Philosophy
"When you look at a composer doing one specific style, you’re looking at how well they can do their own thing, but when you look at a composer doing various contrasting styles, you’re looking at how well they’ll be able to do your unique thing.
Meaning they’re sourcing inspiration from the film itself as opposed to what they’ve done in the past, which leads to a less generic,
more tailored score – and film, ultimately."
-Tai Schiavo (Interview with Canvas Rebel)
Film Music as
subconscious communication
"I thought I had it all figured out in college, as most college kids do I guess – people liked my music and I thought I was ready for Hollywood. As a musician, when you grow up, you study music, and you can get great at that, but writing music for film is an entirely different beast. The music isn’t coming from your mind, it's coming from the picture. Each film I’ve worked on has taught me several invaluable lessons in filmmaking that I’ll take with me for the rest of my career.
I developed a sensitivity for lighting, and color, and small fleeting expressions of actors, how to handle different shots, bridge scenes, what to emphasize and what to disguise. Learning how to handle different situations on-screen is what I think separates a composer from a film composer.
Writing the score for Terroir taught me a ton – it was inherently challenging being a horror/comedy film because all of the horror elements had to fit under the tonal umbrella of the comedy genre, like it couldn’t actually be scary. Aside from tonal genre-nesting, a big thing I learned while writing the score for Terroir was how to write dense suspenseful clusters with specific undertones.
Tying in [creative purity (see below)], I didn’t just want to consciously choose notes to rub up against each other, I thought that would fail to capture the unique flavor of the suspense in different moments. Instead, I watched the spot in the film over and over again until a single note jumped into my mind. I’d write that note down, then repeat the process until no more notes jumped into my mind. In the end, I was left with a unique cluster chord.
Because I didn’t consciously choose the notes, I allowed what was happening on-screen to enter my subconscious as a feeling, and then present itself to me as a unique combination of notes. This allowed for moments of suspense in the film to be flavored with undertones of a horrific discovery, a comedic fakeout, or a character having a last-second idea.
The most interesting part is that sometimes I’d end up deriving a combination of notes I could label as an existing chord. From then on I never chose a chord, I had to feel it first."
-Tai Schiavo (Interview with Canvas Rebel)
Creative Purity
"The biggest turning point in my creative life was sparked by a single lesson I had to unlearn, sprung about by a conversation I had with James Newton Howard.
In my last year at Berklee, I went on the annual film scoring industry trip to Los Angeles. On the last day of the trip, we visited James Newton Howard, the composer of many scores including The Dark Knight (in collaboration with Hans Zimmer), The Hunger Games films, and The Sixth Sense – and who dropped out of college to orchestrate for Elton John.
He talked us through some challenging moments in scores he wrote, and happened to casually mention one thing that echoed in my head – he spoke about a moment in a film that had ambiguous emotional implications, and he supported that in the score with what he called a 'nebulous harmony.' This implied a choice beyond what harmony to use, to how clearly a harmony should be stated, whether that be by omitting certain notes or adding other notes to pull the sound in uncertain directions.
At the time, I couldn’t believe what he was saying. It was like telling me that beyond choosing what color and style of house you want, you could choose how many walls held it up. The concept he described was like racing half a Ferrari with seven wheels.
Before we left, I asked him what on-screen would compel him to write a “nebulous harmony,” and he described the choice of harmonic clarity as regular as the choice of harmony itself. This made it painfully clear to me that I was seeing music in two dimensions when it could be seen in three. It was like I was previously working with harmony in choices of color, darkness, and brightness, and now unlocking the choice of transparency.
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The lesson I had to unlearn was that there doesn’t need to be a clear harmony in every moment of music – or even any harmony at all. This realization happened to coincide with a point in my life where I was dissatisfied with my writing on a fundamental level, and inspired me to deconstruct my writing and strip it down to the most foundational component – melody. Since then, I haven’t written a note of music down that I couldn't first hear clearly in my head.
I’ll cut the story here, but after two painful months of deconstructing and reconstituting my creative process, I began to notice creative purity so clearly in highly regarded art of all forms. Creativity that didn’t have any logical or theoretical crutches, sprung about directly from the subconscious that speaks to the subconscious. I finally found an answer for why myself and many others are drawn to the music of The Beatles. This is the foundation of what I used to teach my students back when I taught, and what I’d write a book on if words were my thing.
This gave me tremendous insight into the essence of making a film, and how to write music to speak directly with the viewer’s subconscious."
-Tai Schiavo (Interview with Canvas Rebel)