Category: music composition

Berklee College of Music and Electronic Arts (EA) Music announced the “Next Gen” scholarship program, which will provide an annual scholarship and mentorship to a woman or non-cisgender composer in the screen scoring department each semester in an effort to increase diversity in the field.

Through the mentorship program, the scholars will learn how EA Music leaders compose, orchestrate and arrange original scores for video games. EA Music’s portfolio includes EA Sports FIFA, The Sims and Madden NFL.

The scholarship signals both the college’s and the digital interactive entertainment company’s commitment to increasing equity within the entertainment industry and screen scoring.

“Music composition is traditionally a very male-dominated sector, with a recent USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative finding that women currently represent only 1.7% of composers in screen music, and the gender ratio of male composers to female composers is 18.3 to 1,” said EA Music president Steve Scnhur in a statement. “We hope this partnership will provide the women who take part with an incredible learning opportunity and remind them of the variety of roles available to them in the video games industry.”

The first recipient will be announced at the inaugural “EA Day” at Berklee College this spring, which will feature guest speakers and EA Music executives.

“This is an exciting moment for the Screen Scoring Department and Berklee as a whole,” remarked department chair Sean McMahon in a statement. “We are constantly striving to provide the best possible education for our students to attain personal and professional success. With this scholarship and mentorship program, Berklee and EA Music will collaborate on a vital initiative that allows the selected women to succeed, learn, and enter the world of composing with support from one of the most forward-thinking companies in interactive entertainment.”

A medley of artists from Newfoundland and Labrador have landed five nominations for the 2023 Juno Awards. 

St. John’s band Fortunate Ones are nominated for contemporary roots album of the year for That Was You and Me. 

The Florian Hoefner Trio, led by a Memorial University professor, has been nominated for jazz album of the year for Desert Bloom.

Comedian Matt Wright is nominated for comedy album of the year for Here Live, Not a Cat. 

Graphic designer Jud Haynes is nominated in the album artwork of the year category for his design for Kubasongs by Kubasonics. 

And Susan Evoy, a teacher at St. Teresa’s Elementary and Waterford Valley High in St. John’s, is nominated for the teacher of the year award. 

For the sake of art

Evoy said she was thrilled to hear about the nomination.

“It was pretty unexpected. I was very surprised and pretty excited.” 

Korona Brophy, a member of the Celtic Fiddlers and a retired music educator, nominated Evoy for the award. 

To be nominated for this award, a teacher must have received at least one grant from music education charity MusiCounts, which provides schools with financial support to get new equipment and instruments. 

“It was nice for Korona to reach out and think of me, to think that I was worthy, I guess, of my nomination,” said Evoy.  

Evoy said she sees it as an opportunity to represent music teachers in Newfoundland and Labrador who are trying to make the best of their programs under challenging circumstances.

“I know a lot of teachers are having their time cut and they don’t have a lot of money for resources,” she said.

“So I think it is just good that the Newfoundland music teachers are getting the recognition.”

Evoy said the recognition means learning music is important. 

“I know people say like learning music helps math, learning music helps everything — I am a firm believer in just learning the arts for the sake of art.”

In addition to being a music educator, she has a long list of credits within the arts community of Newfoundland and Labrador. 

She’s a member of both St. John’s band Ouroboros and a covers band called 709, she does contract work, she works with Corner Brook artist Mark Bragg, and she’s on the board of both the Strong Harbour Strings and the Rotary Music Festival.

Another nominee, Bekah Simms, grew up in Newfoundland and studied at Memorial University. Now based in Toronto, she received a nod in the classical composition of the year category for Bestiary I & II. 

The Juno Awards take place on March 13 in Edmonton.

The following op/ed comes from Eamonn Forde (pictured inset), a long-time music industry journalist, and the author of The Final Days of EMI: Selling the Pig. UK-based Forde’s new book, Leaving The Building: The Lucrative Afterlife of Music Estates, is out now via Omnibus Press. 

There is a fabulous, possibly apocryphal, quote attributed to Nick Cave.

“I’m forever near a stereo saying, ‘What the fuck is this garbage?’ And the answer is always the Red Hot Chili Peppers.”

Which leads us to his latest fabulous set of quotes. In the January edition of his Red Hand Files newsletter, he responds to a letter from a fan, Mark from Christchurch in New Zealand, who tasked the ChatGPT bot writing some lyrics “in the style of” Nick Cave.

