Debbie Wiseman on composing for film and TV

Music for film and television is, as Debbie Wiseman MBE puts it, something that's often taken for granted.

Like other aspects of sound, and indeed visual effects, music is something that can, and perhaps sometimes should, slip into the back of the audience's awareness, but which nonetheless demands a skillset considered specialist even by composers working outside the field of screen entertainment.
 

Debbie Wiseman


Wiseman enjoyed promising beginnings, training in the junior department of the Trinity College of Music, and then at Guildhall. Thereafter, success came from the conventional approach of sending out demonstration material and receiving a response from an interested director.

With credits since the early 80s, Wiseman describes her career as "a slow progression [where] every project helped", although she cites 1997's Wilde as "an important film - I did get a lot of approaches, and Warriors [in 1999] was probably the TV equivalent."

At Guildhall, Wiseman studied particularly under the late Buxton Orr, who she describes as "a fantastic composition teacher". Orr, who had trained as a medical doctor before entering music, was known for scoring horror and psychological thrillers and preferred to produce complete orchestrations himself, without the assistance of an orchestrator.

Composing (but not recording) in her home studio, Wiseman has adopted this approach - "it's one hundred per cent me" - but considers conducting the final recording "the best bit - it's a feeling of completion."

As with many composers, the temporary tracks favoured by editors (and directors, while in the edit), aren't a favourite, risking a dictation of what the music should be, as opposed to allowing the composer free reign. Says Wiseman, "I doubt many composers would ever say they love a temp track - if they're saying that they're being diplomatic. I prefer a blank canvas, I like looking at a scene, I don't like being influenced in that way."

Perhaps the most direct solution to the temporary music issue is to compose demonstration music based on a script and discussion with a director, before shooting, as was the case with Peter Kosminsky (Warriors): "we'll talk early enough that he'll know just from a script what sort of music he'll like, that he'll listen to, perhaps even on set as he's shooting - that to me is an absolutely ideal way of working." The same technique was used for 2014's A Poet in New York, where a theme to represent the Dylan Thomas character was composed "before she [director Aisling Walsh] even shot a frame of picture - they took that theme away and they used it as temp music. You're not influenced by anything other than the script and the story, which is the most truthful way to start."
 

A Poet in New York A Poet in New York

But ultimately, "coming up with a theme can take a matter of moments. The technique is shifting and adapting to create that moment to respond to what's going on on screen." Conducting while watching a monitor showing specially-prepared version of the production, often with graphics to help the conductor accurately time the music to moments of action, is a special skill: "we take these things for granted when we go to the cinema or watch TV but those sort of  moments are som