The Composer Connection

Composers Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch (All of Us Strangers, Living, H is for Hawk, Censor, Rocks) and Roger Goula (Sense and Sensibility, Everybody Digs Bill Evans, All That Breathes, The Hard Stop) sit down together to talk about how their scores actually get made.

Emilie explains why she tests her first notes by asking whether the character would hear them in their own head, how three cellists, each detuned differently, pulled off the heavy scordatura on H is for Hawk, and why a run of films about grief became a kind of therapy she got paid for.

Roger explains why Elinor is a solo violin and Marianne a voice in Sense and Sensibility, how a soft upright he tried between takes at a period-piano session was bought online the next day and carried into Air Studios, and how he scored a film about the world’s greatest jazz pianist with no piano and no jazz, building Everybody Digs Bill Evans from a deconstructed double bass.

Along the way: why British audiences laugh in the wrong places, the home demo that beat the studio recording into the final film, why piano is the hardest instrument to record, and the film school tutor who called it all alchemy.

GUESTS

Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch: website · Instagram

Roger Goula: website · Instagram

The Composer Connection brings two screen composers together for an unguarded conversation about the craft. New episodes every month.

Made by Outlier Creative - a content house for screen music. We work with composers, libraries and publishers on video, campaigns and press.

The Composer Connection brings two screen composers together for an unguarded conversation about the craft. New episodes every month.

Made by Outlier Creative - a content house for screen music. We work with composers, libraries and publishers on video, campaigns and press.

Composers Chris Roe (Bad Apples, The Salt Path, Trigger Point, After Love) and Paul Saunderson (Earth, Human, Evolution, Trying, Fightland) sit down together to talk about how their scores actually get made.

Chris explains how Bad Apples arrived as a log line with a Bartók reference attached, why he built the score around recorders, baritone sax and a tubax only two people in London can play, and how an iPhone recording made by a flautist at home survived into the final mix.

Paul explains how a library album he recorded in Studio One at Abbey Road ended up getting him the BBC's Earth, why the strings on Human are all cellos and basses with hardly any violas, and how a single day in a percussionist's flat became the rhythmic toolkit for an entire series.

Along the way: the E-Bow accident that set the sound of Trigger Point, salt poured over a mandolin for The Salt Path, why you should go to every dub, and what happens when a mixer quietly replaces your score with generic drones.

GUESTS

Chris Roe: website · Instagram

Paul Saunderson: website · Instagram

The Composer Connection brings two screen composers together for an unguarded conversation about the craft. New episodes every month.

Made by Outlier Creative - a content house for screen music. We work with composers, libraries and publishers on video, campaigns and press.