was nice out, sometimes to the sound of the TV from the other room and the syncopated pumping of the dishwasher. (My parents wouldn’t let me learn to play the drums, because it would be too loud and annoying. I wanted to play like Neal Peart and the others my older siblings listened to, but was required to stick with something less invasive to their ears.)

I picked up the bassoon for school band, the flute for marching band, sang with and accompanied the chorus on the piano, and soon played viola, cello, or bassoon in local and state youth orchestras. I played and performed in musicals. I banged out the piano parts in the school jazz band and jammed on electric bass and keys with my rock group in our garage (a selection of our repertoire: repertoire: Rush, The Monkees, The Smiths, Guns ’n’ Roses).

Without a doubt, my most central musical education happened at home. There, not only did I practice my parts and fool around at the piano. I read my dog-eared music dictionary, encyclopedias, and a picture book about orchestras. I learned about orchestration without even realizing it by listening to records like Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic or Barbra Streisand albums. I silently read through the Catholic hymnals during Sunday mass avoid dying of boredom; those seemingly interminable masses on an empty stomach incidentally taught me the mechanics of 4-part harmonization.

My earliest piano performances were for family and any random visitors to our house. The whole thing smacked of a mildly amusing circus sideshow, with an undercurrent of hidden pride in my freakishness on my family’s part. I was the youngest of four, and I didn’t mind the attention. It motivated me. (A German speaker might have called me a Bühnensau.)

2. CONCENTRATION AND PERFORMANCE UNDER PRESSURE

“Play that really fast song again (Chopin?!?) with your hands crossed!”

-“Ew! What is that?” -“It’s Bartok, Mom.” -“Ooh, I hate it! Play something good.”

Sometimes my parents would play bridge with their relatively elderly yet extremely boisterous friends, Pat and Harry. Harry, probably 3 beers into their game, would yell from the other room as I tried to practice, “Hey Sue! I know you’ll forget me when you’re in Carnegie Hall! Don’t be pretending you don’t know me in 20 years!” or “Play me some Sinatra!”

When my piano teacher, Mr. Godowsky, would bounce balls of paper off me during my lessons to improve my concentration, it seemed a relatively tame challenge.

My older teenage brother sometimes showed me off to his gangly, pimpled friends after he got home from work, dressed in a brown McDonalds uniform and reeking of French fry grease: “Look at this, Chip! Sue, close your eyes! Name these random notes I’m banging out on the piano!” I gladly showed off my most entertaining skills.

3. CREATIVITY, IMPROVISATION AND TECHNOLOGY

I loved to play a game my siblings and I invented: someone had to call out the name of a song, I’d have to play it immediately on the piano, then someone would call out another song after about 30 seconds in. I’d have to transition to the next piece smoothly without stopping the musical flow. There were no absolutely no normal guidelines as far as tempo, style, genre, or key. I morphed from, say, Sunday Bloody Sunday to a Mozart sonata to the theme from Cheers to Bach Inventions to Billy Joel, just to give you an idea of a typical game. I’ve called on skills I acquired during that game countless times while writing film scores!

One of my sisters and I used to record ourselves on an oblong black cassette recorder with a loose, shaky red recording button, reading books and making up background music on the piano to go along with the story. I was about 6 or 7, she was 11 or 12.

We made appropriate sound effects, such as sifting our fingers through pennies when the pirates talked about the treasure chest or faking seagull sounds when they were on a beach. We always made up a special sound for each book (audio branding?) to indicate a page-turn (for example, lustily yelling “HARRRRR!!!” at the page turns of Look Out for Pirates). These were my first efforts at recording and sound design. Ha!

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Along the way, I accepted any music-related gigs I could find as soon as my skills were at a marketable level. Nothing was musically off-limits, and as long as something musical was within driving distance of our house for my parents or my older siblings, who had to chauffeur me about, I wanted to be a part of it.