Cave wearily replies that he has been sent similar things since November when ChatGPT launched. He calls the Cave-esque lyrics “replication as travesty” and then really rolls his sleeves up.

“It could perhaps in time create a song that is, on the surface, indistinguishable from an original, but it will always be a replication, a kind of burlesque,” he says, arguing that “algorithms don’t feel and [d]ata doesn’t suffer” like true artists do in order to write their lyrics, calling what he does “a blood and guts business” that a machine can never come close to.

“What makes a great song great is not its close resemblance to a recognizable work,” he continues. “Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite. It is an act of self-murder that destroys all one has strived to produce in the past […] [T]his song is bullshit, a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human.”

There is a lot more and all of it is stirring and beautifully written, as one would expect from someone like Cave.

He was, however, talking as a lyricist reacting to AI-generated lyrics. If the best lyricists aspire to be poets, to always reach for something beyond, then AI-generated lyrics will always be found desperately lacking.

Cave is probably as withering and damning about AI-generated music, seeing it as a toothless, bloodless, pointless simulacrum.

But – and without wanting to provoke a Red Hand Files newsletter aimed at my head – is there still a certain place for a certain type of AI-generated music?

To answer that, we will have to separate out different kinds of music. Cave is coming at the debate, as he absolutely should, from the perspective of the profound power of music: music as a means of emotional explanation and human connection. His starting point is music as the apotheosis of art, but a) lots of music will fall pathetically short of such lofty expectations and b) not all music has to even try to achieve this kind of transcendence.

Indeed, following Cave’s artistic hierarchy argument, it overlooks the fact that a tremendous amount of human-written lyrics (not his) are absolute doggerel or insipid/mawkish nonsense. But that’s OK. And maybe, just maybe, AI could help improve the output of some of the shockingly bad lyricists out there who have publishing deals. (I will not name names, but there are thousands of them out there. You hear them every day.)

So AI could become a type of shuttering for terrible lyricists, holding up the feeble structure of the songs they have somehow thrown together without proper architectural rigour. AI might even become a total replacement for a pitiful lyricist whose work is beyond all help and hope. Is either result necessarily a bad one?

Setting lyrics aside, there is an argument that AI music composition does have its place. A small place, but a place nonetheless.

Doubtless composers will argue this is driving them out of work, but that depends on what the music is required to do. It’s not quite the MU trying to ban the synthesiser in the 1980s, but music can sometimes exist as a sonic space-holder that has no great artistic aspirations. It’s nothing more than the sound it makes.

We perhaps need to think of music as existing in two very different configurations.

1) Functional/utilitarian music

There to serve a distinct role where music is in the background and which only works when it is in the background. This is music that has no use, power or beauty outside of that specific use case. The music is there only to fill the silence. It is very distinct from library music which has a creative form of its own and can adapt to different use cases.

2) Artistic/aesthetic music

This is music written to connect with humans and to distil human emotion, capturing and expressing something that exists beyond words. At its apogee, this is the “blood and guts business” that Cave is actively engaged in. Sometimes it is gristle, but it is at least grasping for something more.

These two types of music could, as long as we understand the distinctions and how and where they can or should be deployed, co-exist.

The level of creativity/genius involved in the latter will never be replaced by machines. But the use contexts of the former are very different from the aesthetic underpinnings of the latter.

It is really a case of the split between music, on the one hand, as hyper-industrialised and, on the other hand, music as highly artisanal.

This, of course, should not give AI-generated music carte blanche to infiltrate DSPs as part of a terribly topical game of fraud.

Songwriters, who already feel they are being fleeced, belittled and erased in the digital age, might argue that AI music is not just taking food off their table, it’s taking the crumbs. And setting fire to the table. It’s the thin end of a miserable wedge for them.

But AI is not replacing them. It is (or it should) only be used to put up temporary aural wallpaper that is not dependent on skill, craft or art. No songwriter worth their salt would want to create music devoid of these attributes. This is music that is less “blood and guts” and more “bland and ruts”.

AI music is really just a new form, arguably even a lesser form, of Muzak.

Just as Muzak was a homonym, we therefore need a new name for this utilitarian sound to separate it out from the music that wants to stir or soothe your soul. For the sake of argument, let’s call it MusAIc.

