Face of a Nation

The project came to me through a referral, and from the beginning, director Mina Chow was deeply engaged with what the music could contribute to the film.

One of the central ideas in the film is American ingenuity and innovation, particularly as seen through the history of international exhibitions and the architecture created around them. The film also reflects Chow’s perspective on America’s changing role within that tradition.

That gave the score an opportunity to become expansive and aspirational, but the documentary also contains much more intimate material involving family and personal history.

The music had to be capable of carrying both scales.

I wanted the orchestra to provide the foundation of the musical world.

Rather than treating orchestral writing as something reserved only for the largest moments, it became part of the score’s underlying vocabulary. Smaller ensembles, individual instruments, electronic elements and mock-ups could then move in and out of that foundation as the film required.

For the major orchestral material, we recorded remotely with a full orchestra in Budapest.

That required detailed preparation before the session. When dozens of musicians are recording together, ambiguity becomes expensive very quickly. The writing, orchestration and score preparation need to answer most of the questions before the first note is recorded.

The preparation paid off. The session moved efficiently, with very few questions or changes required during recording.

Approximately fifteen minutes of the score were recorded with the full orchestra.

That was a deliberate production decision.

A film does not necessarily benefit from spending its recording budget evenly across every minute of music. I prefer to identify the places where the audience is most exposed to the score—the opening, important thematic statements, major transitions and the ending—and make sure those moments receive the resources they deserve.

Other parts of the score could then be produced with smaller live elements, additional recording and carefully constructed mock-ups.

Additional live work was recorded in Orange County, and I also performed piano for portions of the score.

The result was a hybrid production in which the scale of the music could change without the film suddenly feeling as though it had entered a different musical universe.

Because the film travels through different countries, architectural traditions and historical periods, there were opportunities to introduce distinct musical colors.

Those colors needed to be recognizable without turning the score into a collection of disconnected musical postcards.

Spanish guitar could suggest one environment. French-influenced impressionistic colors could shape another. A more contemporary combination of synthesizers and rhythmic ostinatos could help distinguish material associated with Britain.

The important part was that these elements remained inside the larger musical language of the film.

Cultural color was there to support the story, not replace the score’s identity.

One of the cues that best represents the larger orchestral side of the score was written around the film’s ideas of American ambition, achievement and disappointment.

The music needed to acknowledge scale and optimism without becoming simplistic. The film’s perspective contains both admiration for what had been accomplished and disappointment about what was lost or diminished.

That combination is much more interesting musically than uncomplicated triumph.

The orchestra gave me enough range to move between those ideas—to allow the music to rise, pull back, question itself and then recover a sense of forward movement.

Documentaries can create an unusual scoring problem because their subject matter can move rapidly between places, periods and ideas.

The temptation is to solve each sequence independently.

I try to do the opposite.

Even when instrumentation changes, melodies can evolve. Harmonic relationships can return. A texture heard in one context can reappear later in another form. An orchestral idea can be reduced to a few instruments and still retain its identity.

Those connections are often what allow a score to travel widely without becoming fragmented.