Supe Troop’s Lauren Weiss talked to composer Anne Chmelewsky about film scoring and the recently released film Where Hands Touch, on which they both worked.
Supe Troop (ST): Hey, Anne! What lead you to your profession as a composer? Is there a particular score or individual composer’s work that inspired you to be a film composer?
Anne Chmelewsky (AC): I started learning piano when I was five and was always more interested in making up my own little songs than playing existing pieces – I would make up stories and improvise on the piano alongside. I became fascinated by film, and my main exposure to music initially came from that. I would spend hours cutting out articles about films from TV guides and collating them into a book to cross reference cast and crew (pre-IMDb!). It may sound ridiculous, but that’s when it occurred to me that writing the music for Star Wars and Indiana Jones was a person’s job. And, from that point on, that’s all I wanted to do. When I was 12, I was told by a teacher that composition wasn’t for girls (ST: RUDE! Check you at now, though!!!), and it would only ever be a hobby for me, and so I lost my enthusiasm for music. But the scores for the Indiana Jones movies obviously had a big impact on my life, because I decided that if I wasn’t going to compose music for films, I would try to become an archaeologist instead! Later when I was applying to universities to study Latin and Greek, I put on the TV one night and Raiders of the Lost Ark happened to be on. It was a strange coincidence, as I hadn’t listened to the soundtrack for a long time. The next morning, I decided to put in a late application to a music college in London to study composition, auditioned a few months later, and got a place.
ST: What is your favorite instrument?
AC: Tough question! I think for me it tends to fluctuate. Right now I love the trombone and the viola – I’m not sure I can pick one over the other!
ST: What do you look for when you are spotting a film?
AC: The most important thing for me is to get as much information from the director on the vision of the film and the subtext of each scene, character, etc. Out of that conversation, themes emerge and begin to inform a certain musical direction and pace. Often there is already a clear idea in place of where the music should go in the film – I tend to think of both music and silence as equal blocks, a bit like the notion of negative space in art. I visualise them like Lego bricks that go over the film’s timeline, with different colours corresponding to different themes/textures/etc., and I try to hold on to that image throughout my composition process when I go into the writing of specific cues, so that I can retain the bigger picture of how the music develops over time in the back of my mind.
ST: What projects do you have in your future that you are excited about?
AC: At the moment, I’m developing my third comic opera: Pygmalion 2.0. The piece is a comedy in three acts performed by a mezzo soprano, a pianist, and a cellist, and it presents a gender reversal of Ovid’s classical story Pygmalion. My version of the tale follows a pioneering scientist of artificial intelligence who comes to the realisation that the future of humanity depends on re-engineering the entire male sex. Driven by a fierce sense of intellectual competition and a desire to avert the imminent downfall of the human race, she sets out to artificially create the ‘perfect’ man of the future using a series of complex computer algorithms, Nietzschean philosophy, and Tinder…
I’m also working on an album for string quartet, trombone, and vibraphone, which I hope to have completed by the beginning of next year.
ST: Without giving any spoilers away to our readers, your final piece in Where Hands Touch brings tears to my eyes every time! It is so beautiful and emotional. Do you have a favorite cue/scene from the film?
AC: Thank you (it took me a while to get that one right!). There is a cue which holds a dear place in my heart, because it’s the first bit of music I presented to Amma Asante [the director of Where Hands Touch] after watching the first cut of the film – I was completely stunned by the movie and its power, and I composed the piece within that aftermath moment, and it ended up becoming a key theme for the film and the first track on the soundtrack album.
ST: What is your favorite soup?
AC: Gazpacho, always and forever, I could have it for breakfast.
Thanks, Anne!
Click that Where Hands Touch tag below to see more about the film.