RECORDING November 2024 - 22

Compositional Worlds
of
The
Michael Whalen
Boston Studio in
1999 with Synclavier
and Tons of Gear
What is TV scoring like now,
especially in the era of Netflix
and Hulu, where a whole
series might drop in a day
versus weekly episodes?
It's closer to film now because even
though things are cut up into episodes,
essentially, you're looking at one project
that you produce over an extended time
frame. In the old days of series television,
you'd get something on a Wednesday,
and you'd have to deliver it on a Sunday,
and then it would happen all over again,
and again and again.
The editors would get you the picture,
then you'd spot it, and then there'd be fixes.
Then you'd get a " locked " or final version
of the picture, which would get locked
again repeatedly over the next two to
three days, so you are forced to reconform
all of your music on Friday and Saturday
night. And then by the time you get to delivery,
there's probably another last minute
change. So you've probably spotted it, reconformed
it two or three times, and delivered
it at least once, probably twice. And
then you get to do it again. Remember, in
the regular network days, a series was 23
episodes. Nowadays, how series are done
all at once gives you more time.
22 RECORDING November 2024
In addition to all of your soundtrack
work over the years, you also
release your own albums, the most
recent of which is Watercolor Sky. In
the past, you have released classical
solo piano albums, ECM-esque
modern jazz albums and smooth
electronic-style excursions. Your
latest is squarely in the New Age
category, which is a genre many
of your early releases fell into.
My first commercially
released
necessarily subscribe to any specific genre.
Until the past 10 or 15 years, genres were
more about how and where to sell music
and which audience might listen to it or
how to talk about it as a journalist.
Today, people are actually using music,
recording
was in 1993. I had done the
soundtrack for a big PBS series called Sea
Power: A Global Journey. I convinced the
nice people at Narada Records-a New
Age label that was a huge genre in the
mid '90s-to release it, and it worked in
that world, sort of.
At the same time, Hans Zimmer and a
few others had also released scores on
Narada, and we were all trying to figure
out the lines between a film score and New
Age. Today, the category " New Age "
doesn't exist on all streaming platforms as
far as what you can enter for metadata.
We live in a weird world now with so
many genres, yet so much music does not
and I'm using that very distinctively-using
music. They're not listening to music. I have
music to drive to, music to fall asleep to,
and music to hang out with my wife on a
weekend.
Now, music becomes about the activities
that frame your life.
The GRAMMYs still use the term because
you've got all these categories,
and somehow, all these categories have
to make sense to somebody.
Sometimes, especially these days, describing
something as a genre can be almost
more misleading than simply talking
about what sort of visceral emotional
thing you get from this or that music and
why you like it.
I think that is a more valid way of describing
music than, " Here is one of the 93
categories that the GRAMMYs or Spotify
are doing this year. "
RECORDING November 2024

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of RECORDING November 2024
