Tell us a little about your background, both personally and professionally. How did you first discover film music?
I can’t remember exactly when I first noticed film without music, music with film, and music without film. I won’t be original here, but as a boy, maybe ten or eleven years old Hans Zimmer’s The Rock, along with Harry Gregson-Williams and Nick Glennie-Smith, must have made a huge impression on me.
That’s really the driving force for everyone who became interested in film music and was born in the eighties or nineties. Quite recently I revisited it, and actually some fragments are already quite sluggish and certainly don’t match today’s action cinema, but I would simply attribute that to racing technology. From any angle you look at it, The Rock is technological film music based on means and programs that were being used and implemented quite vigorously in American cinema at the time.
I remember one moment when the very essence of film music appeared in my life, and it was quite a breakthrough moment that I return to and often recall. My neighbor, who lived next door, lent me several film music CDs. I don’t know if it was already a time when film music was interesting to me, when I could name certain things. Among those CDs, I remember there was The Double Life of Veronique, Thomas Newman’s Meet Joe Black, a few other discs, probably Scent of a Woman. I think at that moment, around 2003, Meet Joe Black and Thomas Newman really got under my skin. Even today, beyond my passion, even now as I’m talking to you, Jon, I’m looking at a huge framed poster with the cover of The Green Mile that I have above my desk, with the complete list of tracks from that soundtrack.
Professionally, I’ve been associated with the IT industry and sales management, mostly international. And regarding film music beginnings, it’s very difficult to answer the question of why it’s always Hans Zimmer and why it’s always The Rock, and how many people’s musical and film paths and passions would have turned out differently if not for that one film score, which is still very popular to this day. After all, two years ago, Intrada reissued a two-disc edition of this album, with massive work from Stéphane Humez, Maxime Marion, and film music journalist Kaya Savas, so it’s really quite significant, especially for this generation.
This was probably caused, at least here, by the fact that certain films were available and often appeared on cassettes or in rental stores. The Rock was always rented and watched – today we’d say in bundles or packages with James Horner’s Braveheart, Rocky, Terminator, or The Last of the Mohicans. Even when we take these four soundtracks, each of which I remember perfectly, we see that each is quite different. So if we received as children the foundations for our passion from several different pools, several different composing styles, because we had Trevor Jones, Harry Gregson-Williams, James Newton Howard, James Horner. These are all different film stories, different projects, different collaborations, and probably different arguments each time for hiring a particular composer.
So this is such an interesting discipline that from the beginning made us draw from different, often eclectic playgrounds. Think, for example, of Rocky IV. Unlike other musical genres, if someone listens to rock or jazz, they’re in a certain area of sound, a certain area of instruments and melodies. But with film music, we had to wade through such a wide range and try, because the nineties were a very good period. We had both symphonic and electronic soundtracks, and jazz was also present. It was a good time to start.
How did you start your career as a film music journalist, and what do you do now in film music?
I remember writing my first review of a film with music by composer David Wingo, and the film was called Take Shelter. The music amazed me, the finale of this film amazed me. The psychology, although it’s independent cinema and the music is quite minimalist, mostly created by computer, the very relationship of the soundtrack with the protagonist and the musical commentary on the state and condition of the main character, played brilliantly by Michael Shannon, how he perceives the world, were for me arguments to finally start and describe what seemed justified to me at the time. Perhaps not everyone feels the same way, but maybe I managed to catch something that drew attention and had an effect. Wow, I actually didn’t catch that. That was in 2013.
But I remember that back then, the first reviews I wrote for the portal filmmusic.pl, where I’m still an editor, I interspersed with playing basketball. It somehow refreshed my mind, and I often simply alternated between writing and playing basketball on the court. However, that’s not entirely true either, because once, I think it was 2005 or 2006 after the premiere of Oldboy with music by Cho Young-wuk, I wrote a review and sent it to another portal—I won’t reveal which one. The editor of that portal, I was 15-16 years old at the time, you could say crushed my review, pointing out a mass of errors, crossing things out. He didn’t give me another chance, didn’t praise – not that I needed it – but rather reprimanded me for such a cavalier approach to the topic, and I even got criticized for misspelling the composer’s name. That discouraged me, I won’t deny it.
But if we can talk about my first contact with film music journalism, even when I was in high school and in the school radio station, I played film music over the school’s PA system. I remember during breaks—perhaps many people if they heard Dario Marianelli’s Pride and Prejudice now, some brain synapses might tell them they’d heard this music before, and I don’t necessarily mean Henry Purcell, but Marianelli’s original composition. Several hundred people listened to that music because they were at school. Every break, everyone listened to film music. It must have been an interesting experience and I hope I didn’t plunge people into any moods or give them bad memories associated with it.
