Lee Holdridge, like Bruce Broughton, writes colorfully orchestrated, melodically driven orchestral scores that are passionate, imaginative, and diverse and help us explore film and television with our ears and hearts. Although he is perhaps overlooked as one of the fine talents of the feature-film community, the television community – for which he has scored many movies – has honored him with five Emmys and numerous Emmy nominations. Holdridge is very much in his element with Americana-flavored pictures, such as “Call of the Wild” (1993) and “Buffalo Girls” (1995), as well as with such comedy/dramas as “Splash” (1984) and such epic adventures as “Into Thin Air: Death on Everest” (1997). One of his best scores – two hours of Celtic-influenced music – was written for the television miniseries “The Mists of Avalon” (2001). Your early years were spent in Haiti and Costa Rica. In that time, what exposure did you have to music? Well, basically, Costa Rica is where I really became aware of music. A lot of this was due to my dad’s students. My dad was a famous scientist. A lot of his scientific students played musical instruments, and they liked to get together to play chamber music. I loved listening to that as a kid. I started going to listen to the symphony orchestra in San Jose. I got fascinated by the violin and decided I wanted to learn to play it. So, at age ten, I got my hands on a violin and was able to track down Hugo Mariani, the conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra, whom I took violin lessons from. By the time I was twelve years old, I wanted to be a composer. I used to rewrite my violin exercises and play them for my teacher, and I was driving him crazy with that. I was saying, “It would be better if it goes like this.” Then my parents worked it out so that I could go to junior high school and high school in Boston and live with an uncle and aunt there and study music. That’s where I met Henry Lasker, whom I studied with. That’s how I launched myself. So I thank the conductor of the National Symphony of Costa Rica and my teacher in high school in Boston, Henry Lasker. These are two men who erally influenced my life and launched me on the path of composing. You seem to be heavily influenced by the classical masters. Yes, my first exposure to music was all-classical. I did not really listen to much pop music or jazz or anything like that until I got to the States. I mean, I knew Brahms long before I knew Chuck Berry. That was my influence, of course, because of the violin literature I was playing with the chamber orchestras. I loved that music, and that was really what I grew up with first. I think that it has played a really strong influence in my composing life ever since. Did you ever have aspirations to work in film music? How did it evolve into a career for you? When I thought of composing, I really only thought of composing orchestral music and music for the concert hall. The film-music idea didn’t come until I came to New York in the sixties and was studying music, which exposed me to the richness in a lot of the films that were shown in New York. I used to go to a theater called the Thalia and a theater on 42nd Street, and all they did was show European films or art films. I loved it. I would go to all the film festivals. I loved film as an art form. I was really drawn to directors and their styles and, of course, the music was a big part of it. I was knocked out by certain composers and how they would approach the film – I really saw it as an art form. In academic circles at that time, if you were composing film music, you were looked upon as though you were a prostitute. They had this very snobbish academic sort of old-school European attitude about it. But I met one man, Nick Flagello, who was a great composer and a great teacher, and had actually worked on films as an orchestrator and an arranger, and he talked to me about technique. I just knew that that was the future – it’s definitely an art form, and, of course, it has become one of the most important twentieth-century art forms in music. Your work outside of films, such as your Scenes of Summer, has heavy imagery. Although this work speaks for itself, what is your canvas when writing a classical piece versus a motion picture? It varies. With Scenes of Summer I had a little bit of a program idea in the back of my head as I composed the piece. But with a piece like my violin concerto, I didn’t; I just simply composed. It varies from piece to piece. With some of my concert works, I will think of something. With some I won’t – I just will start with an idea and pursue it. Imagery is important to me, but I definitely could go to the road of pursuing an idea, seeing as far as I can go with it. I imagine that your schedules conflict. Is it difficult to find creative time for your concert works? No, it’s funny, it always sort of works out. I can’t explain it. It’s never been a conflict. I’ve always been able to do both very successfully. I might have a break between two films and I may manage to composer something during that time. Ideas come quickly to me. Once I get an idea, and once I get going, composing can movie rapidly for me. I sort of get hooked and I can’t put it down. The film scores are very demanding. They take a lot of time, and they take more time now because you have to play things for directors and rewrite things sometimes. You just do it. I just get it done somehow and then find that I can still do the other. It all just seems to fall into place. You’ve also composed many television scores. How do these projects differ from a major motion picture, and does either pose bigger challenges for you? Well, I have the attitude that you write for film and that’s it. Whether it’s a large screen or small screen, the challenges are: How do you score it? What do you say with the music? What role is the music playing in the scene? In that sense, it’s a dramatic art form, however you approach it. You should always think of it that way. Obviously, in a film, you have an audience in a theater. They’re there for a couple of hours. They’re not going anywhere. You’re aware that you could take advantage of that in terms of taking time to say something. On television, the time is shorted because the programs are limited in their timespan, so you have to say things