Victor Davies recalls that it was in a Nashville recording studio when he was awakened to music as an emotional glue bonding viewers to a movie or TV program.

‘After finishing a take, I told the artists ‘That sounded wonderful,” the composer says. ‘Then one of the singers leaned over the microphone and said, ‘Mr. Davies, down here in Nashville, we say ‘That feels wonderful.”

After all, would the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho feel the same without Bernard Herrmann’s high-pitched, stabbing violin chords? And would Steven Spielberg’s Jaws be as memorable without John Williams’ ominous two-note shark-attack motif?

Playback spoke to two of the 2002 Gemini Award-winning composers about their project-specific approaches, and the techniques they employ to make a TV program sing.

Davies, who has written some 750 compositions for film and TV over three decades, recently earned his first Gemini Award. The nod was for best original score for a documentary for his orchestral score in Anthony Sherwood’s Honour Before Glory, the CBC Remembrance Day doc about our army’s first and only African-Canadian battalion, formed in World War One. Sherwood based his wartime doc on a diary kept by his great-uncle, Reverend William White, the battalion’s chaplain and a commissioned officer.

To set a mood, Davies accompanied sepia-toned visuals of a pen writing in a diary during the opening credits with a WWI-era brass band composition, the piercing sound of a coronet – a primitive horn sounded as troops march into battle – rising to the fore.

He says that film and TV composing is very much about making choices about where music should go in a soundtrack to underscore its emotional content, and what effect the director is seeking.

‘There’s a place for songs in films, but scores create an emotional envelope, a special world for the characters and what happens to them,’ Davies explains.

He praises Sherwood for ensuring that a sizable budget was put aside for the score. ‘An orchestra of 18 players plus some synthesizers – for a documentary that’s quite substantial resources these days,’ he remarks.

Other producers are not as generous with their music budgets, nor are composers always so lucky.

James Jandrisch, who likewise won his first Gemini in 2002 for best score for a drama for the ‘Enough’s Enough’ episode of CTV’s cop series Cold Squad, says an orchestra is the first thing that pops into his head when considering a gig.

‘But budgets where they are today, it’s not always possible,’ he says.

It helps that Jandrisch can become a one-man band if required. ‘I play virtually anything – not well, but I’m trying to pick up everything I can.’

Lending ’emotional glue’ to a police drama about unsolved cases called for Jandrisch to avoid the tube.

‘I tried not to watch too much TV, to keep my brain in a movie sense. I wanted to have the production values of a feature film,’ he recalls.

He composed a score for Cold Squad, often filmed in the grimier parts of Vancouver, that was part traditional strings and part electronics and guitar-based percussion.

‘There are lots of elements of world music and classical and symphonic. But mostly it’s raw guitar, dirtying and the most aggressive I can get it,’ he says.

He remembers also tuning his vocal chords when the vocalist he had hired for a recording session fell ill.

‘I ended up singing myself. I was concerned, but as it turned out, [the producers] loved it,’ he adds, seated in his studio, surrounded by five computer screens, a few TV sets and a vast assortment of instruments.

And how does Jandrisch know when he’s hit on a melody that sticks, that follows people out of the cinema or after they switch off the TV set?

‘You know in the first five seconds if it’s working or not. You either go there or not,’ he says, adding that time is of the essence in composing. He wrote the score for the award-winning Cold Squad episode in just four days. The longest deadline he’s had is two weeks.

‘Don’t tell my wife, but the scariness of the one-hour show deadline – I thrive on it,’ he says, before returning to the ivories to tap out his latest melody.

The third 2002 Gemini composer winner was Mychael Danna, who got the nod along with brother Jeff for their work on the MOW The Matthew Shepard Story. Danna also recently picked up his fourth Genie for his score in Atom Egoyan’s Ararat. The composer has become a popular choice for Hollywood productions as well, and is currently in L.A. working on the score for the upcoming blockbuster The Hulk.

-www.academy.ca