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4. SIGHT-READING, MEMORY, IMPROVISATION, AND THE BIRTH OF STYLE

My first paid job was to be the pianist at a local Unitarian Universalist Society when I was 12. They were extremely kind to me and very open-minded, so I basically busked on the hymns they asked for in whatever style came to mind that day. It was fun, and no one seemed to mind the inconsistencies. There was very little religiousness or stodginess going on there (and I suspect half of them were atheists and/or secular humanists). I was in an ideal space to try out new musical ideas, including my own compositions, without fear of judgment.

I played for countless kitschy weddings and private parties where more than a few older men hit on me (I was between 13 and 17 during that period). People often slurred requests for embarrassingly cheesy songs and used me as their personal karaoke machine. It was all very educational as a study in human psychology and the art of escape.

I was later an organist and assistant choir director at a Lutheran church all during high school, and started up a children's choir during the break between Sunday services. Since non-Catholic services "didn't count" for my parents, I also took some gigs in local Roman Catholic churches on Saturday afternoons. However, the priest also roped me into playing at distressing funerals where I could see a corpse from my perch at the organ. Sometimes the more oppressive churches seemed especially cavernous and dark, and I felt watched by creepily staring plaster statues. This prepared me very well for the horror genre. /s

There was a piano gig now and then at a company Christmas or anniversary party in a nice hotel in exchange for an envelope, thick with cash, that they slipped into my hands at the end of the night for playing songs on request with a smattering of light classical pieces (no Bartok, Mom). That was relatively easy money for a teenager to earn, plus I got to eat some really good food and get all dressed up. I felt pretty lucky. Here I learned what the average audience thinks of as “background music” and how to not disturb the dialog.

The Town Hall Theater in my hometown, Clinton, CT.

I took sight-reading jobs all through middle school and high school, accompanying both choirs and soloists - anyone, from beginners to semiprofessionals. There were always auditions, recitals, lessons to accompany. In those years, I learned to anticipate common mistakes, and I noted the weaknesses and strengths of different instruments, their ranges and timbres. I noticed which rhythms tend to trip people up, and how to talk down a nervous player before an performance or exam. I learned to lie to singers about which key they were singing in to spare myself their drama. I became a master of taming unruly egos and learned to build up the confidence of insecure musicians. I got used to staying on my toes, skipping beats and measures to offer the illusion of smoothness to a rocky performance. (Once I cried accompanying an opera singer because her vibrato was so wide vile that I couldn’t tell what note she was singing - I thought my ears were somehow broken.)

In any case, I learned to play lots of different instruments along the way just because it was, well, fun. I would not have been able to orchestrate like I can today if I had not done so. I would have had to take years of very boring and technical classes instead, which I may not have even had the patience to learn in a classroom. If I had taken those classes, following the rules everyone learns in school, I might have lost an element of uniqueness or never have found my own style by following all the standard rules everyone learns. I don’t feel as bad now that I didn’t get a formal degree, in retrospect. Who cares, as long as I do my job well? I'm not exactly doing brain surgery or anything.

5. LEADERSHIP AND GROUP DYNAMICS

I performed both onstage and in the pit for lots of musicals (at least those ballet lessons got put to use), wrote a musical in high school, and later went on professional USA and European tours by merit of the experience I'd gained. I immediately learned to arrange and write out impeccable scores and parts (for fear of the volatile character of the music director) under strict deadlines, respect hierarchies, and sometimes I took over conducting and rehearsals when the director was hung over.

I was nearly always the youngest in the group back then. On one tour, the pit orchestra was all experienced session players over 40, straight from London (including a trumpet player who'd recorded for the Beatles), and I was this seemingly inexperienced girl director at 20. There, I began to learn that an orchestra can smell insecurity from a mile away and will eat you alive if you aren’t prepared enough to easily radiate natural confidence.

To have the right to lead, I needed to have full command of the material.

In those 9 months on the road, I learned to work harder on my communication, interpersonal and organizational skills. I learned to take orders as well as give orders.

Above all, I stopped coasting along on talent alone: that's too easy and only takes you so far.

