It's a Friday evening in July at Abbey Road recording studios in north London. In Studio One, 80 players from the London Metropolitan Orchestra are relaxed and chatting softly, their instruments silent. By the far wall, 40 singers from the English Chamber Choir stand quietly. In the windowed control booth sealed off at the rear of the studio, video monitors show Anthony Hopkins riding in triumph back to Rome in a scene of vast splendor from the upcoming movie version of Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus."
Watching and listening closely to the first playback of picture with music are the film's director, Julie Taymor; composer, Elliot Goldenthal; music producer, Teese Gohl; and New York conductor Steven Mercurio. Recording engineers sit patiently at the huge mixing board and several Apple computers.
Even on a video terminal, the entrance to the Coliseum that Taymor has created is spectacular, with a series of dynamic images showing a carnival of marching soldiers, animals and carriages. This is the director famous for the breathtaking opening of the stage version of Disney's "The Lion King." "Titus" is her first big feature, and she knows that expectations will be high. Goldenthal's score is big, percussive and sweeping, the choir chanting and soaring above it. It looks and sounds grand.
But Taymor and Goldenthal aren't satisfied. "The choir should bark here," the director says, demonstrating what she means. "The second of the two-note blurs should be short," the composer says. "We can do that," says the conductor, and he heads back into the studio.
Taymor, highly praised over the past 20 years for elaborate stage presentations of Shakespeare plays and such productions as "Juan Darien: A Carnival Mass" and Carlo Gozzi's "The Green Bird," has made just two short films for American Playhouse and a filmed version of Stravinsky's "Oedipus Rex," before this.
Goldenthal has written Oscar-nominated scores for "Interview with the Vampire" and "Michael Collins," and scored such films as "The Butcher Boy," "A Time to Kill, "Batman & Robin" and "Drugstore Cowboy." He also has an enormous reputation in the theater and concert hall, creating symphonies and chamber music.
The two have worked together some 20 times in those arenas, including a stage production of "Titus." Taymor's conception for the film is that its design should reflect many eras from ancient Rome to the 1930s to modern times. "It's reimagined time," she says. "The stylization is very real. You quickly get used to a world that mixes cars and chariots. You should believe in the places and people."
Goldenthal's music had to reflect that. "Elliot was the first person I called," Taymor says. "He has a mix of this big orchestral music that just tears your heart out and big band material and rock 'n' roll."
Goldenthal says that he finds the amalgam more natural than contrived. "All you have to do is go to Rome today," he says. "Go the Forum and watch a 1999 Maserati go by and there are some kids with a boom box playing Italian rap music, and someone else drives by listening to opera; from another car you hear jazz. You've got the whole picture right there. It's not contrived, it really exists."
He says that working on the stage version of the play with Taymor was a gift. "Whenever you're in a theatrical situation, you're there for eight or 10 weeks of rehearsal when you have to work out the music. The gift is that you really get to understand the text in a very deep way. It was like going to a Shakespeare camp and learning one play over 10 weeks. At the end, I absolutely knew the play. I knew where to avoid stomping on the language."
Taymor speaks of how Goldenthal's music illuminates scenes. "There are plenty of times where we go: 'Do we really need music here?"' she says. "But then you hear the music, and it takes a whole other trip. It's very exciting, almost operatic, but the language can support that because it's Shakespeare's language."
Goldenthal is happy to move from such films as "Batman & Robin" to “Titus”. "I think that 'Batman' is very much like Shakespeare in the sense that, yes, it's disposable culture and nothing could be more nondisposable than Shakespeare, but the meeting ground is that it's mythic," he says. "In 'Batman,' you have these giant mythic themes. You're dealing with psychological and mythic stuff just like Greek tragedies – with the exception that it's cartoon myth."
Goldenthal agrees, however, that he has to use different musical muscles on those projects. "The differences are purely in the dramatic sense in that in Shakespeare, no character is on one level," he says. "Every character has layers and mirrors and ironies, so when you score it, you have to choose which layer to go to. Whereas in 'Batman,' the hero is the hero; the villain is the villain; the zany is the zany. The villain shows up, and that's the music. The hero shows up, it has to be heroic."
New York-based Goldenthal, who studied with Aaron Copland and John Corigliano, likes to divide his year between composing for movies and the theater and writing concert pieces. But he's a huge fan of movie music. "Film music has been around for less than a century, but if you look at it, the same percentage of great music will have come out of the film world as will have come out of the classical world," he says. "Out of all the classical compositions that were produced in the 20th century, probably only 15% of them survive the cut. In movies, 85% of the music scores are terrible, but there's that 15% that will rise and eventually be a part of the great world of art."
He cites Bernard Herrmann's work and that of Shostakovich, who did over 40 film scores, Prokofiev, Leonard Bernstein, Virgil Thompson, and Aaron Copland. "Not to mention the film scores of Duke Ellington," he says. "Just in that pack right there you have some excellent stuff."
For his own scores, Goldenthal says he writes according to the musical needs. "I find that different tasks require different methodologies," he says. "When I write a linear melody, a fugue, say, I sit down with pencil and paper and work it out very carefully. Then I play it into a synth, watching the movie to make sure it works dramatically. But for music where you have to turn corners a lot and match people's expressions at 1/25th of a second, then it's much better to sit there with MIDI computer equipment so you can really be intimate with the characters. The technology in that instance doesn't distance you, it gets you closer."
He works closely with orchestrator Robert Elhai, who started as his assistant. "I work very closely with Bob in a sort of joyous collaboration," Goldenthal says. "We sit there and talk about all the great orchestrators of classical lore, get out the great scores and tremble as we look at them and see how different orchestration problems were solved, and we learn."
He also clearly enjoys the recording process and working with the orchestra. He especially likes working at Abbey Road. There is a practical reason for scoring a film such as "Titus" in London. It was made without a distributor lined up, and Goldenthal says that if he had recorded the music in New York or Los Angeles, the musicians would have had to be paid reuse fees whenever the score was replayed, such as for an album. "Here in London, they've worked that out. You pay a little more, so there's no reuse fee," he says. "That generates more work for the musicians here, and I feel happy for them. I have a great many friends in orchestras in the States and I'm certainly not against unions, but I hope that the unions there start to be a little bit more flexible so that musicians can get as much work as possible. There has to be a way to work things out creatively so that everybody's happy."
He also likes Abbey Road because of the sound. "The players are good and the strings sound really rich and brilliant here," he says. "I enjoy the intangibles about Abbey Road, too."
By which he means the gardens, the commissary and the pub. "On breaks, musicians can go there and have a pint or two and relax," he says. "It makes for a more musical kind of event as opposed to other studios that eschew the notion of drinking and smoking. Then it feels more like a factory, like it's an industry and you go to work, record and go home. I'm sure Beethoven and Mozart didn't sit around and eat low-fat diets and practice yoga and abstain from alcohol."
Back in Studio One, conductor Mercurio has finished rehearsing the choir and everybody gathers for another take. Titus returns to Rome. The carnival strides along. The strings are rich and brilliant. And, on cue, the choir barks.