Anyone remotely interested in British television music will be aware that one name is paramount: Carl Davis. In the years since David moved here from the States, many TV series, plays, etc. have benefited from his delicate and careful scoring. I vividly recall first hearing his music in BBC’s first showing of “The Snow Goose”. From then on, I have followed his career with great interest. The following interview contains lengths excerpts from his official biography. Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1936, Carl Davis started his formal musical education at seven years old. “There was always music in our house,” he recalls. “My grandfather sang, my mother played the piano, and I used to tune in to a local radio channel that played classical music non-stop all day.” By the time Carl was nine he was following scores. “I used to check over all the radio programmes scheduled, then go to the public library and take out the score for the coming week. Being an insatiable reader, exploring the library was like being in a second home.” His first love was Gilbert and Sullivan and, through sheer determination and application, he taught himself to sight-read and sight-sing at the same time. “Then I got a strong whiff of opera and my interest in Gilbert and Sullivan evaporated.” At 18, after studying at Queen’s College, New York, and the New England College of Music, he was appointed piano accompanist to the Robert Shaw Chorale, one of America’s top choirs, for three nationwide tours. In order to survive the endless cross-country bus rides, Carl and other members of the orchestra turned their talents to chamber music to while away the time. “In a music shop in Philadelphia, I glanced down at a book of blank manuscript paper lying on the counter. The empty page was so inviting… I wanted to fill it with music. Later that week I quickly composed some songs to poems by my favorite poet, and a trio for two clarinets and bassoon, booked a studio for 10 days ahead when we played in Nashville and did a demo tape with musicians and singers from the Chorale. From that moment I was hooked on composition.” He studied composition for 2 year with Paul Nordoff at Bard College, New York State, which was run on a seminar basis and allowed him to explore all forms of music for theatre, ballet and concert. In his second year at Bard he composed the scores for an experimental revue called Diversions with a fellow student, Steven Vinavar. This was seen by Jerome Robbins, director of “West Side Story”, who was sufficiently impressed to help them get a management deal together. Diversions was staged in Greenwich Village in 1959 and went on to become an award-winning show (later presented, under the title Twists, at London’s Arts Theatre). After leaving college to join the New York City Opera as a pianist, Carl Davis made an important decision: he would move on and try his luck in Europe. “My first stop was Denmark, but I was a complete stranger to the country and just turned up on the doorstep of a composer in Copenhagen whose name had been passed on to me. It led to a job with the Royal Danish Ballet.” Then, during a brief sojourn in Vienna, Carl Davis realized that England was at that time the vital scene in the theatre and media scene, and left for London. He arrived in 1961. Again he had no contacts, but was soon writing “non-stop music” for a radio play called The Flip Side, which won the 1962 Italia Prize. He was then commissioned by Ned Sherrin to write songs, including a whole sequence of duets for Millicent Martin and David Kernan, for That Was the Week That Was. From there, he quickly became an integral part of the British music scene. A big break-through into the live theatre came with an invitation to write the music for Alan Bennett’s hugely successful Forty Years On, with John Gielgud. Carl Davis later worked in the same capacity on Bennett’s Habeas Corpus with Alec Guinness, which saw the start of his collaboration with director Ronald Eyre for the Royal Shakespeare Company; at the National Theatre his compositions for Jonathan Miller Productions span Laurence Olivier’s The Merchant of Venice; Dante’s Death; The Marriage of Figaro, and Measure for Measure. Might we begin by asking how you started writing for television and movies? My first TV work developed out of my stage work. It was a commission from ABC Television for a studio produced musical done in what are now the Thames TV studios in Teddington. It was a flash-in-the-pan – a bold venture, but undermined by lack of technical know-how. It was only several years later that I began to do incidental scores for television plays for the BBC. This developed out of my radio work. By developed I mean that I was passed on and recommended by producers who had moved from radio into television. This score was for a trilogy of plays by Ken Taylor called The Seekers, directed by Alvin Rakoff. The film side of my career developed in turn out of television. A phone call out of the blue from director Jack Gold led to a long and rewarding association. My first feature film was “The Bofors