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Rewind - Why Is Music NOT a Universal Language (cont'd)? ft. a Musician (Greg Pliska) · Linen Suit & Plastic Tie

• 0:04
  hey, this is Kevin and welcome to another bonus episode of the
• 0:11
  linen suit and plastic tied podcast as we are all enjoying
• 0:17
  our holiday season Grove and I have decided to release another
• 0:23
  formerly unpublished portion in one of our episodes back in
• 0:28
  season, 1 And this was from an episode called why is music not
• 0:34
  a universal language, featuring a musician, are extra
• 0:40
  Storyteller for that conversation is Greg pliska and
• 0:45
  for those of you who are listening for the first time if
• 0:48
  you've ever been to an IMAX movie theater, you know that
• 0:54
  there's a short clip that they always play before the movie
• 0:57
  actually starts. That showcases the The stunning
• 1:01
  graphics and the Epic sound effect of IMAX movie with a
• 1:06
  countdown and watch a movie or be in one slogan.
• 1:11
  Greg is the musician. Who orchestrated the music for
• 1:16
  that clip? Pretty cool.
• 1:18
  You know, so in this part of the conversation, Greg shares with
• 1:24
  us a bit about the intricacies of Creating music for movies and
• 1:32
  theater, which he does a lot at a professional level.
• 1:36
  How do you make sure that your music doesn't get into the way
• 1:40
  of your acting? And when do you want your music
• 1:45
  to take center stage of your movie ever play?
• 1:48
  Those are all important storytelling choices that a
• 1:51
  musician needs to make. And also, we have Greg break
• 1:57
  down some of the musical jargons.
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  So what exactly is orchestration, what is
• 2:03
  composition? How do they serve storytelling
• 2:07
  respectively? So without further Ado, let's
• 2:10
  get into our bonus conversation with gregg On your point about
• 2:21
  each part, contributing to this overall goal and theme.
• 2:26
  Do you ever need to worry about cohesion, with other music or
• 2:32
  scores in that same piece of film or theater?
• 2:37
  That's also a great question, you know, especially as film
• 2:41
  more and more has pop music in. It has other often contemporary
• 2:47
  pop because people Looking to place their songs in the movies.
• 2:50
  And so, a lot of a lot of film is scored with us with songs.
• 2:55
  And that was certainly true of trust and and other things I've
• 2:58
  worked on. So you have to be conscious of
• 3:02
  how you fit in with those things.
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  And there's actually a couple moments and trust that I'm
• 3:07
  really proud of what we did. Where there's a piece of score
• 3:12
  that ends on a single note, that actually bleeds over the pop
• 3:16
  song that comes in. And, and I think for the viewer,
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  My Hope Is that the viewer doesn't realize.
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  Those are two different things that it just seems like a
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  seamless musical fabric. That's telling a story that was
• 3:29
  also true. We talked about warhorse the
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  play a little bit before we started recording because I was
• 3:34
  the music director for that show.
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  And that show has a ton of recorded music that serves as
• 3:40
  underscoring, but it also has songs that the cast sing their
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  folk songs. They're there.
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  So them are original but they're all written in the style of
• 3:51
  English folk song. And so there are a lot of places
• 3:54
  in that score where there's this found music there's this
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  traditional folk song that is being overlapped or integrated
• 4:02
  with the score for the composer created.
• 4:06
  And yeah the goal is always to make those things feel like they
• 4:08
  all belong together or if they don't belong together, that's a
• 4:12
  that's there for a reason to. There's a jarring, you know,
• 4:15
  suddenly the music is Out Of Tune that song comes in and
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  Clashing, with the score that exists at and that's an
• 4:21
  intentional choice to yeah. And, you know, we were talking
• 4:24
  about hearse before we started, you know, I grew up in Toronto
• 4:27
  and I actually saw it while I was in Toronto and what I love
• 4:30
  about that show is that how intricate it is, you know, with
• 4:33
  the puppetry and, you know, the set design and the emotion and
• 4:38
  it's a very intricate show and the music plays such an
• 4:41
  important role there because of the horse because the horse is
• 4:44
  in, like walking. Or if I remember correctly,
• 4:47
  isn't like walking on. Talking.
• 4:48
  It's not like a animated show. The horse is emotion, is he is
• 4:53
  the bed walk. It's a soul of the show and
• 4:55
  that's all for the music. So can you tell us a little bit
• 4:57
  about that about writing the Amo emotion for the horse?
