Q&A with Michael Bahnmiller
I interviewed a composer and music preparer who also pioneered a cinematic book soundtrack based on the Brandon Sanderson Cosmere universe.
There are many ways to tell a story – dialogue, acting, the movement of the camera through a scene. Another crucial way is through the musical score, which helps to establish the pace, tone, and emotion of a scene. My guest today has worked on a variety of Hollywood films as a music preparer on everything from La La Land to Jason Bourne to The Simpsons. But it’s his work as a composer of book soundtracks through his company, The Black Piper, that piqued my curiosity. In 2017 Bahnmiller produced Kaladin, a cinematic album based on The Way of Kings, the first book in the massively popular Stormlight Archive series by Brandon Sanderson. It’s an intriguing concept, and one near and dear to my heart given my profession as a book scout!
Let’s start by talking about how you began your career. Tell me about your composition work on cinematic book soundtracks and what that entails.
I went to BYU to study media music and coming out of college, my intention was originally to create a demo that I could take to Hollywood. And maybe I was crazy to think this, but I was stuck on the idea of doing a full album, with a full choir and with a proper mixer and all of the things.
The problem was that I didn’t know how to produce the album. So I went looking for producers, and eventually I got connected to someone and talked with her. What I didn’t understand at the time was that there were different kinds of producers. And it turned out that she was a film producer and not an album producer, which actually was fortuitous in a way.
We expressed the idea of what we were doing, but she pushed us toward telling a story with the album, and I kind of took that literally! I’d had the idea a long time ago of doing a book soundtrack. I had even approached an author, but I wasn’t ready at the time to actually execute on the idea. But my friend Richard Williams had previously had interactions with Brandon Sanderson’s team. This was back in 2014, so Brandon was on the rise but wasn’t yet on that New York Times bestselling trajectory. And after some discussions, we came to the point where we [were allowed to] obtain the IP to use it for a book soundtrack.
It took three years to work through the licensing on that. I got some funding from my mom, and we recorded half of the album with a full orchestra in Prague, and we came back and in the intervening time, we prepared for a Kickstarter. In 2017, we ran a Kickstarter for Kaladin for The Way of Kings, and we raised $120,000.
We took that and went and recorded the other half in Budapest. We recorded the choirs, the soloists, it was a full team of were 11 composers, 11 orchestrators, and eight music preparers. And during all this I had made friends with a budding film composer at the time named Philip Klein. And as we finished up the recording, he made some comment like, “Hey, if you move to LA, I’ll see what I can do about getting you some contacts for you.” And that sounded like a promise to me… or at least, promising.
Phil made the connection [for me] to a prep house called JoAnn Kane. So that was how I got my start in music preparation, doing a lot of proofing for big budget films – everything from La La Land to Fantastic Beasts to X-Men: Apocalypse, you name it.
What does it mean to do music prep? Walk me through a day in the job.
The composer on a film writes the music, and they’ll hand off the music to an orchestrator, and the orchestrator will take that and prepare it for a conductor. Essentially, their deliverable is a conductor score and that is taken and given to music preparers. It’s the preparers who will take the score, take the flute line, and turn that into a part for a flute. They’ll proofread the scores and the parts, make sure that nothing was missed. They’ll print it, bind the music, and so on. It’s everything past the orchestration. I did a lot of proofing, proofreading.
I’m curious about your own composition process. When someone pitches you their movie, what is your creative process turning that concept into a score?
That’s a great question. First I start with picking the director’s brain. What is it you envision for this? Are we just scoring visuals or is the music telling a certain story at these different points? Obviously style and pacing is so important – silence tells its own story as well. I like how Han Zimmer did Interstellar, right? He talks about how he was scoring that love, the relationship between the father and daughter. Sure, [the soundtrack] has this epic spacey feel with the organ and the giant reverb and all that. But the real question when you sit down with it is: what story are we telling with this?
My friend Richard likes to just sit there with the clicker off and just sort of play along to what he’s seeing and just feel it. For me, I like to engineer the process, I like to pace it. Where does everything fall based on the feeling that we want to have at any given point? So I work those technical aspects first, and then I start working on the primary driver for the music — is it the emotion, or do we really want something that’s more like wallpaper, or something more bombastic with all the percussion driving at this moment?
It’s all about breaking each of those things down logically. And then once I have that worked out, once the canvas is there and I’ve got the palette ready, I can add some more heart here by throwing in some English horn, or whatever. Now I’ve assigned some instrumentation, and part of the instrumentation also comes down to budget. Are we doing this live? If we are, then that affects what those colors and things look like, because I might write differently if I know I’m going to do something with synth.
