Thinking about using a chamber ensemble for film music?
It’s been quite some years since I’ve written any music for film. And most of what I did write got played at a local party/festival then promptly filed on a shelve! Indeed the last thing I attempted to score was for my own entertainment: some random climate change NASA video I found online:
- NASA video & music (no narrator) (links go to my YouTube channel)
- NASA video, narrator & music
However, in the interest of writing an entertaining, maybe even educational blog, here are my thoughts on composing for a small chamber ensemble, regarding film music.
Update: I went ahead and scored this Bridgerton clip with and ensemble of 8 players to give you a concrete example of what I’ll be talking about in this article. Go to 2:37 of the clip to hear the music:
Chamber music is more informationally dense
If you’re used to loading up an orchestral library on your digital audio workstation, and making minimalist film music ideas sound good, simply by administering sound orchestration techniques, you’re going to find out rather quickly that such is not going to fly when composing for a handful of instruments.
Chamber writing is a whole other ball game, where you’re going to have to get out of that minimalist mindset and write like you’re writing a concert piece. Yes, that means applying more information per instrument per unit time. But keep in mind you are saving time, not having to orchestrate an idea for a large set of instruments, be they digital or organic.
Write some small concert pieces to build your compositional technique in the realm of chamber writing
Before attempting to write a film score with just a handful of instruments, do your homework first, and write several concert pieces for instruments you’re wanting to use for your film tracks. This way you can develop how to create variant textures, moods, and techniques to adequately tell the emotional story of your film properly. You’ll also learn the quirks, like finding places for wind players to breath (which becomes more important when dealing with small sets of musicians playing more informationally dense music), and such.
These don’t have to be long. I’ve written several symphonies that run between 20-30 minutes. But I’ve also spent a good amount of time writing miniatures for solo instrument(s) + piano. So you can definitely pull off some AA, ABA or ABAB formed music with just a minute to minute and a half’s time. Check out my ‘Scenes for Flute and Piano’ on the ol’ YouTube or my ‘Scenes for String Quartet’. Or any other of my ‘Scenes for’ type music.
The piano is your most versatile instrument in chamber writing
It’s not an accident that the volume ratio of chamber music using a piano as an accompanying instrument, to that using a harp or guitar for that purpose, is so very high. The piano is just more versatile than these other instruments, regarding dynamics, polyphonic capacity, and ‘orchestrational’ texturing.
Further the piano sample libraries these days are so realistic, you don’t even need a real piano player to render a credible film music track, if need be. This allows for smaller budgets, i.e. cash that stays in your pocket.
Pick your instruments wisely
Make sure the family of instruments you end up choosing for your film score matches your movie, and has enough versatility to work in all the scenes.
In general, a small group of chamber instruments can provide adequate scores for period drama films, especially with European or American settings. Think Jane Austin or Thomas Hardy.
Action scenes
If your movie does have some action, make sure you have enough instruments to create emotional excitement through polyphonic complexity. A piano quintet could be used to achieve such. You can pull off a war scene, or chase scene with a piano quintet. It’s basically a pocket orchestra itself. Not so much with say a flute and a horn, or a single woodwind or brass instrument plus a piano.
However the mainstay of the modern action movie is still the large orchestra, so know the limits of chamber writing, or where it’s not appropriate.
Single character focus
However a single woodwind plus a piano could work well in a movie that heavily focuses on an introspective or introverted main character. The somber and melancholy texture the clarinet provides would work well in a movie where a character spends most of their time alone, walking about and observing the workings of the world. Or a flute and a piano could provide an adequate score for a more bubbly female character.
Romantic movies
Romantic movies would of course need the passionate and lyrical qualities of string players. Again the piano quartet or trio could provide significant emotional depth. Heck even a string quartet could do well, just make sure you master string quartet writing before you attempt such a score, as having just 4 instruments of basically the same timbre can get boring really fast, if you’re not a master at teasing out different textures in them.
Use AI to pull the music out of movie clips to practice
Okay you’ve done step 1 of your homework, where you wrote some small concert pieces to get familiar with chamber writing. Next is to practice scoring some scenes via movie clips you can find and extract online (just don’t post them anywhere, after you’ve added a score, or you could get a copyright strike).
With all the AI applications these days, expressly for the creative arts, you can now remove music from audio tracks while keeping the dialogue. This means you can create ‘raw’ movie footage with no sound track to practice your chamber related film music technique. Descript is one such application, which you can check out by clicking this link.
Budget for live players
For large orchestral scores, as long as you write to the limit of your samples, and cover all the fakeness up with percussion and electronic sounds, you can get away with not using live players.
That’s not going to work for chamber writing, where all the intimate details of an instrument on are display. But the whole point of using a small set of players is to be able to afford live musicians, right?
Of course lean on production to instruct you as to whether you can record overseas or out of town, union vs. non union, and all that stuff. But do the research and find budge friendly options. These overseas packages that have giant Eastern European orchestral recording rooms might not be the right fit, if all you need is enough space to record a few instruments.
Fiverr offers low budget options
Heck there are good quality musicians with nice little home studios for hire on Fiverr! I used one of those to record a little violin and piano tune I wrote. You can hear the result below.
Keep in mind though not all recording musicians on fiverr can, or are willing to play along a prerecorded piano or click track. The young lady that helped me with the above piece was a classically trained violinist but was familiar with studio tracking over pre-recorded music.
Mock ups these days do sound pretty real
Even though you definitely want live musicians to give your score its authenticity, don’t be surprised when your live recording doesn’t sound too much different than your mock-up if you’re using a good sample library.
I’ve always used Vienna Symphonic Library stuff to make my mock ups. And every time I hear a live performance of a piece, I’m always expecting some miracle, like it’s going to be 100x better than the sample library version of the piece. It’s not.
Related: Check out what I think are the best orchestral sample libraries regarding realism, which includes a particular solo wind series that listeners probably wouldn’t question were it used in a film or tv score.
Indeed my mock-ups are like pristine, quintessential versions of my tunes, and live versions of these always have imperfections that grind against my perfectionism. Even if the performance is brilliant technically, there’s some secondary melody that wasn’t brought out as much as I would have liked, etcetera.
Next Up
Thanks for checking out my article on tips for using a chamber ensemble for film music. Next check out my blog for more more articles on my musings on the world of classical and film music.