How to Score a Western
There is a dusty expanse, lonely desperate people, and a Winchester rifle. Yes, it’s a Western.
Your job is to score it – create the soundtrack, and some original songs. But where to start?
This post draws from my experience in creating the songs and score to Ragged Wing’s A Different Long Stretch of Earth
Step 1: Study the soundtracks
That rattle of the tambourine and the high wavery whistle in The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. The tiny bit of spring echo on the kick drum in Fistful of Dollars. The throaty bass clarinet in The Hateful Eight. Before getting inventive, it’s good to have a repertoire of genre signifiers to choose from.
Step 2: Study your country music
If you’re going to be writing original songs with lyrics, starting listening to a ton of country music and let it sink into your bones. There’s a lot out there. When you’re ready to get focused, ask the script writer(s) for five to fifteen songs that they consider essential, and make these your bread and butter. Love them, then dissect them. I made a playlist of all the little 5-15 second moments in the songs that “got me”. Like Step 1, this is a study in artistry and genre signifiers.
Note: this study of songwriting and genre should be deeply humbling. I had only basic knowledge of country music before I embarked on this project, and after a couple weeks of research, I had discovered dozens of sub-genres that would merit another ten years of intensive listening and study. This is the rewarding part about doing theatre / film music though – it pushes you outside of your area of expertise. Circle back to those choice songs you got from the script writers when you’re feeling overwhelmed.
Step 3: Write a bunch of songs to generate ideas.
These will eventually be thrown out. Why were they thrown out? Maybe they sounded too much like Sufjan Stevens (too sensitive!) or Violent Femmes (in my defense, the character singing this one was supposed to be a pre-teen). In any case, this is where it gets fun. Do you love that lap steel guitar from the Patsy Cline songs? Does it remind you of spaciousness and sunrise? Make a piece with it!
Do you want to try and channel some of the directness of a Hank Williams verse for the script’s musical number? Get out your idiom dictionary, and scribble away!
This is the time to entertain left-field ideas. Maybe instead of country instrumentation, the play opens up with a musique-concrete montage of sound clips, taken from old country movies. No? Okay. It was worth a shot!
Ideally these drafts will start conversations with the script writers. You’ll gradually develop a greater understanding of the story, and what it needs musically. And one more thought: if you’re making country music, you probably won’t be sounding as gritty and authentic as the historical artists (and this is especially true of genres like country and blues, where authenticity is a major part of the appeal). I wouldn’t recommend faking grittiness. Find what you have inside yourself at the end of the day, and bring that to the table.
Step 4: Create themes for your underscoring
Put on your thinking cap. For this part, you’ll want to identify the big themes of the play, so you can “code” them with some underscoring. This is the classical approach to scoring a story (see: leitmotif). In the play I was scoring, a number of characters were taking big trips across the prairie. So I made a “Journey Theme”, with finger-picked guitar and a soaring whistle, that played in appropriate moments before/after discussions of travel.
This is a short and direct snippet of music, that has a memorable texture. Musical themes create connections between ideas and characters that reappear in different parts of the script, and reinforce the cohesiveness of the script.
How many of these little themes should you make? Some soundtracks just have one or two, and this simplicity can be very effective. For this play, I made music for four major themes. Here’s another one, “Underground Theme”.
A couple of our characters were really interested in a mythic creature that dwelled beneath the prairie. Taking a cue from the instrumentation in The Hateful Eight, I used bass clarinets and bass flutes to create a breathy, ominous texture. It sounds almost like the exhales of a big creature…
Step 5: Combine and transform themes
The fun thing about creating simple 30-second themes is that now you have the building blocks to create bigger, badder pieces. For instance, as the story-line I was working with ratcheted up with tension, one of our characters set off to take a Journey -> Underground. Voila! Lets hear what these themes sound like together. This piece of music underscored a soliloquy with sequences of silent choreography, one of my favorite moments in the playt
As we moved into the dramatic finale of our Western, all the different threads of the script starting coming together – so our musical themes begin to morph into one cohesive, cathartic finale theme. The next clip combines the “Journey” and “Underground” themes, but also incorporates a couple other key musical ingredients from other moments in the play. It’s a bit bombastic (and was eventually revised to be more subtle), but illustrates nicely how our themes grow and transform with the script.
That should be enough advice to get you going. Dig out the tambourine, wet your whistle, build some calluses on your fretting fingers. Have fun!