Chairs

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  Daniel Carlin

  Title: Chair
  Department: Film Scoring

  "A great strength of the Film Scoring Department is that all of the faculty members either have already finished successful industry careers or are still active in the business. We emphasize the practical side of preparing the student. It's not just a matter of artistry and craft but how students will function out in the real world.

  "The primary way you get work in our business is through networking, and that doesn't start when you get out to Los Angeles or New York. It starts here, where you first hook up with people who will be in a position to help you get jobs later.

  "We expose students to many different areas on the way to their degree. Video games are providing terrific opportunities for composers and other music workers, so we are building an interactive music lab and hiring a faculty member to teach the unique aspects of this genre.

  "In the Film Music Composition Seminar that I teach with Don Wilkins, we spend half the semester talking about general principles and concepts, looking at different composers and styles. The last half, we look at the work students are doing in their other film-scoring classes. The first lesson we teach them is that in this industry, it's not about your music—it's about the director's film. The composer's job is to create music that the director feels best serves the dramatic needs of the film. And when the director is critical, the composer needs to be able to graciously and objectively accept those comments and adapt his or her music accordingly. We're trying to teach our students how to deal with that aspect and to thicken up their skin a bit. For me personally, the rewarding part of this course is to see how good their work already is."

  • B.A., San Jose State University
  • M.A., University of Connecticut
  • Ph.D. Candidate, University of Connecticut
  • Former executive director, Henri Mancini Institute
  • Former chair and CEO, Segue Music
  • Former intelligence analyst, U.S. Air Force Security Service
  • Emmy Award, Outstanding Achievement in Music Editing, Mini Series or Special (Under Siege)
  • Emmy nomination, Outstanding Achievement in Music Direction (The Temptations)
  • Collaborated as music supervisor, conductor, music editor, and/or soundtrack producer on An Officer and a Gentleman, Sister Act, Steel Magnolias, Days of Heaven, The Black Stallion, The Bodyguard, Quest for Camelot, Bruce Almighty, What’s Love Got to Do With It, and Last of the Mohicans
  • Voting member and former chair, board of trustees, National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences (NARAS)
  • Voting member, Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, Academy of Television Arts & Sciences
  • Codesigner/founder, Sundance Institute Composer Program
  • Founding advisory board member, SoundArt
  • Former instructor, UCONN, UCLA, Belmont University

  Top Five Most Underappreciated Film Scores

  	The Mission Ennio Morricone In my opinion, the number one most underrated film score of all time was written for a 1986 movie starring Robert De Niro, Jeremy Irons, and the relative newcomer Liam Neeson. An important studio executive (who wouldn't want to be quoted in print) commented to me that Ennio Morricone, composer of the music for The Mission, had a better grip on the story than did the director. This score is arguably one of the best of all time. Morricone manages to combine traditional music from the Latin mass with native poly-rhythms, indigenous voices, and soulful symphonic melodies. And he does so after introducing them individually so that they evolve throughout the length of the movie in a most skillful and artistic manner. (Footnote: Although nominated for an Oscar, Morricone’s effort lost to Herbie Hancock’s score for Round Midnight, which many insiders felt had been nominated in the wrong category. As a result, the Academy’s Music Branch subsequently changed its eligibility rules for film scores.)
  	A Little Romance Georges Delerue Georges Delerue won an Oscar for A Little Romance, and wrote the music for over 350 other projects, including Agnes of God, Julia, Day of the Dolphin, and Anne of a Thousand Days—all Oscar-nominated scores. He was more internationally honored for his collaborations with the great French director Francois Truffaut, including the classic Jules and Jim. A Delerue score that was not nominated was the Herbert Ross film Steel Magnolias, which was Julia Roberts’s break-out role (and first Oscar nomination). The movie also starred Sally Field, Dolly Parton, Olympia Dukakis, Shirley MacLaine, Tom Skerritt, and Sam Shepard. Delerue’s score mirrors and complements the dramatic arc of the story, beginning with ebullient joy, peaking at overwhelming tragedy, and concluding on a note of eternal optimism. The music that enters in the moments following the main character's death, and resolves at the funeral, is as heartbreakingly beautiful as you will ever hear.
  	Heart Beat Jack Nitzsche Jack Nitzsche was one of the very first film composers to come from the rock world, having written and arranged for and/or recorded with Phil Spector, the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, Leon Russell, Tina Turner, and, most famously, Neil Young. Jack therefore seemed an improbable choice for director John Byrum to score Heart Beat, the story based on Carolyn Cassady’s autobiography Off the Road (as a sort of response to Jack Kerouac’s beat memoir On the Road, in which she played a major role). The movie offers fine performance by stars Nick Nolte, John Heard, and Sissy Spacek. In preparing the score, Nitzsche wrote a killer romantic theme and then had the good sense to hire the great Shorty Rogers to arrange all of the jazz charts. (Nitzsche turned the main theme into a song, "I Love Her Too," with his wife and collaborator, Buffy Saint-Marie, with whom he later won an Academy Award for the song “Up Where We Belong” from An Officer and a Gentleman.) The Heart Beat score is bebop at its truest, performed by some of the major musicians from that era, including Pete Jolly, Red Callender, Shelly Manne, Pete Condoli, Bob Cooper, and Art Pepper, who played the alto solos. I loved this score and hope to get my hands on it again sometime.
  	The Getaway Jerry Fielding Jerry Fielding was nominated for three Oscars, and would have received additional honors had he not been blacklisted during America’s notorious McCarthy era. Fielding wrote a terrific score for Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway, starring Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw. Only a select few of us ever had the opportunity to appreciate Fielding’s dramatic use of jazz voicing and exciting rhythmic patterns because the score was tossed out at the insistence of McQueen—for political reasons. Quincy Jones, a friend of a friend of McQueen’s was hired to rescore the film. This was neither the first nor the last time a good score was discarded for non-musical reasons. (Footnote: Quincy Jones received a Golden Globe nomination, but he lost to Nino Rota for The Godfather score.)
  	One Eyed Jacks Hugo Freidhofer Marlon Brando directed only one film in his career: One Eyed Jacks, starring Karl Malden, Katy Jurado, and Brando himself. The music was written by Hugo Freidhofer, an Oscar winner (Best Years of Our Lives) and eight-time Oscar nominee. Regrettably, Friedhofer was not recognized for this classic western score, in which he adeptly interwove ethnic elements with gritty melodrama and one of the most memorable love themes ever written for a movie.