Within those parameters, I can start to develop the themes. What does it look like when things start, and how do they change over time? Some of that’s exploratory as you go along. Sometimes you’ll start in the middle and be like, “Okay, I’m actually going to start with this scene, and a theme will present itself.” And that kind of thing kind of also happened with that book soundtrack that we were talking about earlier as we were writing some of the tracks.
I’m curious about the idea of a cinematic book soundtrack. Is this something that readers are meant to listen to as they’re reading? Or do they read it, let the themes and the ideas soak in, and listen to it afterwards? How do the two come together?
Oftentimes when I tell people I do book soundtracks, they think it’s the thing that plays in the background while the audiobooks run. But that’s not the goal here. This thing is a standalone, like its own adaptation. So when you listen to it, you remember the story. It is a full-on adaptation. We break the book down, we figure out what are the pivotal moments, what do we need to give it a full arc and breathability, and what does the end of the book look like? So it’s not like we’re just going to pick out a bunch of tracks that we like; we’re designing the thing as if it were a film in your mind, and we’re scoring that.
The Way of Kings is a massive tome. So that producer that we brought on was also a director. She ended up doing the creative direction. I led the team-building effort and designed some of the main themes as a lead composer. We wanted to make sure we hit some of those heavy emotional moments, because that’s important to the fan base. There’s so many parts that are just so important – [capturing] the depression of Kaladin on this track, the epic feel of the Shattered Plains. But yeah, those emotional beats are things that she primarily developed over the course and conveyed to the individual composers. And she used film terms to kind of describe it for the film composers, because we need visuals to write to as film composers.
It’s like we’re panning here and we’re zooming in there, this is the composition with the characters here and there and exactly what’s happening, and this is what we need to feel at this particular moment.
Was there an early soundtrack or a score that you listened to that really sparked your love of composition and made you want to go in that direction?
The first one that I really noticed in the theater was Nick Glennie-Smith’s score for The Man in the Iron Mask. I felt the emotions, I could feel what it was doing to the audience, and I realized how much power music has over people. I understood what music could do generally speaking, but how it interacted so cohesively with the story in such a way as to drive you to where it wanted you to go and it could make you feel something. And I loved that. So I started collecting film scores.
I had files of CDs. Gladiator came along and I heard the duduk in that – it’s this Armenian woodwind double reed instrument that has this quality that just tugs at you. And it was a whole other dimension to what you can do with music. I think it was at that point that I decided, “Yeah, I am absolutely going to be doing this somehow.”
How about sonic influences? Are there composers that you turn to or you think about when you are working on your own projects?
I can tell you that I have a lot of composers that I just love. I don’t know whether I draw on composers – that’s an interesting conversation on its own – because in school we talked about trying to find your own voice, and that was something that I heard when I first started in the industry from other people who were also trying to capture the attention of directors and filmmakers. You need to have your own voice. But really, I don’t think you can escape your voice. And I say that because there’ve been a number of projects that I’ve worked on where the directors tell me, “I want you to sound like this guy.”
I’ve always felt of myself as something of a chameleon where I can go into a project and I can figure out the technical aspects of what makes this piece work or this composer the way that they are. If this guy likes to do a lot of chromatic mediants, I’ll use chromatic mediants too. So I can break it down and figure out what it is that makes the thing tick, but there’s still a lot of you in it. Do I draw from the other composers when I work on my own stuff? I think so. I have heavy respect for James Newton Howard, and when I’m being conscious about it, I am trying to get as close to as good as James as I can get.
Do you feel like your faith has informed your work at all? And if so, in what ways?
I feel like creation in general, [especially in] music, it comes from the divine. I think that there’s a spiritual creation aspect to it. It’s not just something that comes out of thin air, and it’s not something that I can just force.
Sometimes we are forced to connect more strongly with it when we’re up against a deadline, I suppose. But I think that there’s a spiritual element to creation in general. And I have taken projects I’m not proud of that I felt like I had to do because I’m in the Hollywood scene, and if you say no to a project, that means you’re out. But I’ve got to a place where I’ve realized that I can take on projects that align with what I want to do and to say no to things that I don’t want to, or that I don’t feel comfortable doing. In that regard, I think that it has influenced my career as much as it has influenced the way that I write.
Wow, once again I am amazed to learn about another moving part in what brings a film to life. This was fascinating! I loved what Michael Bahnmiller said about creativity coming from the Divine.
Wow talk about a mini masterclass! Great work!