If you musically blended equal parts Hans Zimmer and Mark Isham and an unknown X-Factor, you might get the mystical beauty of Jeff Rona’s music for “White Squall” (1996). With this score, Rona’s first solo effort for a major motion picture, he captured the film’s heart with a hypnotic, ethnic-music-influenced voice. But Rona had been composing film music for quite some time prior to this score, working as a ghostwriter and working with the two aforementioned talents, Zimmer and Isham, who would ultimately play a role in his rise to success. Rona has written highly engaging music for a long list of noted films, including “Black Hawk Down” (2001), “The Thin Red Line” (1998), and “The Fan” (1996), and such television shows as “Chicago Hope” and “Homicide: Life on the Street”. He also is the author of the insightful book Reel World, in which he shares his vast experiences in depth. (Reel World is not just a book about Rona – it covers every aspect of the film-scoring process, thus providing a great tool for anyone interested in pursuing a film-music career.) Have you always been interested in film music? It was never a particular interest to me growing up. How did your career evolve? I played the flute when I was in school. I started to do a little bit of writing only because the only thing worth doing was playing in the jazz band. I was thinking of being a jazz musician. There are no flute parts in big bands, so I would actually have the conductor’s score and would make up my own parts. And this led me to writing my own things. Then I started playing with synthesizers and got very into sound design and synthesizer playing. When I was at college, I came to practice one morning in the music building and found that somebody had posted a “Composer Wanted for Student Film” notice with this little strips of paper with a phone number at the end. It was on one of the bulletin boards spread out around the buildings to hold announcements of upcoming concerts and what have you. Assuming I was the first person there, because I got there very early in the morning, I went around the building and took all these ads down. So I was the only person who called, and I got the gig! It was a wonderful and eye-opening experience. That probably turned me toward thinking that this is something I might want to do, though I didn’t get into it more formally for quite some time. First, I became a studio synthesis “gun for hire”. I also was a part of Jon Hassell’s ensemble, which included album work and some touring, and I worked with a lot of record producers. But, by far, most of my projects were for film composers. I learned so much. Eventually they asked me, “Jeff, would you like to try ghostwriting some things?” I’d been writing concert music, working with dance companies, writing modern ballet, theater, and some more avant-garde things – concert music, you know, mostly useless crap. The opportunity to try my hand at doing a cue here and there got me going, and I’ve been doing it ever since. So where did your actual film career start? When someone actually paid me to write something! As I said, it started off with bits and pieces of ghostwriting, working without credit on films for other composers who were behind schedule or too busy. They’d say, “Look, I don’t really have time. Could you do this?” So it started where I’d do a cue here and there – those were the first bits and pieces of my filmwork. It was fun most of the time. It was all the joy of writing music for picture, but none of the responsibility: Your name doesn’t go on it, and you’re not in the room with the director when he says, “That’s the worst piece of crap I’ve ever heard!” But, in fact, I got to sit in on a lot of those meetings, a fly on the wall. They were as important as the work in a lot of ways. I was seeing the politics of film music with people who had been through those minefields before. Those days were my film-music education as well as my start as a working composer. From a few cues here and there, I got more and more calls to write. Before I could put my name to the scores, there were some films and TV shows that were scored entirely by me anonymously. Around that time I met Hans Zimmer, and I did some synth programming and sound design for him. He was just getting popular and very busy, and he called on me to write a few additional music cues, but not as a ghost, for a Barry Levinson movie called “Toys”. That led to me scoring Barry’s next project, a television series called “Homicide: Life on the Street”. From there I began steady scoring for both film and television. “White Squall” has a unique approach. It almost seemed New Age in style to me. Was this intentional? “White Squall” was my first large feature film. I was a huge fan of director Ridley Schott, who had a pretty open mind about the music, and he helped steer me in the right direction. Celtic folk music had a significant influence on that score, though it was by no means an ethnic score. There was a lot more going on there. The main theme of the score is harmonically very simple and very open in its orchestration. But if you listen carefully, it doesn’t fit into the category of New Age music, which I’m not too fond of myself. It’s more layered and textural. You became a composer for the hit television show “Chicago Hope”. How did this happen? Mark Isham and I are friends, and I had worked with Mark on a couple of his films, “The Net” and “Fire in the Sky”. We hit it off, and I really admired his craft and methods. Although he’s much more into jazz than I am, we still found ourselves seeing a lot of things the same musically. Mark was asked to write a theme for a new pilot from producer David E. Kelley called “Chicago Hope”. David had liked something Mark had done. Mark approached me and said, “Look, I’m going to write this theme and pilot, but why don’t you help me with it? Maybe you could just keep going with doing the series.” I had just finished working with Barry Levinson and wanted to do another television project, so I ended up working on that show for the first few seasons. I did some films during that same time. In the projects you worked on with Mark