Isn’t it frustrating orchestrally composing for a television series knowing that the sound is coming out of a little box?
Well, yes. I orchestrated for Alex North for a couple years, who’s a great man. He always said, "When you leave the scoring stage, that’s it. Never listen to the dub." You never listen to the final product. Walk away with a memory of what it is you did and the sound that you love. With Star Trek, it used to be rough, because the music was held back quite a bit in the dubbing and so it was pretty hard to pick out. Now, it’s quite a bit different and the music seems to come out to the front more. But I’ve done other shows where I’ve gone, "Didn’t I write something here?"

How does your continuing relationship with a producer of a television series give you more freedom to compose?
Sometimes you get into projects where the person in charge brings quite a bit to the table and forces you to become experimental beyond your previous works or thinking, but sometimes you are so limited that maybe it’s a fear to do anything outside the accepted genre for the film. You’re limited to things that have been a) heard or b) tracked. A lot of times with the larger projects I’ve found, much to my surprise, and I must say disappointment, that the temp takes precedence over discussion of where we want to go. Sometimes I find it’s the smaller projects, even small PBS things that I occasionally do, that actually have more room for experimentation. There’s more personal growth musically than on a huge project where I’ve got a one-hundred piece orchestra but I’m a slave to the temp track. In a television series where you work with a producer on a weekly basis and that’s really hands-on, there’s something different every week. When you go to a film, you’ve got that one critical period of time with the director. After it’s over, it’s done. It’s not like week after week for an ongoing season.

I would think that after working on Star Trek for a while, then getting the film project Letters From A Killer, the change in approach would be quite abrupt.
"Oh yeah, you got three weeks, get going," they told me. My experiences with David Carson, because I did Star Trek Generations with him also, are that you start with the unfinished script and he sits with you all the way through the recording sessions and the dub. He’s never absent for a moment from the process and is a hands-on director. It’s great because when the score for Letters From A Killer got to the dub stage, everything was as smooth as silk, there were no surprises. This was about a four or five month process with David. The tough ones are, say, a movie of the week where you get called in. The HBO film Breast Men was very tough because it had already been scored. They were already into the dubbing and it was going on the air. I got the call and then had a meeting with the director and the producer. I started this at 6:00 p.m. and the very next day I scored the show with an orchestra, strings and everything. It was a panic scoring the whole thing. Once you get through it, you’re walking into walls. It was like you’d been hit by a freight train. Whereas with Star Trek, I work with Rick Berman and Peter Lauritson: It’s a family thing, we know where we’re headed, it’s really a fun thing to do.

How does your approach in scoring series television differ from scoring major films?
On a series, your thematic material has already been developed. It’s all in the theme and in the shows that have gone by. You know what works, what the producer wants, and what puts a smile on everyone’s face when it finally gets to the dubbing stage. In a film, what I generally do is I always get the script and want to know exactly what’s intended, because often you can read between the lines on scripts and see where the intentions are. I’ll sit at the piano and just start fooling around. What is the script trying to say? What’s the overall mood of the script? This is what I try to create on the piano. I have a Yamaha Disklavier, so I record what I’m doing and the piano plays it back. I can actually fool around, play it back, and see if the mood strikes me correctly. Then I like to get dailies or some cut-together scenes to see what the locale looks like, how the characters are, or how they relate to what I thought they were going to be in the script. Basically I look at the whole picture and try to decide where I’m going from scene one to just before the end credits hit. Then I’ll take a few key scenes and either do them on the piano or on more advanced equipment. Next, the director and I get together to look at the picture or scenes. We discuss where the music is headed, how it could help the picture, what it is we’re trying to do, and what we’re trying to say. By this time I’ve gotten the point by communicating with the director. We come to a resolution of what it’s going to be and then I go to score. In Letters From A Killer, we decided that we wanted to have all very open guitar work like sliding acoustic guitars and acoustic bass. I couldn’t describe it verbally, do it on the piano, or even do it on the synthesizer, because it doesn’t sound right. So I got eight players over at O’Henry Studios and scored the first five reels of the movie straight through with that concept. When David Carson and I got to the end of it, we loved it. We decided it was a good way to start, but it couldn’t carry the film all the way, the film needed more impact. So we sat down with the film again and by the time we got to the end of the curve, I had everything: strings, percussion, brass, full electronics and guitars wailing in this thing. The process of doing this was purely evolutionary. It evolved and was organic in a sense. The moment it became static, we said, "This is wrong and we need to do something else." It’s not losing track of our original concept and incorporating it all the way to the end, but making the music grow as the film gained in intensity. Now, in a series, there is a pattern that is simply inviolable. It’s a process you don’t deviate from. In a feature, you can pretty much just run screaming into the room with the orchestra, throw ink and paper all over the place and just see what happens.

Can people develop themselves more as composers scoring television series or motion pictures?
I’d say they both are equal in totally different ways. When working on a series, I take it as a challenge to do something interesting every show, something that I haven’t tried before. I’m constantly listening to classical music, the 20th Century stuff, trying to learn where the orchestra is headed in this century, then use it. Those are the things that I bring to Star Trek. In the case of a feature such as Letters From A Killer, it’s taking what I’ve learned through the process of the twelve years of Star Trek, for instance, and my years of country shows, rock ‘n roll stuff, funk, rhythm and–the best things that I know how to do–and dovetail them into the picture. Both processes are great, enjoyable, and you learn from both. It’s easy on a television show to become static and just keep repeating yourself. Now and then, I do it as a joke to see if anybody’s paying attention. But for the most part, every week I try to have musical Alzheimer’s where I simply don’t remember what I did the week before, and still, within the parameters that are given to me, create something that is fresh and new.

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