• 

  Alison Plante

  Title: Assistant Chair
  Department: Film Scoring

  "Knowing how to collaborate is so important. Music for media—whether it's games, interactive media, film, or television—doesn't stand alone; it works with the other elements and that means that you're working with other people. We promote collaboration in a lot of classes in our department and in extracurricular activities, and we're continuing to broaden the possibilities for collaboration in the curriculum."

  "In film scoring there is a tendency to use more and more synthesis with budgets shrinking and with the technology getting better. In the synthesis and sequencing applications course, I teach how to make technology tools sound as close as possible to a real orchestra or ensemble, as well as teaching skills specific to film scoring. 

  "I want my students to know how to approach and learn a new piece of hardware or software. The technology changes so quickly, so they need to know how to get up to speed. I try to build confidence, especially in troubleshooting, because any time you deal with technology, you have to be able to fix it yourself. I teach my students to use technology as a tool that helps them but doesn't limit creativity. They also need to know the limitations of the technology they're using: to learn what it does well, let it do that, and not try to make it do something that it doesn't do well.

  "Even with a film score, music has to be a personal expression to some extent, otherwise you're not creating something meaningful. But at the same time you have to be able to distance yourself from it, because when the director says, 'This doesn't work at all for me,' you have to write something else and not take it personally. That's a tough lesson and requires a thick skin.

  "Knowing how to collaborate is so important. Music for media—whether it's games, interactive media, film, or television—doesn't stand alone; it works with the other elements and that means that you're working with other people. We promote collaboration in a lot of classes in our department and in extracurricular activities, and we're continuing to broaden the possibilities for collaboration in the curriculum.

  "I also teach the entrepreneurial, or freelance, side of film scoring. That means networking and marketing skills, and at least some amount of business saavy. The business is changing almost as fast as the technology, and the most important key to having a successful and rewarding career is to be flexible. If a student can identify what it is that they most love to do, at core, they will find a way to make a living doing that. Maybe it's not what they pictured exactly, but it will be a good fit for their interests and strengths.

  • B.A., University of Chicago
  • Exchange Fellow, Cambridge University
  • Founder of Treble Cove Music
  • Winner of the Janet Gates Peckham International Award and the Menn Foundation Prize and the Menn Foundation Prize
  • Television credits include scores for the History Channel, the Annenberg Channel, and PBS
  • Numerous national television commercials for clients including GMAC, Animal Planet, National Geographic Channel, Spalding Sports, and W.B. Mason
  • Additional scoring credits include multimedia museum exhibits at the Harvard Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Institution, and music for theater