John M. Angier is responsible for the overall direction of Renovatio Records, from researching potential projects to determining how each score should ultimately be presented. His work focuses primarily on musical research, album curation and sequencing, with particular attention to the relationship between a score and the film it accompanies.
As the person who usually decides where a Renovatio project begins and where it should ultimately go, John tends to approach each release from the perspective of the listener: what should be included, what can be left out, and how can the album tell the film's story through music?
In this interview, John discusses the origins of Renovatio Records, his approach to score research and sequencing, and what he believes makes a film score album work.
How did Renovatio Records begin?
It started in the early 2000s, when I was listening to a complete score for a film. I don't remember exactly which one it was now, although I suspect it may have been a Jerry Goldsmith score. What I do remember is realizing that several cues I was listening to had never appeared on the official soundtrack album.
I then discovered that this wasn't an isolated case. It was actually quite common for official releases to leave out significant portions of a score, rearrange the music, or present only a relatively small selection of what was written for the film.
That got me thinking: if I had access to the music, why not assemble it in the way I would like to hear it?
I started making my own customized presentations, mostly for my own enjoyment. Some of them worked surprisingly well, and eventually I thought that there might be other film music enthusiasts who would enjoy them too. So that was really how Renovatio Records came about, long before we started publishing online in 2014.
What makes a successful film score album?
There are several things that need to come together. First, I think an album should contain most, if not all, of the important cues from the film. By “important,” I don't necessarily mean every piece of music that was written. I mean the cues that contribute significantly to the film and that a listener would expect to encounter when revisiting its score.
The album should also work hand in hand with the film. Ideally, it should retell the film's story musically. As you're listening, your own memories of the movie should become part of the experience. You hear a particular theme or sequence of cues and suddenly you're reconstructing the film in your mind.
Chronological order is therefore very important, although I don't think it should be treated as an absolute rule. Nobody necessarily wants to listen to two hours of essentially the same kind of music simply because that's the order in which it appears in the film.
Sometimes omitting a repetitive cue or moving something slightly can make an album much more enjoyable without sacrificing its narrative structure.
Ultimately, I think a successful album should leave you with the feeling that you've really enjoyed the music, but also that you didn't quite notice how much time had passed. If you can make someone listen to an hour of film music and think it felt like twenty minutes, you've probably done something right.
And I'm not opposed to long albums either. I don't have anything against long albums. I have something against long albums that don't need to be long.
All albums in the catalog are distributed free of charge through this site and are not intended for commercial use.
What does the research process behind a Renovatio release look like?
We maintain a list of scores we'd like to tackle, which is constantly changing. We look at our own collections of film score albums and consider which scores could particularly benefit from a Renovatio presentation.
Once we've decided that a score is worth tackling, one of the first things we look for is whether there is a complete or expanded source available in good quality. Labels such as La-La Land Records and Intrada Records have been invaluable in that respect, because their expanded releases can provide access to material that wasn't available when the original soundtrack was issued.
Once we've decided to tackle a particular score, we try to learn as much about it as possible. Obviously, that includes the music and the film themselves, but we also look at cue sheets, production and crew information, album liner notes, interviews with composers, and anything else that can help us understand how the score was constructed and how it was used in the film.
Sometimes you find three versions of what appears to be the same cue, with three different titles and slate numbers, and you have to work out whether you're dealing with three cues or one cue wearing three different names that went through different iterations. This is the point where the research starts becoming less like musicology and more like detective work.
We also research the visual side of the project. Photographs, logos and other artwork from the film all contribute to how we eventually present the release.
So by the time we start assembling an album, we've hopefully developed a pretty good understanding of both the score and the film it belongs to.
What is your philosophy when it comes to sequencing?
Sequencing is probably the part that can consume the most time. You can have a tracklist that looks perfectly logical on paper, but then you actually listen to it and realize that something isn't working. A cue might be chronologically correct and still feel like it's in the wrong place. That's when you start moving things around by one track, listening again, moving them back, and wondering why you've been doing this for three hours.
I don't necessarily think chronological order is sacred. But if you've taken a score that was written to accompany a story and rearranged it so that the album flows better, you've made a different kind of listening experience. That's perfectly legitimate. I just don't think it should automatically be presented as the definitive version of the score.
For Renovatio, my editor and myself generally try to preserve the narrative progression of the film while making whatever adjustments are necessary for the album to work as a listening experience.
So when sequencing, we consider chronology, thematic development, the way cues lead into one another, and the overall dramatic progression of the score.
