MRH: There’s a BBC documentary that I saw about a month ago called The Alchemists of Sound (2003), and it’s about the people who were working at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Over time they moved from using tape manipulation towards some slight synthesizer processing during the early seventies, before it eventually become more widespread, and the tape-based workshop was ultimately closed, but it was fascinating to see how they were using a lot of tape recorders just to keep doing loops and altering the sounds further though tape.

They were analogue sounds, but like you were saying about those early synths and filters, they produced really unique sounds that I don’t know if today’s computers can do quite as well with that warmness redolent of the old machines.

AL: And it’s a very different creative process to work with something that has knobs and levers and actual physical movements and manipulation, as opposed to clicking a mouse, and selecting bits and bytes and little numbers here and there.

There’s something about the analogue world that I really like. I know some composers who had the opportunity to use orchestras, but were very proud in using a synthesizer instead, and it became a very powerful instrument and something that people were very proud of.

Then we entered a world where synthesizers were basically working as a way to cut corners and cut costs and try to emulate orchestras as best as you can and save money, and it’s nice that I think we’re coming back to the world where we can use different kinds of analogue synths and even digital sounds, and use them for their own sake, as oppose to as a way of saving money and emulate real instruments. That’s where it tends to lose me; there’s something very human about having the real thing in a real orchestra.

I find when I’m at orchestra sessions, I will have a moment where my conductor will turn his score in the middle of a cue; he does it as quietly as he can, but because he’s sitting underneath the microphone tree, you hear that, and the question always come up: ‘Should we figure out a way to get rid of that?’ and I think, ‘No way, That’s the living proof that we really did this.’ That’s one of those great things that tells you that this was 90 people in a room performing this live.

I really like that. I kind of equate it to the breaths in singing. I like to hear the breaths, and hear the singer breathing, and know that there’s a live breathing organism behind the creation of this music; not just five steps back or six steps back but literally one step back from the microphone.

MRH: City of Ember also contains a lot of heavy brass, and I wonder if you think it’s harder to write for brass, particularly when it involves layering and developing sounds for something like a driven action cue. There’s one on the album that’s called “Tunnel” and there’s a lot of fine sonic details you can hear, which other composers have said requires skill to write in such a way that they’re all clearly defined, and grab audiences.

AL: When I’m writing for brass, I always start with the French horns. I really like the timbers of that sound, how rich it can get, and also how you don’t necessarily hear the size; you can have six or eight French horns played in unison, and it just warms the sound as opposed to hearing six or eight separate entities playing the same note.

I’ve always struggled with trombones because it’s a different timber; if I end up writing French horn parts that are really too low for most people to be able to play successfully, they end up getting orchestrated into the trombones, and it doesn’t really capture what I’m looking for or what I’m hearing in my head.

In City of Ember, it was actually Nicholas Dodd, my orchestrator, who said, ‘You know, maybe this is an opportunity to try and use the Wagner horns, which are more similar in timber to the French horns, but a much lower sound.” So we hired four Wagner horns to compliment our six or eight French horns, and just had this massive brass section.

It was just amazing how well it worked… but there’s also a beauty to the Wagner sound that seems to live completely in conjunction with darkness; the combination of darkness and beauty seemed to really fit the film’s themes.