Gun”, which was directed by Jack, and previous to that I had done several prize-winning telefilms for him. What exactly are the conditions when you’re hired to score a series or a play for the BBC? How much time were you given to compose the music for “Private Schultz” for example? First of all, a play and a series are two different things, but they have one thing in common – a dubbing date which is my deadline for completing the composition and recording of a score. Very often this is further determined by a transmission date. Often a series may start its transmission and not yet be complete, so that episodes 1 and 2 may be out on the air while we are dubbing episodes 3 and 4. “Private Schultz” was worked on over a very long period of time. There was music during the filming played live in the studio, episode by episode composition and recording and subsequent dubbing of each segment, so work on that series went on for many months. I would say an average for a single play would be two to three weeks from the end of the editing to the recording of the score. In the mid-seventies there seems to be an amazing amount of TV series you worked on. Was this something that you decided to concentrate on? No, this was not a deliberate choice. This was fitting in to what was a happy combination of the king of series that was suited to the sort of music I like to write. A time Carl Davis remembers with particular pleasure is his collaboration with director Peter Hammond on “Our Mutual Friend” and “Wuthering Heights”. “Peter introduced me to the art of writing and a ‘library of themes’ – that is, composing a group of musical pieces based on underlying themes which can be used throughout a series at various times. The pieces are later fitted into the production like a jigsaw.” Carl Davis’s love of books and his great feeling for the drama undoubtedly play a strong part in his success story. He says, “Throughout my life, thanks to the world of books, I have had the joy of immersing myself in complex characters, varied situations and landscapes, and when I compose music for television productions based on books, I try from the very first notes, the melodies and scoring, to convey some of the excitement and drama that these books gave to me.” Having been brought up in America, did you have any difficulty in musically approaching so many typically English subjects in those television productions? This problem of identifying with subjects of different countries and types is just not a problem for me. Obviously I research my subjects musically, but I do not think that writing music for “Our Mutual Friend”, for instance, has much to do with Englishness, or at any rate that was not part of my thoughts. It had more to do with murder and tension and the river. Can you tell us how you came to do the music for “The Bofors Gun”? As I explained before, I had been working on several telefilms for Jack Gold. We had done an ‘Omnibus’ programme called “Tales of Coppard” and a wonderful ‘Play for Today’ called “Mad Jack”, which was an adaptation of the Siegfried Sassoon autobiography. We were obviously a successful team and he invited me to do “The Bofors Gun” for him. Incidentally, that was also Jack’s first feature film and the start of a very fruitful collaboration between him and Nicol Williamson. “The Bofors Gun” was not a film which required much scoring. If you were to do that score now, would you approach it differently do you think? Yes, I would, because I understand much more about the conflicts which were exposed in the movie; but “The Bofors Gun” has problems in scoring in that it is based on a play and is mostly dialogue with very little purely visual passages; so while I may sharpen up my approach to the scoring today, there still would not be very much scope for me in the film. “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” must be your most prestigious film credit to date. Could you tell us how you came to work on that film, and how you felt it turned out? Karel Reisz had heard some of my television music – in particular “Our Mutual Friend” – and asked if I would work on the film first of all to adapt a Schoenberg score which they had liked and put on the movie for editing purposes. This later became impractical and I took over the entire score, except for a Mozart piano sonata at the end of the picture. I feel it turned out very well. The film is constantly interesting and provocative and the music provides a strong atmosphere, and is heard. Were you at all tempted to omit the contemporary rock music tracks from “The Lieutenant Woman’s” albums? It’s a lovely score, but those rock pieces are something of an intrusion. I tried in the albums to convey the time shifts in the film. The Rock tracks were, in fact, all written for the contemporary scenes, but in the end mostly not used. What was Christopher Palmer’s precise function on that film? He assisted me with the orchestration. I would think that the scores for both “Napoleon” and “The Crowd” were an extension of your work on the mammoth “Hollywood” series… What were the main