Or, in a nod to Brian Eno and his experiments on Ambient 1: Music For Airports that he wanted to be “as ignorable as it is interesting”, we could name it Proxy MusAIc.

 Music Business Worldwide

EXCLUSIVE: Academy Award and 3x Emmy winner Bill Conti (The Right Stuff) has been tapped to pen the score for Roselli’s Way, a new biopic on Italian American pop singer Jimmy Roselli.

The film scripted by J.D. Zeik (Ronin) will watch as Roselli looks back on a career, in which he was forever the underdog in comparison to contemporary Frank Sinatra, among others.

Michael Besman, James Deutch, Roger Birnbaum and Mark Kimsey will produce for EMP Productions, along with Spike Seldin and Neil Jesuele of Remarkable Media, and veteran music exec and record producer Ron Fair, who will also serve as music supervisor. James Ivory and Stephen Dembitzer will serve as exec producers. A director is not yet attached to the project, though the casting search for its title character is now under way.

“The story behind one of the greatest voices of his era needs to be told,” Conti told Deadline. “Roselli’s life, though unknown is most compelling.”

Conti won an Academy Award for his The Right Stuff score in 1984, after securing Original Song noms for the films For Your Eyes Only and Rocky in 1982 and 1977, respectively. He’s scored more than 90 features in total, including such other notable titles as The Thomas Crown Affair, Necessary Roughness, Broadcast News and The Karate Kid. He also served as Musical Director for the Academy Awards for nineteen years and won his three Emmys for his work on the broadcasts.

The composer is repped by Final Cut Management.

This article contains spoilers.

Todd Field’s new, multi-Academy Award nominated feature film Tár is generating considerable commentary – and not a little controversy.

For some, its storyline allows for a timely exploration of intergenerational conflict concerning the value of Western art and artistic ethics. Others see it as a critique of cancel culture.

Still others think it epitomises the problematic representation of women and LGBTQI+ people in a traditionally male-dominated industry.

But I think it also shines a light on some of the social and political dynamics of the world in which it is set: the elite end of the classical music industry.

Power before the fall

Portraying the professional and psychological downfall of orchestral conductor Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett), the film depicts her as prone to abusive and grooming behaviours. Those behaviours, the film suggests, may have led to the suicide of a young former student (and possible love interest).

In interviews, Field has stated he created her character not to explore gender or sexuality, but rather power. The film could have equally been set, he suggests, in “a multinational corporation or an architectural firm. Pick your poison.”

But Field’s choice of setting supports his dramatic aim beyond merely providing it with an interesting backdrop.

The globetrotting level of the classical music industry at which Tár works has faced its own #metoo stories.

It is also characterised by especially high numbers of people drawn from private wealth and educational privilege – a situation some argue is only becoming worse.

Late in the film, we discover Tár is from much humbler stock. This informs her character more than we might first realise.

From the outset, the film gives us several clues about her true class identity. Her charitable foundation is named “Accordion”, after the decidedly non-elite instrument she happens to play. Despite living in a supremely stylish Berlin apartment, she feels more comfortable retreating to the bedsit she has refused to relinquish. She has impostor syndrome about whether all she creates is merely pastiche, if all her creative work is derivative.

Ultimately, we discover she was not born Lydia Tár, rather Linda Tarr. When she briefly encounters her brother, he tellingly remarks “you don’t seem to know where the hell you came from, or where you’re going”.

Tár is therefore not a “true” member of the elite level of artists she has fought so hard to join.

Although we initially see her being supported by colleagues who enable aspects of her toxic behaviour or choose to stay silent when they witness it, when things go public, she is unceremoniously dumped.

Ultimately she is not protected by the industry that promoted her, nor does she really know how to protect herself when it turns on her.

This is not the norm. The film names two real-life conductors (James Levine and Charles Dutoit) who also fell from favour owing to similar accusations of predatory sexual behaviour, but their downfalls occurred at the end of their careers, not, as here, at its apex.

Field’s film suggests Tár’s particularly swift and brutal downfall may be in part because she cannot fully access networks of patronage and privilege in the classical music industry.

In this world, personal and institutional power is still intimately tied up with class. Both can be made to serve the interests of wrongdoers and silence their victims.

Read more:
Classical music training and abuse cultures – we need to act now

From Mahler to Monster

There is one other dominating presence complicating the film’s narrative: the music. It is not for nothing Field chose a composition by Gustav Mahler, in particular his Symphony No. 5, for Tár to conduct.