• 5:01
  Sure. And for that show, I didn't
• 5:04
  actually write any of the music. I was the music director and
• 5:06
  that I did some of the vocal arrangements and so on the yeah
• 5:11
  that show is a is magical because there are these horse
• 5:14
  puppets that people leave the show, swearing We're real horses
• 5:19
  and we're really communicating. But of course they're they're
• 5:23
  puppeted. And you see the puppeteers all
• 5:25
  the time. It's not like their puppeteers
• 5:26
  are trying to be hidden, right? So part of that is just the
• 5:30
  Artistry of the puppeteers. As a company called handspring
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  puppets, from South Africa, designed and crafted them and
• 5:37
  their extraordinary. And then, as you said, another
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  part of it is the music which underscores entire scenes, the
• 5:47
  way I scored. As Anna film, right in a film.
• 5:49
  You can have music underneath the entire scenes, entire bits
• 5:53
  of dialogue. Obviously, the Star Wars movies
• 5:56
  are kind of extreme example of that where John Williams score
• 5:59
  is going throughout. It's hard to do that.
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  And, you know, live play because the actors are not, you know,
• 6:08
  fixed in time, a scene might take a few seconds longer or
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  shorter or you know, things things expand and contract with
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  each performance. The Jose did a really clever job
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  of creating a series of musical cues that overlapped and kind of
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  dovetailed. So, if a particular scene was
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  going long, there was enough music to stay underneath that
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  singing and then you could transition when you need it to,
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  or if you need to transition sooner, it would still feel
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  seamless. And, you know, there's this,
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  there's this trick that we have to do when we're scoring
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  something like that, which is to not Say too much, right?
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  Because the actors are saying, things, the performance is
• 6:53
  telling us something the visual is telling us something.
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  And I think, you know, sometimes we say when, if you come out of
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  a movie and you didn't notice the music that might mean the
• 7:04
  composer actually did a great job because the music was just a
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  seamless part of the experience, that's not always the case, of
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  course, but but it's very easy for the music to become
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  intrusive or jarring, or too sudden.
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  Take away from what the story is.
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  It's like that hologram thing. We're just one part of the whole
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  piece of Storytelling and if you kind of have to figure out where
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  you need to stay out of a way, where you don't need to say too
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  much because the acting was doing.
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  Let's go ahead and another I guess more General example that
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  I can think of is a cartoon actually, Tom and Jerry which I
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  grew up, loving loves telling Jake.
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  Yep, but yeah. Yeah.
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  It's kind of like how you talk about, you know, when the music
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  and like this visual content is really good.
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  You don't, you don't tend to notice it.
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  I remember when I first kind of watch these things, those music
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  just so seamlessly and naturally blend into the animation and I
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  really, you know, think that, you know, this is how how Jerry
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  is laughing or this how, you know, Tom is walking and stuff
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  like that and it is Just amazing when you actually think about
• 8:20
  it, that cartoon had no line pretty much whatsoever.
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  And the whole sequence is kind of just underscored by music
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  like you said, so that is definitely, you know, one kind
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  of example where we see get the magic of Music in storytelling.
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  On the contrary of that, you said the trick is to not say too
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  much. But is there a point in time
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  where you You would want the music to take center stage of
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  the theater or the scene. That's a great, great question.
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  And the Tom and Jerry example is a fascinating one, because if
• 8:59
  you scored a live action film, The Way those cartoons are
• 9:03
  scored, it would be ridiculous. Right.
• 9:06
  There is a fact we use the toon car tuning to say that a
• 9:11
  composer is doing too much, right?
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  Because in the cartoon, every gesture, every move, every step.
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  You know, is underscored and given a, you know, a big musical
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  gesture and if I did that in a film, maybe in a comedy, you'd
• 9:26
  get away with it. But 98% of the time in a
• 9:30
  live-action, human story, that would just be totally
• 9:34
  destructive because the music suddenly intrudes.
• 9:37
  I think, I think where you want the music to take Center Stage
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  is when the emotion justify. Sighs it.
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  It's almost like the, you know, you hold back until you can't
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  take it anymore and then you let the music happen.
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  It's like somebody once said, you know, nothing makes people
• 10:01
  cry more in a movie than a character.
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  Trying not to cry, right? The person on screen.