Isham, such as “The Net”, how much of a role did you play? Like other projects that I’ve done with Mark, “The Net” started off with Mark saying that I come up with really interesting palettes of sound, electronically. I have a particular style with the way I program sounds. He said he was doing this thriller, but he’s not as technically savvy as I am, so maybe I would help him put together some cool sounds. And then he just ran into the time crunch that comes up frequently with composers. He said, “Here are a couple of cues.” He had already written some themes, so we started with that, and then I wrote some pieces for a big orchestra and an all-female choir. Going back to your work with Hans Zimmer, tell me about your work on “The Power of One”. On “The Power of One”, I just helped do some arrangements. There were some very complicated scenes. For example, there was a prison camp scene in which the prisoners start singing a song – and this song has to become scored. Then Morgan Freeman gets the crap beat out of him while they’re still singing. It turned out to be beyond complicated. It was poorly planned. It was a simple scene, but it required, at the time, some of the tools we have now to time-stretch and fit singing recordings to pictures. So it was me, just doing unnatural acts to the audio to make it musical. It was not a very creative thing. It was just arranging. I believe that you played a larger role in “The Mothman Prophecies”, although you are not credited as the composer. Talk about this picture. By this time, I was no longer assisting other composers on their films, but doing my own projects, plus a few collaborative scores, such as “Exit Wounds” with hip-hop producer Grease, “Shelter Island” with Michael Brook, and “A Thousand Roads” with Lisa Gerrard. I also contributed music – as additional music – to such films as “Traffic”, “Gladiator”, “The Thin Red Line”, “Black Hawk Down”, and “Mission: Impossible 2”. In these cases, I wrote my own thematic ideas that became elements of those scores. In the case of “Mothman”, Mark Pellington, the director, had already hired the writing team of tomandandy for the score. He had worked with them on his previous film, “Arlington Road”. But some of my music had made it into the temp. Claude Letessier, a friend of mine, was the sound designer on the film, and he had a very heavy role in the overall architecture of the soundtrack, sound effects, and music. Everything to do with sound passed through him in a really unusual way, with him integrating music and effects together and manipulating everything rather abstractly. Pellington had really responded to some of these pieces that I had written and licensed them into the score. In the end, they used around eighteen cues of mine in the film, including the opening title music and the whole ending sequence of the movie. Actually, tomandandy took a whack at replacing my music and they just couldn’t, because their approach is somewhat different from mine. There’s a couple of their cues in the movie that quote my pieces, if you know what I mean. I think they did a terrific job on their score. So why weren’t you credited for that? My name is at the end of the movie as “additional music: because the music was licensed and not written as a “work for hire” – it was music I had already written for myself, plus a few I adapted for the film. At the end of any movie, the licensed music is put in a separate section of the credits, just as the songs as credited. Since I am the publisher of my music in “Mothman”, it must be credited as such legally. So I appear several times in the credits, plus several of those pieces were used many times. “Net Force” is another score in which you take a technological approach. “Net Force” was a television movie based on a Tom Clancy novel. Rob Lieberman is a talented director, and he let me do my own thing. The plot was a lot of pseudo-American patriotic drivel, but that’s Tom Clancy. It gave me a chance to pusher harder on some of my electronica work. I worked with Rob again on the theme and pilot for the series “The Dead Zone”, and we did a very high-end television project called “Earthsea”, which was done with full orchestra, choir, and a lot of Middle-Eastern and Celtic players. So I’ve gotten to cover some range with Rob. What is your most prized work? I usually love whatever I’ve done most recently and tend to forget about the rest. I’m very proud of the “Homicide” series because we completely broke the mold of how television music is made and sounds. What we did was like nothing that existed up to then, and I really enjoyed being given the invitation to innovate and work with a brilliant guy like Barry. I’m very proud of the work I did on “White Squall”. It was the first time I was able to do my own thing with an orchestra. Ridley is an amazing director. I’m also very proud of the music I contributed on the film “Traffic”. I think a lot of my soul is in that film in one way or another. I liked the music I did for “Black Hawk Down”. There’s a good chuck of my music in that score. That film was scored as a group effort. Producer Howard Koch hired me on his first television film, “The Riverman”, and I got to do a very contemporary, moody score for him. I only had a few days to do that score, but it came out very well. If you had to choose a score or composer that influenced you most, who would you say it was? That would be really tough. Music is so deep and varied and personal. I have a lot of influences and inspirations. In college, my roommate was a rabid film-music collector who had a huge collection of film scores. He introduced me to film music. One score in particular, because I was so into synthesizers at the time, was the score by Jerry Goldsmith to “Logan’s Run”. It had orchestra and very cool, weird, old-style synthesizers. I was so blown away by that. It had elements of the avant-garde, but still had elements of deep emotion and excitement. I also loved Jerry’s score to “Alien”. A bit later, I saw “Never Cry Wolf”, Mark Isham’s first film score. It was a very different approach to film music – simplicity. Now, if you want to talk about New