Bruce Broughton has been composing for TV and films for more than four decades, and he also created the first symphonic score for a computer game, “Heart of Darkness”. He wrote for such noted television series as “Hawaii Five-O” and “Quincy” for many years before he gained wide audience recognition with his exciting first major-motion-picture score, “Silverado” (1985). He has followed this with many Americana-flavored scores, including “O Pioneers!” (1992), “True Women” (1997), and “Roughing It” (2002). Broughton’s signature style is predominantly lighthearted, beautifully orchestrated music. During his long, varied career, he has worked in almost every conceivable film genre, and his impressive oeuvre includes wonderful music for the mystery movie “Young Sherlock Holmes” (1985), the suspense-laden “Narrow Margin” (1990), and the emotionally charged, delightful “Miracle on 34th Street” (1994). What was your exposure to music when growing up, and did you ever see yourself becoming a film composer? I came from a musical family. A grandfather was a composer of band music, a grandmother was a trained singer; all of my grandparents and both of my parents could read music, sing at sight, and play two or three instruments. An uncle was a songwriter; his sister was a pianist. My brother is a professional trombonist/composer. I started playing the piano and the trumpet when I was six or seven, and I started composing when I was twelve. But I never considered composing for films or anything else until my last year of college. Your career started in television. How did this come about? I got a job out of college as an assistant music supervisor for CBS Television in Hollywood. My job was to track and supervise music for series that CBS produced. At that time, I worked on shows like “Gunsmoke”, “Hawaii Five-O”, “The Wild Wild West”, and many other shows you’ve probably never heard of. I began composing for TV while I was at CBS and eventually became Assistant Director of Music for the network. I left when the job became too immersed in the business end of music. When I left CBS, I knew TV, so that’s what I went into. I started working immediately on “Quincy” and then “How the West Was Won”. Your first major film score was for “Silverado”. Was the transition from television to motion pictures difficult? It was not a difficult transition, because, by that time, I had done many, many Western-style and Americana shows: “Gunsmoke”, “How the West Was Won”, and “The Blue and the Gray”. I knew the musical style well. But, because it was my first major feature, it was somewhat daunting. I didn’t want to screw it up. What are the major differences between TV scoring and the film scoring, and which do you prefer? It’s mostly a matter of size. Movies are scaled toward large images, whereas television is generally more intimate. Movies are meant to be seen in theaters, where the image is huge and the drama is shared with other people. There are generally not many distractions when watching a movie. With television, it’s much the opposite. The images are smaller and the programs suffer the distractions of not only people walking in and out of the viewing area, but of commercial breaks, poor transmission, and rigid time constraints. In the case of television series, there are also rigid story formats with well-developed characters and relationships. For a composer, one of the main differences between the two media is that there is generally a little more time on a feature film to think things over before committing to a direction, though not always. Television is practically always done on the fly. There also tends to be much more attention paid to detail on a movie than on a television show. When recording a movie score with an orchestra, hours can be spent agonizing over one musical gesture. There’s rarely anything like that in television. I like working in both television and movies, assuming the stories are interesting. Television often has more variety in stories than movies. But for capturing an audience and having the maximum effect of your music felt, there’s nothing like the movies to do that. Although you have proven yourself to be a most versatile composer, you often seem to score films that require an Americana sound. Is this a purposely chosen direction or do you find yourself pigeonholed a bit because of your early scores in this style? I just happened to have done a lot of Americana-themed projects early on in my movie career, and a couple of these, most notably “Silverado” and “Tombstone”, got the most notice. Because of this, I think I may have been sometimes pigeonholed as a certain kind of composer. However, I have a versatile technique and can write many other sorts of scores. What are your musical influences? Do you ever turn to the old film-music masters, such as Steiner and Korngold, for inspiration? In general, though I think they were good composers, I don’t go to film scorers like Steiner’s or Korngold’s or anyone else’s for inspiration or for stylistic influences. Most film composers borrow a lot from concert composers, because the concert composers have the opportunity and time to be more musically original than film composers. Both Steiner and Korngold, for example, were admirers of Wagner’s music and borrowed a lot from that composer, as well as from other composers’ styles. My musical influences are pretty eclectic and span a lot of different composers, techniques, and time periods. These influences get funneled and sifted through me, eventually becoming part of my style; but the process really isn’t all that different from what any other composer does, no matter what medium he or she is writing in. I usually know where I picked up a specific technique or whether it was something that originated with me. Sometimes the sources are pretty weird. Having said that, I occasionally hear an interesting film score by someone who takes an approach I would never think of, and that sort of influences is often inspiring aesthetically. You can always learn something from someone else even if it’s what not to do. What is your film-scoring process, and is it the same for all areas of your writing, from TV to films to concert music? My composing process, in whichever medium, is usually the same in one respect: I start at the beginning and work my way to the end. I essentially through-compose. Some composers start on the big cues; some of them start on the hard cues. I just start. I will work out my main theme first and then see what comes up later. If I have spent enough time with the story, there’s a part of me that knows when to do what, and I find there’s no use in trying to figure everything out before I start writing. As the story develops in the film, so does my understanding of it, and so does my music. It’s an interesting process. In concert music, I work a lot slower. I will go back over a piece and add or subtract measures or phrases for better timing. I’ll rewrite sections. It’s usually not necessary or practical to do that with a film. In television, I just sit down and