At first glance, here is another artist who might be vulnerable to cancel culture. Mahler had his own history of manipulative behaviour, such as insisting his wife sublimate her own musical career to support his.

Much like Tár herself, the symphony can be characterised as self-aggrandising. As with all his symphonies, it is conceived on a colossal scale and is replete with self-quotations from earlier works.

And yet exposing the personal faults of the conductor and the composer is neither sufficient nor necessary to appreciate the resulting art. As German philosopher Theodor Adorno noted in an essay from 1932, we tend to avoid considering the measure of a conductor’s life off the podium when we watch them on it.

The film reminds us this tendency can come at a significant human cost, and we apply it unequally: depending on not just the identity but also the class background of the conductor themselves.

The film ends with Tár conducting a concert in an unnamed Southeast Asian country. No Mahler is to be found here. Rather, she conducts a program of music from the 2018 action role-playing computer game Monster Hunter: World.

This is not, I think, meant to be some kind of cruel joke (apart from the possible allusion to Tár herself in the title of the game) or a tasteless (and culturally patronising) dig at the expense of non-Western, commercially oriented, orchestral music. But computer game music carries little of the establishment prestige Western classical music does.

The film ultimately leaves it as an open question, but there is a hint that, away from the political machinations of the elite classical music industry, Tár might be able to reconnect with a more authentic – and less destructive – artistic and ethical persona.

Read more:
Tár – an exploration of the flawed musicians behind decadent music

Tár is in Australian cinemas now.

Felix van Groeningen’s 2018 sentimental biographical drama Beautiful Boy stars comedy actor Steve Carrell and indie film golden boy Timothée Chalamet as a father-son duo attempting to mend a fractured relationship stemming from the son’s substance abuse. Inspired by the works of John Lennon, writer Luke David adapted the books, Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction by David Sheff and Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines by Nic Sheff, into a critical success, despite an initial box office failure. 

Beautiful Boy is an emotional, harrowing and heartbreaking exploration of addiction and family values as the two concepts battle it out in an exhausting ordeal. The direction exercises masterful attention, with the stylistic choices of score and camerawork exploring the psychology of substance abuse. Chalamet’s performance as a struggling Nic Sheff garnered nominations for the actor at the Golden Globes, Screen Actors Guild Awards, BAFTA Awards and Critics’ Choice Awards. 

The source of inspiration for the movie’s title derives from rock and roll legend Lennon’s song ‘Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)’. Original author Sheff famously interviewed the Beatles rhythm guitarist and his partner multimedia artist Yoko Ono in the build-up to their senior album, Double Fantasy. This piece of work is a folk rock composition showcasing the couple’s relationship with one another and their child Sean Lennon, released in 1980. Lennon was murdered three weeks after its release, on Monday, December 8th, 1980, by Mark David Chapman. 

The album’s track ‘Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)’ was written and recorded as a tribute to their son Sean, who was born five years before the album’s release. During an interview (via Beatles Bible), Lennon expressed his intentions and approaches to the song to express his newfound love of being a father. “The joy is still there when I see Sean. He didn’t come out of my belly but, by God, I made his bones, because I’ve attended to every meal, and to how he sleeps, and the fact that he swims like a fish,” he shared. “That’s because I took him to the ‘Y’. I took him to the ocean. I’m so proud of those things. He is my biggest pride, you see.”

He added: “Well, what can I say? It’s about Sean. It’s self-explanatory. The music and the lyric came at the same time.”

Sheff’s book and van Groeningen’s film title are a tragic spin on this concept of a father and son bond, juxtaposing the initial innocence and wholesome love of Lennon’s song whilst still highlighting a ghost of that family love. The film demonstrates an older landscape of this dynamic, one that has been infiltrated with the struggles and pressures of youth on the son’s part, with the father attempting to view his son as the individual he is growing into to understand him. The issues of youth addiction emphasise the exterior weight of the situation, that when you love someone with an abusive habit consuming their life, it also consumes everyone around them. The struggle of a child is shared with their parent. 

Beautiful Boy contrasts Double Fantasy in posing something more dark, intense and emotionally grabbling but also something just as powerful and moving. Chalamet’s compelling performance anchors the film’s heart, focusing the narrative’s thematic values for audience engagement against the challenging editing and score composition. 

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