The Big Apple offers composers an appealing alternative to its flashier left coast cousin.
To a director, location is everything – particularly if you’re going to pick up and move everything to that cantankerous but often rewarding locale of New York City. To a composer, however, location is an afterthought. Yet, woven into that afterthought is a complex set of reasons as individual as their compositions that keep several of Hollywood’s most eclectic composers anchored in the East. By insistently placing themselves outside the “bubble” of the Los Angeles industry, these composers echo the statement made by the independent film revolution: If you want originality, look outside the system.
“Being here wasn’t a conscious thing,” says composer Howard Shore (“Analyze This”, “Dogma”), who moved from Toronto in 1975 to work on “Saturday Night Live” and never left, even after he reinvented himself as David Cronenberg’s film composer. “By now, I’m connected to New York and the great cultural diversity that is here. Just to be able to go regularly to the Metropolitan Opera, to be that close to it so puts me in the right frame of mind for writing music.”
Composer Elliot Goldenthal (“Titus”, “The Butcher Boy”), says he’s found a perfect fit for his style of music by incorporating New York’s quirks. “A lot of my music is very demanding, and New York musicians spend their days playing Stravinsky and Mahler and Beethoven. Musicians in L.A. spend 90% of the time playing commercial music. They’re perfectly able to play complex compositions ... but in New York, there’s less stretching of muscles to access difficult pieces. New York musicians are already in tune with what I want.”
Carter Burwell (“O Brother, Where Art Thou?”, “Mystery, Alaska”), like Shore, more or less fell into composing, scoring the Coen brothers’ films, among others, but echoes Goldenthal’s admiration for the quirks in the system. “I find an interesting amalgam of musicians here who are well off the commercial mainstream radar. They’re not really session musicians – they’ve developed peculiar individual styles and approaches to musical problems that I like.”
As the arguably dominant trinity of major film composers who base themselves in and around New York, Shore, Goldenthal, and Burwell would appear to form the framework of a legitimate scene of composers who refuse to adhere to the rules set up by the West Coast. But all three deny that any real sense of “scene” exists in New York. For one thing, notes Burwell, “Composers tend to be people who just work by themselves. I probably have a social moment with another composer twice a year.”
Lonely lot or no, however, New York’s film composers express almost uniformly warm thoughts toward the city, praising the diversity of the musicianship, the unique sound quality found in the oft-used Manhattan Center (originally built by Oscar Hammerstein I in the early 1900s and sometimes used as a convention ballroom when not booked for recording), and the sheer pleasure of being surrounded by culture without drowning in industry. “I feel like I’m lucky to be able to stay and work here,” says up-and-coming composer Edmund Choi (“Wide Awake”, “The Castle”), currently under contract with Miramax. “Right now it benefits me to be here in case Harvey Weinstein needs me, but I have family here and I like the vibe of New York.
“Los Angeles is a very interesting city, but it’s bubble land,” he continues. “You live in your own little bubble, you drive in a bubble to another bubble at work. In New York, you can at least pop out your head and see different people, and that feeds me from an emotional and mental point of view.”
But not everything is so rosy: Composers for TV series have seen their jobs farmed out internationally more and more over the past few years, as viewership has fragmented and budgets have gotten slashed. “It’s a business here, but it’s not a big business, and it’s getting smaller every day,” sighs Shelly Palmer, president and creative director for Palmer Intermedia, who composes for TV ads and shows such as “Spin City”. “The commercial production industry is already over – anybody who tells you they’re in the jingle business is just lying. The state of the business in New York is somewhat under-whelming because the dollars just aren’t there. It’s such a small amount of work available for the money, and it forces you to look in other areas.”
And many have. Brian Keane (PBS’ “New York: A Documentary Film”, “Babe Ruth”) scores for television most of the time, contributes to occasional features and also produces records. But Keane says he likes working on the East Coast because “they’re less corporately influenced here. L.A. tends to be slavish to corporate interests, and the New York musicians’ scene is much better from the standpoint of diversity and innovation. Innovation is not one of L.A.’s assets.”
Composer John Morris (“Blazing Saddles”, “Stella”), who currently scores “The Lady in Question”, Gene Wilder’s series for A&E, agrees. “There’s a sameness to California. Some of the happiest moments of my life have been working for PBS in New York. Those shows wouldn’t be done in California.”
Still, even those who extol the virtues of the Big Apple confess that it lacks one major component: recording space. “In the last couple of years, we’ve been screaming our heads off for recording spots,” explains Emile Charlap, a music and orchestra contractor. According to Charlap, there are only three major places for an 80- to 90-piece orchestra in New York. For a slightly smaller orchestra, there are approximately six locations, and below that, perhaps a hundred or more. “We have a real lack of space for a large orchestra.”
On a different level, most composers grumble over the high cost of hiring musicians. “Sometimes [unions] price themselves out of existence,” notes John Corigliano, a symphonic composer and occasional film composer (“The Red Violin”, “Revolution”). “Only a few orchestras can afford to record in this country.”
Goldenthal agrees. “There’s a lot of scoring going on in London because of the union situation. Sooner or later, the unions are going to have to confront the situation when they find they’re losing too much work. The London orchestras are booked like crazy, and they’re going to get more and more work that takes away from both the L.A. and New York musicians. I’m not anti-union, I’m pro-compromise, because I like to see musicians keep working – and keep working here.”
Between the lack of space and high union fees, composers have discovered that even if you live and score in New York, you don’t have to record here. Few, if any, composers score and record exclusively in Manhattan, even when they call it home. “There have been tremendous leaps in communication – from FedEx to the Internet,” notes Keane. “Now, from the standpoint of convenience, it’s less convenient to drive across the horrendous traffic of Los Angeles to a composer’s studio than it is to get an MP3 file over the Internet into your edit room.”
Even newcomers recognize that permanent relocation can be made to a city of preference, and recording and scoring can be done on a where-needed basis.
“Once you reach a certain level, you could really be anywhere,” says Ryan Shore (“The Living Room Waltz”, “Vulgar”), who moved to New York to work with his uncle, Howard, “as long as you have a fax machine, a phone, FedEx, and an airport nearby.”
The global reach of composing hasn’t been entirely absorbed by the industry, yet composers such as Burwell recognize that they may have lost out on some jobs because they aren’t in the thick of things. There is a plus, however “The up side is that I don’t waste my time going to a lot of those coffees and meetings with directors, and usually the people who come all the way across the country to find me – I usually think it’s because they’re serious about my work,” he says.
And there’s always the flip side to those die-hard New Yorkers who venture forth to record their compositions in cheaper, more spacious venues such as Melbourne, Australia, or Los Angeles: the occasional L.A.-based composer who prefers New York. David Robbins (“Cradle Will Rock”, television’s “Everything That Rises”) grins that he comes East to score his brother Tim’s films because Tim refuses to go West, but adds that there’s nothing like the energy of New York City. “I have an affinity for that kind of connection. In Los Angeles, if you get the same cronies together every time, there’s a little more of them controlling you than you controlling them. I worry about that less in New York – I can throw together different sets of musicians from different areas, who know each other but haven’t necessarily worked together, and that’s very refreshing.”
Another convert to the East? Quite possibly so. In this day and age, with today’s technology, there’s no reason why location has to be an afterthought any more. “For whatever I’ve done in New York,” notes Robbins, “New York has been just perfect.”