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  Once they start weeping, we feel differently, but when we see
• 10:11
  them holding back, the tears, we get much more emotionally
• 10:16
  involved. And there's there's a way in
• 10:18
  which You want the music to just hold back until you can't take
• 10:22
  it anymore and then it carries the emotion.
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  Now, you know, in a musical, which is a whole different, kind
• 10:29
  of Storytelling where characters are going to sing in ways that
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  people don't ever do in real life right there.
• 10:36
  There's no, you know, moving we pretend like what we're seeing
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  is real, some way we're supposed to buy into that, we're seeing a
• 10:43
  real thing happen. Even though we know it's all
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  been totally fake, what in front of a camera.
• 10:47
  But in In a in a musical. Like we know already, this is
• 10:52
  not real characters, don't really sing and people, a
• 10:56
  musical can feel flat or fake. If a character starts singing,
• 11:02
  before the emotional context, justifies it or demands it.
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  So we often say if you, if you're writing a script for a
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  musical, when you get to the point where words are not enough
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  when the emotion is now heightened to the point where
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  the you need the music, That's where the music comes in.
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  And when it's done, well, you don't as an audience necessarily
• 11:24
  even notice that suddenly everyone is singing.
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  You just feel your with them because you feel it, you're
• 11:29
  ready for it, that love song has to happen or that passionate.
• 11:34
  You know I want song has to happen because the characters is
• 11:39
  so filled with emotion. That's the only way they can
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  express it and so there's an analog to that in movies where
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  there's a moment when it just you want to let the music take
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  us. Now when the words are no longer
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  sufficient, it's interesting you pray like that because you know,
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  I'm a, I am a huge musical fan, I love that idea of a musicals.
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  One of the first things you want to do to heal all the music.
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  You want to put on the music. I love the idea.
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  It's like you actually want to hold it back until it's
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  absolutely like begged for and then release it.
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  It's kind of like a release in that kind of moment.
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  I think that's a really good way of looking at it.
• 12:15
  Yeah, that's very much. The, you know, we talk a lot
• 12:17
  about Musical is the storytelling is linear.
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  We're going linear until we get to the musical moments and then
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  we're expanding vertically, right?
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  We're going deeper into the emotion and no longer just doing
• 12:34
  Exposition in storytelling. We're letting the emotion expand
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  and obviously music can can do both things.
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  It can also continue to tell the story but that emotional
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  expansiveness is, you know, it's what an aria is in Opera when a
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  character sings you know a glorious Aria that character is
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  just going deep into whatever their emotional is emotion is
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  and and we should as an audience be drawn in and loved being in
• 13:00
  that emotional soup with them. Music is a form of story time,
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  but there's so many layers of Storytelling you can music as
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  well. And before we dive into that, I
• 13:11
  just wanted to ask you just quickly to define the difference
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  between orchestration in composing in storytelling terms.
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  What what part do they play? Sure.
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  So you know composition is the creation of the creation of the
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  music that's not really helpful definition but you know in the
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  Western European science, a composer.
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  Like Beethoven was also the orchestrator right?
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  Beethoven created all of the musical choices in a Beethoven
• 13:45
  symphony, but in film music and theater music, and a lot of the
• 13:51
  Sonic branding work, there is an orchestrator, so the composer's
• 13:57
  create this music, but they hand it off to an orchestrator who
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  at, at the Very least is taking what the composer imagine either
• 14:08
  on a computer or jotted on a piece of paper, you know, this
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  is French horns. This is strings.
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  This is going to be a bassoon and making that exit making
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  executing more so you might today.
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  Composers on their computers create mock-ups of all these
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  things and do pretty, you know, faithful sample-based Renditions
• 14:31
  of this music on a computer. But you can't just hand that to
• 14:36
  an orchestra and say sound like this.
• 14:38
  You need someone with the technical capacity to translate
• 14:42
  what's on the computer onto a piece of paper.
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  So that the live musicians will, you know, we create what's on
• 14:49
  the computer and in the case of IMAX and a lot of the other
• 14:52
  things that arbitrators like we do, we're also being asked to
• 14:56
  enhance what's there to add something or ring other colors?
• 15:01
  In that might not have been in the original but that will Help
• 15:04
  bring it more to life. In, in terms of classical music,
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  the one of the great examples of orchestration versus composition
• 15:12
  is the piece pictures at an exhibition, which was written as
• 15:16
  a piano piece by mussorgsky. And which Maurice Ravel then
• 15:20
  took an orchestrated in the version that most people are
• 15:24
  familiar with a few here, you probably hear the Orchestral
• 15:26
  Version. So the original music, the all
• 15:31
  the notes and The Melodies and Everything.