At the end of the European tour, in 1995, I didn't bother with the return ticket to the States provided by the production company. With one suitcase in my hand, I took a train to Berlin from our final tour date near Frankfurt. It was time to put my foreign language skills and musical knowledge to the test and make a new start.

6. VARIETY AS A PLAYGROUND

When I got to Berlin in 1995, no job was too serious or too silly: to me, everything was one big, fun, crazy whirlwind of music.

As one of my first gigs, I played keys and sang backup in an all-girl East German 1970s pop nostalgia band, arranging the songs for the other ladies from bootleg cassettes provided by the singer, who sashayed around in feather boas in the daytime and used a fake French name. Onstage, I dressed in character, wearing a wig, sparkly boots, and green polyester mini-dress. We played those old hits in fun dive bars and smoky clubs. If my bandmates were making fun of me, I wouldn't have known, because they had a really heavy accent that had no resemblance to the German I learned in my few semesters of college.

Me conducting recording sessions of my arrangements with the Berliner Symphoniker.

Then, just few years after I finished a tour as a keyboarder for a German indie rock band, I conducted some arrangements that I wrote for the Berliner Symphoniker for a pop album recording.

I also sang medieval chants in a touring vocal chamber ensemble and concurrently formed my own rock band, and began working in many different recording studios as a musical "Jack-of-all-trades". My ear let me do a number of tasks that others would have taken much longer to figure out. I wrote arrangements and sang complex polyphonic backups on my friends’ strange, never-released albums. I even transcribed some classic movie scores for a dubbing studio to re-record for film restorations.

I played classical and film music with orchestras, wrote lyrics in English and Spanish for pop singers and coached them on breathing technique and English diction.

Sometimes the venues and studios where I worked were prestigious or glorious...

but they were sometimes dirty, smelly, sticky-floored, and super loud and confusing.

I often dragged myself to bed at 3 am after playing and singing and partying for hours on end, just to take a train, dressed in a long black gown and clutching a folder of scores, to a church or cloister in Brandenburg early in the morning to sing the medieval sacred chants of Aquitaine to a quiet, pious audience.

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Why am I telling you this?

I want you to know that a college degree can mean nothing or everything. It depends on you.

There is no one way to become a film composer.

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7. SPECIALIZATION

There are technical skills and a level of fluent and spontaneous creativity you will need to succeed, but it doesn’t matter how or where you acquire them. No one is checking your grades, they want to hear your art and be touched on a visceral level.

I think that the more proficiency you gain in varying areas of music, the more qualified you will be to specialize in film composing. You cannot be a musical snob. You need to open your ears and your mind. The best advice I got from someone was,

"Listen to All Kinds of Music."

Getting really good at something takes time. There is no easy shortcut except having luck, but luck isn’t really sustainable, is it?

I was able to specialize in Film Music because I did anything and everything beforehand, for years.

8. FORMAL EDUCATION / THE SCHOOL OF LIFE

As we know, film composing requires another set of skills on top of expected academic skills: perception and transformation of visual rhythm, emotional sensitivity to characters, and understanding the hidden undercurrents in stories. Studying literature, poetry and visual art all can sharpen your musical instincts.

Observe people, develop emotional intelligence, read up on psychology and body language.

Live your life. Live it both actively and interactively. Your listeners will subconsciously perceive that depth in your compositions.

I’ve come across many composers, orchestrators, and copyists with degrees who have difficulty writing a melody or notating simple harmonic shifts without screwing up flats, sharps, and naturals. That’s just scary! Taking a class in music theory doesn’t automatically mean you write music that’s emotionally touching, unique, or - to be more concrete and profane - instinctively legible to a musician who is trying to sight-read precisely and expressively while the clock is ticking during a recording session.

The music came first; the rules were superimposed.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that someone who is great at music theory or solfeggio or programming patterns the way they were taught to on YouTube is automatically a composer. More on this in my other article.