problems, writing for these two silent epics? The main problem was that we were going to move from a controlled studio situation, working on scores in short cues, to one where I would have to perform continuously for the entire length of these films, making adjustments as I went. The score had to be the right size and shape to fit, I had to know the movie very well and to be precise and clear enough to the orchestra to make adjustments. This was a technique very common in the ’20s but which has now been lost. I knew I could not use any mechanical aids like click tracks, clocks, or stop-watches, I had to do it all by eye; but as I was the composer, or in the case of “Napoleon”, compiler/composer, I could be constantly making adjustments, cuts, extensions, etc. to the score across the performances. It was reported that you had recorded your score for “Napoleon”. Was this purely for future television transmission, or will it also be available on vinyl? There is a definite commitment to record “Napoleon” for Channel 4, but this has not yet taken place. A record album would follow on from that. I feel your collaboration with John Wells has produced some very fine songs. I was thinking particularly of “Orpheus in the Underground” and “In the Looking-Glass”. How does song writing differ from basic scoring? This is another whole area which would take a very long time to describe, but the process of song-writing in a team can be extremely exhilarating, as indeed my collaboration with John Wells is. You need to spend time together, you need to feel very free in each other’s company, you need to feel that words and music are being evolved together. One senses in conversation with Carl Davis that his musicianship is linked with a histrionic quality that could well bring success as an actor. In fact, he does make an occasional excursion into the acting world, for example he appeared in a wide variety of roles in “Through the Looking-Glass” series: a butler, a vicar, John Well’s mother, a cave man and a radio operator on a Polaris submarine. “I must admit I enjoy clowning!” says Carl Davis, who is married to an actress (Jean Boht) and is the father of two daughters. Carl Davis is eager to initiate his own projects now, and with this in mind has formed (with Terry Oates) a publishing company, Sundergrade Music Ltd. All your admirers must be appreciative that your collaboration with EMI has produced such fine recordings like “The Commanding Sea”, yet a large proportion of your work remains unrecorded, for instance “Winston Churchill”, “The Wilderness Years”, or “The Sailor’s Return”. Is there any chance we might expect further recordings? I am hoping to do some recordings in the near future, but the sequence of four television albums that I did across 1980/82 were very interesting and valuable, although not particularly successful in the market; so I want to think very carefully before I embark on more recordings of pure television themes. I still do not think I got the formula right. You have worked in virtually all spheres of the media since you arrived in this country. Which do you prefer to work in? I am really happy to work in all of them. My only requirement is that, if I am doing too much film recording, I do some theatre immediately after, and that I go backwards and forwards from performing live in front of an audience to recording in a studio. I think you can get ‘studio-bound’. Have you a favorite score or work that you are particularly proud of? I am very proud of my collaboration with Barry Humphries, which has produced “The Last Night of the Poms” and I am very pleased with my score for “The Crowd”. Are there any film composers you particularly admire? I do not like the word ‘film’ composers. I think that one should just be a composer and write for films as well as for other things. I have many favorite composers. At the moment I am listening to a lot of Bartok, whose music I admire. I am very fond of Stravinsky. I like the two modern Russian composers, Prokofiev and Shostakovich, both of whom did wonderful film music. If I had my wish I would play Mozart all day long… Can you tell us about your current assignments and what we might look forward to in the future? The most exciting venture is this development of the silent film scores. We performed two silent movies at the last London Film Festival: “Flesh and the Devil” with Greta Garbo and “Show People” directed by King Vidor. I look forward to a continuing exploration of this area, in addition to which I am beginning to perform a lot of my film and television music in concert, and this is very exciting. My work on series and single plays for the BBC still continues, and I will also be making contributions to the Shakespeare Series. In particular I would watch out for Jack Gold’s production of Macbeth with Nicol Williamson. I am also looking forward to doing a revision of “Napoleon” as Kevin Brownlow has found more material in the archive of the Cinémathèque in Paris, and I am hoping that we will perform “Napoleon” in Paris and bring this revised version back to England.