I also remember my article for the high school newspaper. I still have a copy somewhere. The subject was film music and how film music accompanies us daily. It was quite simplistic, and today I would probably treat it with pity, but back then it was a big deal. I bragged and showed that article to everyone because it was also my absolute writing debut in terms of published text. At that time, anything written online wasn’t yet the standard.
What in your opinion are things that are necessary for a film score to be successful?
Cinema Paradiso by Ennio Morricone, everyone simply likes it and treats it with some superiority and honor, like Howard Shore’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, or even with cult status. You hear a lot how music should function in film from the very beginning. Some claim that the best film music is music you can’t hear.
It seems to me that the best film music—if we could continue this thought—is the music you can’t hear, but that you can feel. Music whose presence the body senses. If we were to strip a given scene of film music, would the filmmakers still manage to convey the same thing? For example, I’ll use Howard Shore’s example again: the final sequence of Se7en—which you, Jon, recently wrote a great review of—when Morgan Freeman runs toward Brad Pitt because he already knows—would that same sequence without Howard Shore’s devastating film score be the same? Probably not. So that’s when we define, it seems to me, good film music, or film music that achieves success.
Does the question of themes, instruments, lack of instruments, repetition, or copying the same patterns matter? Perhaps yes, perhaps tracing and too literal inspiration can interfere here, can be treated as bad film music because it’s derivative. Which sounds quite funny, because I remember—I think it was Roy M. Prendergast who pointed this out in his book Film Music: A Neglected Art —that film music actually has the least stable position in a film, because it usually comes in last and is easiest to replace. You can’t easily do this with actors, editing, or cinematography—you have to call everyone back to set. But film music, as functional art and music that supports what’s happening on screen, is somewhat disadvantaged because one day it’s there, the next day it’s not, or it’s completely different.
I’m also a proponent of music in film vs their release—if the music works well in the film and meets expectations, you can call it good, simply good film music. Even in such extreme cases as The Exorcist, where music sounds arbitrary and, again following Prendergast in this case, doesn’t describe characters, action, doesn’t move the heroes, doesn’t give certain dynamics to scenes—it simply exists at a given moment and also works. So there’s no rule. Did you know there’s a theory that Friedkin chose the lullaby-like Tubular Bells not because of a sudden creative spark, but because he had seen Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and thought a similar sound would suit his own film?
Obviously, you can look at film music through the prism of popularity—what music accompanies people in concert halls is always Gladiator, always The Godfather, it’s what people like, know, and like to hear again. Film music also has this quality: when calling a soundtrack a good soundtrack, a successful film score, it can be assigned to individual elements of the film—it can be for character, for place, for time, for… what else? For example, Thomas Newman’s American Beauty is simultaneously for characters, a place, which is visible from the very beginning, where this suburban USA and we’d say the atmosphere of this place is expressed through marimba, and you immediately know what this film will be about.
So good film music immediately tells us what the film will be about, where we are, who we’re talking about, who will appear in a moment. It should also fulfill the role of a reminder. If a given melody is assigned to a given hero, whenever we hear this melody, we already know we have the hero, or every time the hero appears, certain emotions will be evoked automatically. That’s why film music should be like a compass on screen, because unlike other musical genres, we often hear film music only once, so it must be very precisely constructed and very precisely woven into the film to fulfill its effect. That’s why we often need very little to identify given music or identify a given composer’s style, because there’s very little time to evoke a specific effect, and if that specific effect is evoked, well, that music is simply good.
What is your opinion on film music today, particularly in Poland? Could you talk a bit about how Polish film music has developed in recent decades?
This question comes at quite an interesting period, because we’re two years after the absolute success of Polish film music, when we had The Peasants by L.U.C. and we also had Forgotten Love by Paweł Lucewicz, which won an award in the International Film Music Critics Association awards. Perhaps this music reached somewhere it had never been before, and thanks to this, revealed for some listeners, for some viewers, the beautiful history of Polish film music, not only in Poland but in the world. Because when it comes to our contribution, it’s quite impressive to me. Every self-respecting film music fan can cite at least a few names, from Kilar to Korzeniowski to perhaps Bronisław Kaper, who won his Oscar for Lily in 1954.
Throughout all these years, Poland also has the good fortune that as one of the few countries, not only in Europe but in the world, it can boast a film music festival in Kraków, where the Wojciech Kilar Award is given, whose laureates include Alexandre Desplat and Patrick Doyle. Thanks to this event, thanks to the entire FMF team and the city of Kraków, film music in our country swells and grows and is transported to concert halls. Philharmonic orchestras play it more and more often, and this also creates great opportunities for Polish composers, who traditionally have the chance to present their suites. And, frankly speaking, a year or two ago at the film music festival, listening to a several-minute suite compiled from films with Stanisław Syrewicz’s music, I was genuinely amazed that I had never before, I admit it openly, had the chance to experience his music.