• 15:34
  Every all the basic musical ideas except for the
• 15:38
  instrumentation was moose or excuse with Val, then took that
• 15:41
  and figured out what the orchestra would play.
• 15:44
  And if you know the you know, the old prog-rock band Emerson
• 15:48
  Lake and Palmer they did a version of pictures at an
• 15:50
  exhibition that is organ and drums and bass and guitar.
• 15:54
  So it's a completely different orchestration.
• 15:56
  Again of the same piece of music in a way, orchestration in that
• 16:01
  sense is just a remix of what the first Those are good parent.
• 16:06
  Yeah, okay. Okay, so an orchestra.
• 16:08
  Okay. So composed in is kind of like
• 16:11
  scriptwriting and orchestrations kind of like high in the ACT.
• 16:14
  Is it having the active state in figuring out the right side?
• 16:16
  Yeah, that's not a bad analogy for it.
• 16:18
  It's not a bad analogy. And, you know, even when a
• 16:20
  composer has done a complete mock up on the computer that's
• 16:24
  got every note in it, that's still not what the artist.
• 16:28
  You know, there's still the step of getting that to be played by
• 16:30
  an orchestra and And the orchestrator plays, an important
• 16:35
  part in understanding what resources are needed and what it
• 16:39
  looks like on the page for human beings.
• 16:41
  I mean, it, I feel like this country I come back to this all
• 16:44
  the time that the, you know, storytelling is about humans
• 16:48
  communicating with other humans. And so composing is about
• 16:53
  communicating music to other human beings as well.
• 16:55
  But the key part of orchestrating is giving it to
• 16:59
  live human beings to perform it, which transforms it in a way.
• 17:04
  That, you know, a computer can never achieve.
• 17:08
  Yeah, and some of my friends who are extraordinary at what they
• 17:11
  do on the computer, you know, do an amazing job but every time
• 17:14
  when we then have the orchestra play it, everybody says, oh my
• 17:17
  God, I didn't realize it would sound like that, right?
• 17:21
  People bring something to it. That that brings it to life.
• 17:25
  Yeah, it's collaborative storytelling.
• 17:27
  Something we talked about with so many different fields.
• 17:29
  Like, we talked about his combo people, we talked about it with
• 17:33
  product, Terrible Storyteller is so fascinating because it's like
• 17:36
  you were you saying about the broken glass with everyone's
• 17:40
  different view. Each person comes in and add
• 17:44
  their own poem Story Time. Each person like each musician
• 17:47
  each director. They all they all add a layer
• 17:52
  and if they're not go at their best it can totally falter.
• 17:58
  So it's so important that trust in that story time for
• 18:01
  absolutely, right? So many.
• 18:02
  Yeah, there's so many key. Keywords trust and you know how
• 18:06
  each person is telling their story concerning their story for
• 18:10
  the whole thing. You have to invest in it in that
• 18:14
  kind of way for it to be for it to shine the way because that's
• 18:18
  one of the reasons why warhorse was so extraordinary is that the
• 18:21
  time and the space and the resources and the care was given
• 18:25
  so that everybody involved could contribute 110% of themselves,
• 18:29
  what they were doing Yeah and also on you know the point of
• 18:38
  orchestration being able to translate or ain't hands, what
• 18:43
  is delivered initially through composition?
• 18:47
  Because you'd also perhaps give us an example of you know a case
• 18:54
  where you're able to deliver a sent the sentiment of a saint.
• 19:02
  Particularly well and orchestration.
• 19:04
  So you know, you've worked on the IMAX Sonic Camp, them worked
• 19:08
  on. Also the theme songs to mvc's
• 19:12
  face the Nations and the HBO feature presentation songs,
• 19:17
  these are all, you know, intro kind of Anthem that lead people
• 19:22
  into experiences. So how do you deliver those kind
• 19:27
  of sentiment through orchestration?
• 19:32
  Good question. You know I'm the first thing I
• 19:35
  thought of was work. I had done years ago.
• 19:38
  Also would made music studio on for the Golf Channel.
• 19:43
  It was a series of New pieces for I think was for the PGA
• 19:47
  Tour, something I've ever lose Dolph golf music.
• 19:51
  And you know there's a there's a lot of sports music tropes.
• 19:55
  It's going to have some high trumpets in it.