write. The eraser is the busiest part of my pencil. You have also composed the music for a game. What was this like? This was a lot of fun for a couple of reasons. First of all, the game was good, the story worked well, and it was very well-executed. Second, the production team was French, which meant that I made many trips to Paris. I developed some really great relationships with some very creative and interesting people, whom I have continued to see ever since. We all stay in touch. It seems that composing for film has changed quite a bit in the past couple of decades, with more reliance on synths, more hands involved, and a shortening of the composing time. Does this affect your more traditional style of scoring? Synths are just musical instruments, so that’s not a big deal, once you figure out how to use them. There have always been many hands involved, though not as much micromanaging as there is now. I think the anxiety is very, very great now for directors, who do not work as often as composers and are in charge of spending a lot of money that belongs to other people. The anxiety is also great for the studio executives, who are relying upon the director to come up with something that will sustain their careers for a little while longer. Every aspect of a movie gets minutely examined and re-examined, and it very quickly comes down to someone peering into the composing process. If you’ve ever worked in television, you’re used to a shortage of time, though sometimes it gets ridiculously short in moves through a lack of foresight or understanding of the composing process. Most of the above issues have always been around. What is different now is that, due to digital technology, much is possible for filmmakers that was never possible before. Temp-tracks are easier to do. Making picture edits up until the last minute, even during the recording of the score, is easier to do. Making changes in the soundtrack is easier, as is changing one’s mind at the last minute. All of the above can make scoring a lot more time-intensive. What are your feelings to using a synthesizer versus a full orchestra? Is it often an attempt to lower the costs of recording, or is it merely a tool, an instrument in itself? The synth, as I said, is basically just another musical instrument and a really useful one at that. However, to some people, it is thought as a way of getting cheap and quick scores. To come composers, it is a way of not having to learn how to deal with an orchestra or acoustical music. The synth gets in my way from time to time because I can’t always demonstrate what the orchestra is really going to sound like from a synth mockup. I’m a good orchestrator and a more-than-adequate synth player. I can make an orchestra sound very, very specific, but I can’t do that with synths. So, when I do a “synth score”, I often feel limited by fewer aural opportunities. I know some synth-oriented composers feel the opposite. Doing a decent synth-based score is expensive, even if a composer does it himself in his own studio. It’s very time-consuming. But he or she doesn’t have to pay a great mass of musicians in order to get the fat sound that his or her index finger can get by pressing the right key that connects to that specific fat sound on a keyboard. This is essentially what’s considered as money-saving. The best synth scores are those that are either integrated into the overall orchestral fabric to produce unique and special sounds or effects, or are produced by people who love, work, and think more comfortable in that specifically creative environment. In your score for the 1994 remake of “Miracle on 24th Street”, you created a warm mood that makes me want to snuggle under the blankets with a cup of hot chocolate. How did you create this emotional mood? The first thing you have to do is to buy into the story. The second thing you have to do is to find the notes that express the way you feel while helping to tell the story. Then you have to find the right instruments and timbres that will carry the emotion to the audience in the most convincing way. Holidays are associated with a certain sound, like Westerns are associated with guitars and harmonicas and horrors with screeching violins and so on. You also wrote some of this film’s cues in the voices of Vivaldi and Handel. Christmas music is partly associated with music of the baroque. Think of Handel’s Messiah, for example; it’s played more at Christmas than it is at Easter. In any case, I chose to write ersatz Baroque for all of the Christmas source music. Besides, I really like to work in other composers’ styles when I can. I learn a lot by doing that. I think my faux Handel and faux Vivaldi work pretty well musically. For the TV movie “Eloise at Christmastime”, I chose to write much of the music in Tchaikovsky’s style, and incorporated bits of his Nutcracker Suite, another great Christmas piece, as accompaniment to the Eloise theme. In “Homeward Bound”, you gave an Americana-style voice to the main characters. There was a definite country flavor to the score, given the outdoor surroundings. The car had a theme that was, to me, the musical equivalent of a cat coming up and rubbing against your leg. The theme for Chance, the young dog, was giddy, bouncy, and country-like. The overall ‘Homeward Bound” theme, however, was big, outdoors, and inspirational. It is, after all, subtitled “The Incredible Journey”. I find it unfortunate that the moviegoers are not exposed to your work in blockbusters. Are you where you want to be in your career, or do you feel underappreciated in the industry and want to be attached to larger projects? Though I don’t feel left out in the industry, I’d certainly like the opportunity to work on a blockbuster movie. I have no control, however, nor does anyone else, over what the next mega-hit will be. I try to work on things I enjoy with people I like and respect and whom I enjoy working with. I like working on all sorts of pictures: serious drama, action, comedies, animation, period stories, whatever. But I particularly like working with people who are passionate about what they’re doing, and in this respect I’ve been very fortunate. There’s still a lot to come. It’s taken me many years to realize one essential reality: It’s not only about the music. Whatever success as a film composer means, it’s not just about whether someone writes well or not. Just as the three rules of real estate have much to do with location, the three rules of success in the movie business have much to do with relationships. Having said that, the choice of whether or not to take ‘the big picture’ isn’t one that any of us gets to make. No one knows which one is going to be ‘the one’, but we’re always hopeful. Which musical projects or areas do you most enjoy being involved with? I like writing music. Period. All sorts. I like composing for the movies; it’s interesting, challenging and exciting. I also like composing concert music. It brings me into direct contact with my audience. What one word would best describe you as a composer? Versatile.