For everyone reading this conversation, I’ll just drop a few names so you don’t have to search deeper. It’s definitely worth becoming familiar with the work of Kurylewicz, Komeda, Korzyński, all the gentlemen with K, Krzysztof Komeda—that won’t be a surprise—or more contemporary composers like Paweł Lucewicz, Bartosz Chajdecki, Krzysztof Aleksander Janczak or Wojtek Urbański, whose film score, the film for which he composed music, won quite recently at the Gdynia Film Festival the most important film award in Poland, the Golden Lion. I was very happy to see Wojtek Urbański’s preparations for the film The Altar Boys, where he shared clips on Instagram of how he recorded music in one of the churches, and it simply looked phenomenal. This also serves well for promotion and how we present film music as something attractive.
Perhaps the very form of presenting film music and its distribution and promotion would be an interesting topic for another discussion. But answering this question, film music in Poland exists. When you watch films or series, this music often stands out, although it doesn’t have as significant an impact as a narrative tool. Whether it’s streaming platforms or cinema films, the music is there and composers are not overlooked.
However, because there’s so little of this music in public space—I mean the availability of records or the presence of soundtracks on streaming services—there’s still room for improvement. Another matter is whether there’s actually such demand to release this music, for it to make economic sense. But that’s also a topic for another discussion.
Who do you consider the best film music composers working today? What is it about their music that appeals to you?
I need to think longer about this question because I recently attended a virtual meeting with Lorne Balfe, and what we often overlook in conversations about composers and film music as such is the amount of work composers put in and the number of hours they’re working, sacrificing other things. It’s probably like that with every discipline, but the great Max Steiner—his private life was simply bad. It wasn’t something we’d want to hear about.
He didn’t succeed in private life, he succeeded in professional life, though it wasn’t always that way. After all, Steiner was very often simply an overworked laborer. Even when he won an Oscar, even when his name became recognizable, he had quite significant problems existing in the industry at all.
I think the best composers add something extra. They set new paths, show new solutions. They do something that stays with us. Max Steiner, Bernard Herrmann, John Williams, Hans Zimmer—like every art discipline, film music needs a kick every so often. Not even every few years, but maybe every dozen or so years. To get such a kick to start refreshing. And it’s easy to say that the most important composers, or the best composers working today, are still those composers who have been with us for several decades, like Alan Silvestri, Howard Shore, or Thomas Newman.
And that will probably be true. And probably many would agree that at first it’s difficult to name young generation composers who have the predisposition to become the next Williams, the next Newmans—Kris Bowers, Ariel Marx, Amine Bouhafa, Anne Nikitin, Jung Jae-Il, and the impressively talented Cameron Moody. Perhaps the best film music composers can also be viewed through the prism of stability, through the prism of delivering projects every time that stay with the film, that guarantee a certain quality, whose music very easily penetrates pop culture, at least goes beyond the film. Hans Zimmer, Alexandre Desplat, Danny Elfman are such names. What’s in this music? What appeals to me? A certain permanence.
I also think of composers who probably leave their soul, leave something that defines them. Like it was with Gabriel Yared, whom I recently spoke with about The English Patient, about the process and how important it turned out to be to invoke and base, to inspire the music of Anthony Minghella’s film on the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, which immediately creates the composer’s language and you can talk about a certain breakthrough, not only creative but also conceptual.
When we think of The English Patient, we have a benchmark for romantic, period-piece drama music. So if I feel that a film score will stay with me longer and I’ll be able to return to individual scenes or certain emotions that accompany it will be encoded, then I consider that this music, returning a bit to the first question, fulfills its role and we’ll return to it many times. Because no matter how niche our discipline still is, let’s call things by their names, notice how eagerly we return to Jerry Goldsmith’s music, and how often we listen to John Barry or Henry Mancini.
This marriage of film and film music is one of the best artistic marriages we can get. And I hope that despite the fact that it’s often said that film music will soon disappear, AI will replace it, there will be less and less of it because budgets will be smaller and smaller, it will remain in such form, because cinema needs music. It always needed it, even long before we got a record in our hands, heard it as part of the film, or looked at the screen and the figure of a musician emerging from nowhere, who in the first, first films was supposed to tell people where this music came from, because otherwise they didn’t know why it was there at all. It’s part of evolution, and it seems to me there’s nothing to worry about.
Read Tomasz’s reviews at https://filmmusic.pl/, or follow him on Instagram and Threads @tomludward.