• 19:57
  It's going to have big drums. It's you know, it's kind of the
• 20:00
  energy. A of the sporting event and we
• 20:03
  delivered a bunch of those things but because it was also
• 20:06
  in the context of, you know, channel that would do some
• 20:11
  reporting about sports. There needed to be versions of
• 20:15
  the themes that could work with not just somebody succeeding but
• 20:20
  somebody lose it, right? And and what you know, what do
• 20:25
  you change to convey the thrill of victory or the agony of
• 20:30
  defeat? And how can an instrument Choice
• 20:34
  make a difference in addition to that there was also
• 20:38
  consciousness of God. What if a famous golfer dies
• 20:41
  like we want to have the music that leads into the broadcast
• 20:46
  that sets that tone? And that's true of all the news
• 20:48
  things to CBS Evening News that we worked on where there's a,
• 20:53
  you know, there's the standard news intro and then there's the
• 20:57
  breaking news music and there is the The tragedy music that sets
• 21:02
  up the tragic news because you don't want to start, you know,
• 21:06
  story of some, some terrible cataclysm with bouncy exciting.
• 21:12
  Hey, it's the news, right? That, that would be offensive
• 21:15
  and painful for everybody. So there are ways orchestration,
• 21:21
  Ali instrument choices that can help convey that.
• 21:25
  I mean, the most obvious one is that the sound of an oboe tends
• 21:30
  to be A very sad sound something about that instrument and the
• 21:35
  double leads and it has a kind of plaintiff quality.
• 21:39
  So it's very easy to take a theme.
• 21:41
  Play it on trumpet and it's got a kind of nobility play it on
• 21:44
  oboe and suddenly it's mournful themselves and those are you
• 21:49
  know that you could take play the same thing on a xylophone
• 21:53
  and it has a kind of brittle maybe even comical bouncy
• 21:56
  quality. So while those are, those might
• 22:00
  seem like the obvious or stereotypical choices they you
• 22:04
  know and you don't want to use them every time.
• 22:06
  It's like, go, I'm always going to do the oboe for the sad
• 22:09
  thing, but it's useful to be aware that people tend to have
• 22:14
  these reactions to these sounds. And I say, people have these
• 22:18
  reactions to these sounds entirely in a western and
• 22:21
  European context, because a lot of this feeling is also cultural
• 22:26
  and and learned in a cultural context.
• 22:29
  So what works, you know, in the United States or what works in
• 22:36
  Great Britain for a certain thing might not be the same in
• 22:39
  Indonesia or, you know, India, whether it might be.
• 22:44
  And that's a whole other label label layer of complexity that
• 22:49
  that we don't always have to get into.
• 22:51
  But that is interesting. When you start to consider, how
• 22:55
  something's going to play outside, A particular cultural
• 22:59
  here are so interesting that the idea of a cultural storytelling
• 23:03
  and the idea of something we were just talking about that,
• 23:07
  you were telling stories to other humans, right?
• 23:10
  Yeah. I want to find the instruments
• 23:11
  that, you know, put on those emotional strings.
• 23:15
  We would talk about trust and you know that kind of a bluesy
• 23:18
  pop type sounds, you know, we watch the trailer for that and
• 23:23
  you could you could hear that, you know, it's kind of like
• 23:25
  setting the tone for the entire Trailer, which sets the tone for
• 23:28
  the movie, and you got that kind of that deeper sound, but then
• 23:31
  when we talk about sports, it's like, the trumpets and the loud,
• 23:34
  and then breaking news, you want to get serious.
• 23:37
  So that importance of setting, the tone with the music is so
• 23:42
  fascinating because it's a Mentos and emotional thing and
• 23:49
  that's going to do it. If you liked this bonus episode
• 23:53
  and wanted to listen to The Original Episode, it's called
• 23:57
  Why is music? Not a universal language,
• 24:00
  featuring a musician, Reckless God.
• 24:03
  And of course, if you like our content, make sure to subscribe
• 24:07
  and follow us wherever you listen.
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  Leave us a comment or review to let us know what you're
• 24:12
  thinking. Follow us on Instagram at LSP,
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  tpod LinkedIn, linen suit, and plastic time.
• 24:20
  This has been another bonus episode of the linen suit and
• 24:24
  plastic tie podcast. We hope you're enjoying enjoying
• 24:27
  your holiday season. Happy New Year. enjoying your
• 24:27
  holiday season. Happy New Year.