(A side note: there are many music professors and teachers, and even some composers who are hawking their knowledge at a price. Not all have a natural instinct for music, or have difficulty in transmitting useful information. They offer expensive Master Classes, rubbing their hands together at the thought of selling recording sessions to desperate young composers with often mediocre pick-up orchestras. Some don’t explain the basics of conducting to the orchestration/composition students who participate, many of whom are working with live ensembles for the first time. Anyway, throwing lots of reverb on an orchestra recording can mask thin and weak orchestrations or poor playing only to a certain degree, thus the old adage “fix it in post”. But I digress.)

Remember: much of the best classical or film music that gets dissected and analyzed in today’s classrooms and (boring) blogs was written by instinct, not by following music theory or by mindlessly parroting inapplicable theory exercises as they appear in required conservatory curricula. (By the way, “solfeggio”, something I see that professors in Italian conservatories are really obsessed with, may be useful in training hand-coordination and torturing children, and as a traditionalist, schedule-padding academic pastime, but in real life, I can assure you that it is superfluous bunk.)

Bach wrote the music he wrote because it’s a product of his experience; it’s a projection of his personality (or his wife’s, seeing as she ghostwrote a lot of his music). If John Williams grew up in a different era or place and was surrounded by other influences and people, his music would reflect that. The Beatles would have used different harmonies if they had grown up in Finland, or Japan, or Spain and the rhythm of their melodies would be different if they’d been singing in Italian.

9. ORIGINALITY AND PERSONALITY BASED ON SKILLS

Again: live your life. Read. Learn. Develop your own musical personality. Copy others’ work to understand how they do what they do, as an exercise. Learn that lesson, then free yourself of it. Experiment. Stop being afraid to try something you’ve never tried before. Try it alone first, in private, and no one will judge you. Be brutally honest with yourself. Reveal your experiments when you feel ready, and get set to surprise people with your versatility.

Film composers need to watch thousands of films and listens to tons of music and soundtracks in our lives, even those we may not like.

We must humbly open ourselves to the influences of the great masters who have come before us. Ideally, these influences are absorbed and transformed into compositions that are uniquely our own, products of the way we express our environment and experiences - like Bach or The Beatles.

The world needs more originality! Absolutely no one needs more “epic” repetitive string or piano arpeggios in film scores, unless you’re writing parody. Stop cloning other people’s music. Elegant homage, yes. Obvious copy, no.

The world does not need more badly voiced, weakly arranged string mock-ups that no musician on Earth with 10 fingers (and 2 lungs) could even play. Please, program realistic moments for your MIDI winds to breathe, to swell, to fade, even if it’s “just” a demo. Know that a downbow has a different color and weight than an upbow. Real pizzicato is never played perfectly synchronized. Musicians are people, not machines. If you want a realistic orchestral sound, you’d better learn what - and how - real humans can play. There’s no valid reason not to do your homework on this!

10. FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION THROUGH SELF-ESTEEM

You know, the day I stopped worrying about what people think of me, about when I turned 38 I think, was the day I stopped worrying how people will judge my music. All at once, I felt a rush of freedom and creativity!

A composer must concurrently satisfy a director’s sense of taste, but ALSO, ideally, satisfy his or her own musical standards. Take some risks! If you are worried about being accepted, write some generic music for libraries and be done with it.

CONCLUSION

Combining instinct with talent and hard work, plus Living Life (!) outside of the classroom or the Internet, he or she can someday come closer to fulfilling a magical duty: a transmutation of the existing ideas of the use of, orchestral and musical sounds into something novel, something more than repetitive patterns and clichés (with or without an academic title or certificate).

This is called finding a personal style.

It is a never-ending process.

It comes down to that spark of inspiration which can find the power to explode through hard work and experience - years of it. Then, it’s up to a particular constellation of circumstances called Luck, or maybe Destiny.

Now get cracking!

Cheers from Italy,

Susan DiBona

Film Composer / Co-Owner of The Villa Studios, Italy

Visit my website!