A topic comes up: good film music is the one you don't hear, because its function is to reinforce a feeling, the one transmitted by the camera and the actors, and not to impress a listener.
Something less topical is coming: these incognito compositions still represent much of the most daring and admirable orchestral music to come out of the West in the last hundred-odd years.
Something blunt is coming: that film music contains instruments and orchestras, that it inherits techniques from Bach, Beethoven or Ravel, is, with each platform or Marvel release, something more and more of the past.
There remains a dwindling number of composers forged in the classic symphonic world of John Williams and Bernard Herrmann.
In Spain we have one: Fernando Velázquez (Getxo, 45 years old), signer of scores such as
A monster comes to see me
(2016),
The Secret of Marrowbone
(2017),
The Impossible
(2012) and even
Eight Basque Surnames
(2014), embodies that versatile, cultured, professional music writer who adapts centuries-old tradition to each film project.
One day, in the center of Madrid, loaded with his scores, he gives his opinion on the turn that film music is taking from the symphonic to the ambient, from the triplets of
Star Wars
(1977) to the purrs of
Dune
(2020): “There are directors and directors who are almost afraid of music: 'Hostia', they tell you.
'You're going to redirect the movie to me.'
That's why you have to be so delicate and that's why people who give you freedom are so exciting, it's as if they gave you their creature”.
Fernando Velázquez, with a score.
Daniel Ochoa de Olza
One of the new creatures that have passed through the hands of Velázquez is
Alma,
the Spanish Netflix series-superproduction created by the filmmaker Sergio G. Sánchez, a great success this summer and one of the last television fictions not only in our country, but in the whole world, to exhibit an orchestral score.
“There is an orchestra for each frame”, defends the composer.
“We have not composed blocks that are reused from one chapter to another: the music evolves like the story and the story moves so fast that repeating itself would have slowed it down, it would not have worked.
What's more, when we recorded the music for chapters four to nine, there were things we changed in the already recorded music for chapters one to three."
That logic, that of constant reaction, explains his songwriting philosophy: “I work with the actors months after filming.
They give it to me already done, but I have to contribute as if I were there,
Composer Fernando Velázquez holds his baton.
Daniel Ochoa de Olza
Velázquez loves the soundtrack genre to the point of acting as an archaeologist.
In recent years he has dedicated himself to locating scores of missing soundtracks to re-record them with Spanish orchestras.
The only version available today of
The Bride Dressed in Black
(1968), which Bernard Herrmann composed for François Truffaut, is the one he recently recorded with the Euskadi Symphony.
This October he will re-record —something that the United Kingdom has not done— three lost works by the legendary John Barry, with the Córdoba Symphony:
Love Between Ruins
(1975),
Wheat is Green
(1945) and
Sinister Plan
(1964).
Much of the best music of the 20th century has been written for the cinema, someone should give him that respect once and for all, and this guechotarra, an Indiana Jones without a hat or a whip, is the one who is taking the first step.
Subscribe to continue reading
read without limits
Keep reading
I'm already a subscriber