Complete scores can become extremely long. Some are almost as long as the films themselves. I'm not opposed to long albums; I don't have anything against long albums. I have something against long albums that don't need to be long. For a conventional single-disc presentation, I generally think somewhere around 45 minutes to an hour is a good target, although there are obviously exceptions. The "Lord of the Rings" scores are a good example of why you sometimes have to go much further.
We also tend to omit source music and songs unless a particular piece genuinely belongs with the surrounding score. And we try not to include too many instances of repeated material unless they are important for understanding how a particular theme develops.
For me, that's one of the things I find most fascinating about film music: the way a story can be told through the development of musical ideas. Our releases are ultimately trying to recreate that experience for someone who already knows the film.
Do you have any particular favorite Renovatio releases?
There are several, but the "Lord of the Rings" scores are probably among the ones I'm most satisfied with.
Those are interesting because we went well beyond the running time I'd normally consider ideal. They're two-disc presentations, but I think the length is justified. There is simply so much material, and the music is so deeply connected to the narrative of those films, that trying to reduce it too aggressively would have defeated the purpose.
Howard Shore's work on those films is extraordinary. You could hold thousands of seminars on the way his themes develop, interact and change throughout the story, and you'd probably still have something left to discuss.
More generally, though, I think the best Renovatio releases are the ones where the listener comes away with a presentation that feels natural enough that they might actually prefer it to the commercial album. Ultimately, it'll be their choice, but if someone listens to one of our assemblies and thinks, “This is the way I want to listen to this score from now on,” then we've achieved what we set out to do.
Which release has proved particularly difficult to assemble?
Every release presents its own difficulties, but some are definitely more complicated than others.
One of the biggest challenges is dealing with a score made up of a large number of very short cues. I generally don't think an album should have 30 or 40 1-minute tracks unless there's a very good reason for it. Once you get much beyond 20 or 25 tracks, the presentation can start to feel too fragmented.
Tremors was particularly challenging in that respect. There were many short cues, and the score involved two different composers, so there were occasions where their musical styles didn't naturally fit together as an album. Interestingly, that release also turned out to be very enjoyable once we found the right structure..
Another kind of challenge is simply getting good-quality sources. "Speed 2" was a good example. For a long time, Mark Mancina's music was mainly available through unofficial releases with fairly poor sound quality. It wasn't until La-La Land Records issued its expanded edition that we had the material necessary to put together a presentation we were genuinely happy with.
And also, there is always another thing you could change: using an alternate take on a cue, trimming down a cue, merging two or three cues into one track, and so on. That's probably the dangerous part. You can spend weeks refining an album and suddenly realize that you've been listening to the same transition for the twentieth time. At some point you have to accept that it's finished. I know that an album is done when I can't change it anymore. So, in a way, we publish them so that I can stop changing them.
What do you think official soundtrack albums sometimes get wrong?
I understand why commercial releases make the choices they do. At the end of the day, a record label is trying to sell a product, and songs are generally more commercially appealing than instrumental film scores. So I don't necessarily see the inclusion of songs as a problem.
The problem is when the songs take up so much space that the score is reduced to a very small selection of cues. In those cases, you can lose a substantial part of what makes the music interesting.
I'm also not particularly fond of rearranging a score simply to make it work better as a conventional album. I understand why composers and producers sometimes do this, and there are certainly cases where it works. But for Renovatio releases, I generally prefer to preserve the chronological progression of the film.
A film score isn't just a collection of pieces of music. It was written to accompany a story. I think the album should retain some of that storytelling quality.
That doesn't mean an official release is necessarily wrong when it takes a different approach. It's simply a different objective. We're interested in creating a presentation that allows the listener to experience the score as closely as possible to the musical journey of the film.
Where do you see Renovatio Records heading?
Hopefully, there will simply be more of it.
We currently have more than 100 scores in our queue, covering different composers, styles and eras, and that list keeps growing. Every time we discover another score that we think could benefit from a different presentation, it gets added to the list.
So I don't really see Renovatio having a fixed endpoint. There are too many scores worth exploring.
Ideally, when someone who loves film music discovers the site for the first time, they should feel as though they've stumbled across a treasure trove. There should always be something else to discover, whether it's a score they already know and want to hear differently, or something they had never considered before.
That's probably the simplest way of describing where we're headed: more scores, more experimentation, and hopefully many more albums that give these pieces of music the opportunity to be heard in a different way.
No comments:
Post a Comment