Ambition vs. Reality When Writing Music for Media

Recently, John Williams gave an interview for the New Yorker and among many other things he hasn't worded like this before he also said:

"[...]What I can tell you is that these genuine, simple tunes are the hardest things to uncover, for any composer. When Elgar or Beethoven finally finds one—I hope you’ll pardon me if it sounds like I’m comparing myself to these people, but it might illustrate the point—in both cases, they understood what they had. Things that may seem more interesting, more harmonically attractive, don’t quite do the job. And so you end up—as a film composer, at least—not always doing what you initially set out to do. People assume it’s what you wanted to write, but it’s what you needed to write.” 

To me, it was very interesting to read that even he would formulate something like this as it very much illustrates a dilemma that many composers who work in the media world have to deal with and I have to admit that it is also one that I struggle with regularly.

All this knowledge and experience about the most minute details of music that you accumulate over years and years of hard study can be wiped away when meeting the reality of a client or a project forcing you to dumb down your music to something that at least feels to you like any first year composition student could have written in five minutes.

However, this whole subject touches on several issues at once.

There is the fact that with media music, we simply don't have the entire attention of the audience. About 75% of the attention is with the images so subtle things in the music will be lost. This forces us to write music that is more "on the nose". It's not enough to reference a theme with a reharmonized subtle version but you need to present it in a really prominent way. It will not work to use a theme that is hard to memorize or grasp but you need that catchy hook that makes it identifiable within seconds.

The other issue is that the general audience has a different demand on music than you as a music professional might have. Things that you feel are incredibly overused or cheesy might resonate very well with your audience or client.

After all, we write music that has to serve the purpose of supporting images. If you want to write music that you can use to explore all your ideas and capabilites, you should rather look for a career in the concert music world.

And yet, it can feel very frustrating when you need to step back from that really cool musical idea you just had because you realize it is just not what works in this context or if your client just keeps shooting it down.

But there's another statement in the quote above that is incredibly important: Achieving simplicity can be an incredibly advanced thing to do. It can be incredibly laborous work to uncover a melody or idea that feels like "it has been there forever" and even in cases where it doesn't feel challenging being able to come up with something like that might require all that super hard earned experience that you have in spite of you not really feeling like that. 

There is that one phenomenon that the more experienced you get in writing music the less you will "think" about it and simply follow all these sets of rules or musical vocabulary that you built up over the years. So your assessment of your own idea being "so pedestrian that any first year composition student could have written it" might simply not be true.

My personal approach is twofold. In projects that I don't find particularly challenging, I try to incorporate small details that will remain unnoticed by most people but "entertain" people who are more musically demanding and which of course also satisfy my personal music nerdism.

If time allows I always have a small personal side project that I can work on which allows me to challenge myself or explore things that I couldn't do in "regular" projects. Even though these projects often don't see the light of day or will never make it to any notable publicity, I still feel like they pay off in enjoyment that I get from them. 

But as I said above, it is not that I don't struggle with this general phenomenon from time to time. My most listened to commercially most successful tracks is one that I would consider as rather bland from the compositional side. Yet I have learned to accept that these personal assessments rarely play a role.