quickly. But I think the attitude you should go in with is that you are scoring a film, period, and you should just look at what is going to be the best thing for the scene in question. Almost all of your work is thematic or lyrical, such as the love theme from “Splash”. Do you focus on thematic material as a basis of your scores? Not always, no. I mean… I think in a lot of cases, yes. Very often the producers who have hired me say, “We want a strong theme, something memorable.” So that’s an important influence. But it varies. Listen to my score to “Into Thin Air”. It has a lot of orchestral non-thematic material. Although there are a couple of motifs that occur from time to time, there are a lot of cues that have no connection with the theme at all and are just written as incidental music. They’re on their own, so to speak. I think if you listen to a wide variety of my scores, you will definitely hear the strong theme idea, which I love, but you will also hear a lot of stuff that is not thematic, but is written purely as texture. How do you come about making that decision? I’m influenced by the film and the director’s directions. When you’re composing for film, you really start with a blank page every single time, because every film is different. No two are the same, and they’re going to take you down different roads. What worked in a scene in one film will not work in a seemingly similar scene in this film because there’s something different about it. So you have to start over each time, and you sort of need to empty your mind and refresh it and say, “Okay, what’s going to work for this? What seems to feel good?” You just have to sit there and play things against the film and start to get a feeling for what seems to feel right. That’s what influences you. It just depends on the scene. Maybe a theme seems intrusive. Maybe something more minimalist might work? It just depends on what you think seems to be hitting the right kind of groove. In “Tuskegee Airmen”, there is the dramatic underscore and military motifs, but what provide the unique voice is the horn arrangements. There are moments of discord that give you an unsettled feeling, yet they evolve into a beautiful melody. I love that score. That’s a very full, dramatic score. The story so moved be because I thought about these men who, against incredible odds – not only racially, but in general – just had to excel to such a degree in order to fight for a country that was basically prejudiced against them. Every scene in that movie is based on a true incident that happened to one of the Tuskegee Airmen. These men hung in there and kept going and became brilliant flyers and excelled so much in the war effort, and I wanted to tell that story in the music, too. I wanted to say that there was the military, and there were the emotions: the leaving home, the losing buddies, the conflicts, the fears… I even delved into atonal music. In the scenes where they counted their first dogfights, the music becomes very atonal. And I used a lot of polytonal chords in the brass to talk about their conflicts. In the end, they persevered and accomplished a remarkable achievement given the odds that they faced. That story is in the film, but it is also in the score. Talk about what you mean in terms of polytonal and atonal. Polytonality is simply juxtaposing two keys against each other. It’s a fabulous thing, especially with low brass and with strings. You can really jar the listener, because now you’re forcing them to listen to completely different keys played simultaneously. Atonality is a serial technique where, instead of, let’s say, writing a C major scale, you create a row of twelve different tones, so there is no tonal center whatsoever, there’s no key. What I find it sometimes does in a film score is create a very unsettling feeling. I was trying to recreate the feeling that these guys would feel in their stomachs as they were realizing they were in their first dogfight. I wanted that sense of, “Oh, my gosh, what we’ve known before doesn’t exist anymore!” – that feeling of fear mixed with excitement. The director had made a suggestion to me about finding some device to create a change there, and that’s what I came up with. I thought it worked great because it just kind of robs you of all reality at the moment. “Old Gringo” is a passionate, epic score that is rich with Mexican melodies beautifully intertwined with Americana color. How much of an impact did this score hold for you, giving you a chance to go back to your roots? It was tremendous. I loved working on that score because I did go back to my roots, growing up with a lot of Latin American music around me and a lot of classical Spanish music as well. I had an interesting time with that film because there were three main characters. I had a theme for each character. You especially get a taste of it in the opening sequence when the three themes are intertwined. I loved doing Westerns. I love that big, sort of panoramic, epic kind of feeling. It’s always ideal for a composer because you really get to stretch out, so to speak. With “Old Gringo” I wanted a symphonic Mexican feeling. “Mists of Avalon” is a powerful and profound score that’s full of energy and emotion. How challenging was it to produce so much music for one story? Did it require a lot of research? Yes, that was quite an epic. The CD contains about seventy minutes of music, but I actually composed two and a half hours for that movie. When putting the CD together, I decided not to put in the battle cues, because we wanted to make it more of a listeners’ CD that was focused on moods and the emotional story and the story of the women. I wrote a ton of epic battle music that is very effective and very powerful in the movie. We skirted around the Celtic issue a little bit. I said, “I don’t want to do a Celtic score, I want other things in it.” So we reached out a bit; and one of the unique things we used was an Indian stringed instrument called an esraj, which has a beautiful, haunting, otherworldly sound. I thought about and worked on translating some of that sound into orchestral textures and using percussion and voices and the solo voice throughout the score. I thought it worked really well. It just created a giant mood throughout the entire film. I loved working on that score. From the moment