Age, that’s the one. But I had never heard a film score done so sparsely. I just adored that. There are other composers I really admire and whose work has inspired me. Zimmer on some things, Tom Newman, John Williams, Mychael Danna, Philip Glass, Danny Elmfan, Zbigniew Preisner, and anyone who finds a way to maintain a truly original voice in the cause of scoring films. I am probably as influenced as anybody by Bernard Herrmann and his use of repetition as a method for creating tension. He’s the father of minimalism, yet it never shows on the surface. He showed that if you came up with something really good, you could repeat it and it would just grow in your mind. He could keep a theme going for five minutes, yet it always remained brilliant and full of tension. His score to “Taxi Driver” – my God! I hear every composer relate to his or her work to Bernard Herrmann. One way or another it always comes back to him. He was, back in his day, the forties and fifties, the guy who broke away from the romantic classical music – the Waxman- and Korngold-style scores. He wrote truly modern music. In fact, it was somewhat avant-garde at the time. He was the first guy to dismiss the overwhelming lexicon of musical thought for film in his day. He turned the tide of film music to allow it to do more modern, interesting things. “The Day the Earth Stood Still” is another stunning score of his. You’ve also written a book on being a composer, The Reel World. What was the purpose of writing that book? In addition to my work as a composer, I’ve always been deeply involved in the technology of music-making and sound. I have been the “go-to” guy for a lot of my friends and other composers. Some time back, I was asked to write a column of film music for Keyboard Magazine, a very popular musicians’ magazine. It became a semi-regular column in which I would relate my personal experiences, almost like a diary of my musical life in the trenches of film music. I would talk about how things would go well, as well as how things would sometimes go badly. After having written numerous articles on the art, craft, business, technology, and politics of the field, my publisher approached me with the idea of doing a book. We gathered up all my columns and went through them picking out the best ones. Because they spanned about five years, I realized that my thoughts and opinions changed over time, as did the technology that made the work possible, so I ended up using the topics I’d written about as a springboard, threw all the articles away and started all over. I wrote the book nearly from scratch, and I interviewed several of my composer friends – Mark Isham, Hans Zimmer, James Newton Howard, John Williams, Carter Burwell – as well as some recording engineers, my agent, a top music editor, and the head of music at a major studio. It has every perspective. You played an important role in developing MIDI. What is it, and what were your contributions? After I quit college to pursue music, I did a variety of music jobs: I was a staff arranger for a major music publisher, a synth programmer, an accompanist for a dance company, and much more. But I was always really into music technology. At one point, I worked for a few years for one of the major electronic instrument makers. I helped them develop new electronic-instruments and write music software – a very new field at the time. I’ve never been trained technically in software writing. In fact, I only got Ds and Fs in math, but I needed a job and, for some reason, I had an aptitude for writing software code. So I lied about my background and got a job doing it. I happened to be working at this company the year that a group of talented and forward-thinking engineers from different synthesizer companies came up with the idea of a universal method that would allow any electronic instrument to plug into any other electronic instrument. This would allow the instruments to be interconnected in order to layer sounds together and to perform them into new recorders called “sequencers” and have them play back into your performance perfectly. All the things we take for granted now didn’t exist yet. And it’s not that far back! Back then, there were competing technologies that weren’t compatible with one another. So I got involved with that group of amazing engineers to develop this idea of a universal, industry-wide method – MIDI. They had started the technical aspect before I got onto the scene. When I got involved, they had the idea, but needed to figure out how the whole competitive business could function together as a single group. I became the person who brought the entire world of musical instrument development together for a number of years in order to facilitate the communication, cooperation, and development of all aspects of MIDI. I spearheaded everything to get Japanese, European, and American engineers to work together to define where MIDI needed to go and solve any conflicts or problems from the early days to its rapid worldwide acceptance and success. I created the structure of how the worldwide developer community could interact in a way where everybody felt that they could do what they wanted to do. It protected everyone’s investment in technological growth and product marketing, which are vital elements to making a standard a standard. I think we were incredibly successful. Even after I quit programming to work as a composer and musician, I kept doing this because it was important, vital work. Where do you plan on taking your career? What are your goals? I am doing my own films and television projects now. I am also collaborating on some score with Lisa Gerrard. I continue to develop myself musically. I make every score a challenge to do things better. I have a lot of musical ideas that I’m just trying to bring into better focus. I want to improve myself as a musician and a composer. I want to find the right kinds of films and directors that will allow me to do as much creative thinking as possible. I just want to have my voice heard and hone that voice, which is a lifelong ambition. It never ends. There is no destination, just the path. You just enjoy the journey.