when I devised that opening motif, the thing just sailed for me. It’s a ton of music, and I orchestrated every single note of it. I never stopped working. I worked seven days a week for, I think, twelve weeks straight, non-stop, until I literally got to the very last note. On a large production such as this, how do you begin, and what is your process throughout? The first thing you do is you watch the film two or three time. Then, what I like to do is put the film on and let it run as I start trying things out on my keyboards. It’s a mental process: I think about the film. I think about the imagery from it. What’s a good sound for this?? What’s going to work for that? Little by little, I start to find a kind of motif. “Mists of Avalon” started with that little harp motif that starts my prologue. That was the first thing that I saw when I thought about her as she was on the water. That motif sort of came out of that idea of gliding across the water. It was the germ that started the whole thing, and I just built from there. Once I have an opening idea and once I know where the beginning of a thing is, I find that I can just open the doors and the score kind of builds from there. That’s where having the classical background helps, because you know how to take something and develop it and build on it and extend it and vary it. And, I’m telling you, a miniseries where you’ve got to go for two and a half hours is like writing an opera. “Into Thin Air” is a powerhouse score that is regrettable overlooked. Nonetheless, it stirs many emotions in me, from anxiety to fear to solitude. Tell me about your experience with this score and describe your use of sounds – from bells to the rhythmic pulsing brass and percussion – in it. I wanted that score to be harsher, more edgy, more jagged, you know? It has a lot of percussive elements. I used the Tibetan gongs a lot to create that kind of strange ambience in places. I definitely played around with that in terms of the rocky landscapes and snow and the sense of being lost and not knowing where the horizon is. I wanted the score to kind of jar you a little bit with the sense of, “What are these guys doing to themselves?” They are throwing themselves into this environment that is completely hostile to them, and they are trying to master it. They have all these complex sets of rules they’re supposed to follow, but they wind up ignoring them, and nature – in the end – gets them. I wanted the score to have unpredictability. I used a lot of rhythmic and percussive tools to create that effect. Many of your scores have that Americana feel from “Buffalo Girls” to “Call of the Wild”, and they seem to flow from your pen effortlessly. Are you drawn to these stories? I’m drawn to these stories. My “East of Eden” miniseries is one of my most epic Americana pieces. I love that score. It’s a style that I find myself very much at home in, probably because I love American folk songs. I also love a lot of early American hymns. Many have been overlooked, but they have some great melodies. Every now and then, I've quoted one in a score. It’s a style that I like a lot and I am very drawn to. I never tire of writing in that style. To me it’s fresh every time. What score of yours do you hold nearest to your heart? It’s like asking a parent, “Which child do you like best?” The score you’re working on at the moment is the one you love the most because that’s the one you’re on fire with. When you finish a score, you go on to the next one, which sets you on fire because that’s the new score that you’re doing at the moment. And when you look back, you realize, “Oh gosh, I’ve done some wonderful scores,” and then you say, “Okay, some may have come out better than others.” Sometimes, the circumstances for this might not be of your own making: it may be the film or it may be the situation that you’re in or it may be the fact that you were given too many directions in the wrong direction. Overall, I look at the work that I’ve done and I feel very good about it. But I feel like a student. I always feel like there’s so much I don’t know and so much I need to learn. I find something often happens that is very humbling: You write a cue for a movie that you’re working on right now, and you say, “Oh boy, this cue is great! This really works, this is fantastic!” Then you take a break. You go out and you get into your car and run an errand. You turn on the radio and on your favorite classical station you hear one of the great masters. Suddenly you hear a piece by Richard Strauss and you say, “Okay, that’s how you’re supposed to write.” So, you’re always kind of being brought back down to earth. That’s good. I think that’s healthy. So I always feel, “Oh gosh, I can do this better. There’s got to be a better way.” But sometimes you just run out of time. We live with deadlines, and there’s a point where you just got to deliver. Well, I understand your humble point of view, but you are a master at what you do. I appreciate that. I try. Are there film composers who inspire you? Oh, yes, the classical film composers, of course. I’m a big fan of all the great masters, especially Erich Korngold, Franz Waxman, Max Steiner… I love all the great composers, Victor Young. They all did, I think, fabulous scores. One of my all-time favorite scores is “The Best Years of Our Loves”. First of all, it’s an incredible film, but the way the score works in the film, to me, is unbelievable. It is so magnificently done. In the more contemporary sense, I admire Jerry Goldsmith tremendously. I think he is one of the top film composers of our era because the span of his work is simply amazing. When you consider “A Patch of Blue” and “Chinatown” on one end of the spectrum, and then you go to the other end of the spectrum, to scores like “Patton” or “Planet of the Apes”, you say, “My gosh, look at the work this man has done!” I think he is one of the great icons of film composing. I admire many different types of scores. I admire the scores that Georges Delerue did for some of the early Truffaut films. I love those scores. They were like chamber scores – sometimes they were scored for like eight instruments or ten instruments. They were wonderful scores, very moody with great ambience. In more contemporary films, I admire some scores by Thomas Newman. I think he’s a wonderful composer.