Highlights from Rohan Stevenson's Interview with The Ladies of Lake (podcast)
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Note: I've included some rough timestamps if you want to listen to a specific bit of the podcast. They're not accurate to the second, but they will get you to the relevant bit.
"Temp Love"
[6:30] Rohan says he and Rob Lane (the other composer) sometimes had a lot of trouble shifting the directors away from the temp music (the placeholder music used to establish the mood/tempo of a scene in the early editing stages). The directors often got attached to the temp music and found it difficult to go for something too different (a phenomenon known in the industry as “temp love”). Temp music used for Merlin included scores from Lord of the Rings, Batman, and other music with an epic feel — but, as the series went on, the temp music used was often Rob and Rohan’s own music from previous episodes. That is why a lot of music ended up being re-used, which Rob and Rohan found frustrating (it was also one of the reasons why they were not involved in season 4 and 5).
Crazy Schedule
[9:50] Merlin was a surprise success and the schedule got “pretty crazy”. The composers ended up working with some incredibly tight deadlines (Rohan mentions sending stuff off "on 5 o'clock on a Friday for a dub due to be screened the following day"), which was very stressful. [12:50] Since the editors used temp music for the cuts, the composers would need to match the tempo of the temp music when writing their cues(*) in order to make the edits work (“temp chasing”). Given the tight schedule, this wasn’t always a negative thing, as it could save a lot of time during the ideation/writing process.
Finding Inspiration
[14:30] Rohan describes Merlin as “operatic” — which is why they drew inspiration from anything with a kind of operatic vibe, such as John Williams's music and his Star Wars score ("space opera"), and The Lord of the Rings — even Donnie Darko was used as temp music, and Rohan used it as a starting point to write his own version of an ominous beat. The producer of episode 3x06 (The Changeling) told Rohan that the vibe to go for in that episode was “Princess Bride”, which helped him immensely.
Going on Set
[18:00] Rohan and Rob didn't actually get to go to the set much. Occasionally, they did some recording in Prague, which was an opportunity for them to get together. When they were still working on S1, Rohan very nearly missed a recording session in Prague after missing his flight due to a fire at Heathrow. Apart from these occasions, the co-working process between him and Rob consisted mostly in “a lot of shouting down the telephone” (“There were some shouting matches” he recalls, laughing). Rohan was however invited to the set by Anthony Head, whom he describes as “a lovely man”.
[20:00] Generally, composers don’t need to be present on set, unless it’s for something like music supervision, when there is music being played live. He talks about working on a documentary on prehistoric sounds and having to go to Stonehenge to supervise some drummers during a midnight shoot, which was great (it was "all set with mysterious lightning and smoke going through Stonehenge", something you probably wouldn't be able to do now).
Meeting the Cast
[21:15] When asked about his favourite memory of working on Merlin, Rohan recalls being invited to the BFI (British Film Institute) for a Merlin presentation, where he played "the wrong kind of music" on the piano to accompany Arthur and Gwen’s scene in 2x02 (“I played it a bit like a tango, for a laugh”). On that occasion he met the Merlin cast, including Katie McGrath, whom he describes as “mad as a bat — but gorgeous”.
Favourite Composers
[27:00] Rohan and Rob grew up idolising the great “operatic” film composers, such as John Williams, Bernand Hermann, Miklós Rózsa, Gerry Goldsmith. In fact, it was Star Wars that got Rohan into composing. Rohan gave Rob a handwritten score of Return of the Jedi for his 40th birthday – and a little bit of Parade of the Ewoks, a piece from this film, “found its way into the score… just a little bit, about four bars.”(**)
[30:00] Rohan says his all time favourite film score is How To Train Your Dragon (“It’s unbelievable. It’s genius from bar one to the end”). Other all time favourite scores are Signs and, of course, Star Wars.
[31:50] Rohan says he was always into music, but when people ask him what inspired him to become a composer he loves to tell the story of how he became obsessed with the high-hat part in Dancing Queen (the bit “just between the chorus and the verse”) when he was 3-4 years old, and how he begged his mom to get him some cymbals because he wanted to reproduce that sound (“They won’t produce that sound – you need a high-hat, not cymbals. But she didn’t know that”). When asked if he found inspiration in classical music, he says he was “very taken with the whole story of Beethoven, to the point that I used to take myself off for walks in the countryside because that’s what he did”.
The Original Theme
[31:50] The opening theme we all know and love wasn’t the one originally written for the show – there was an alternative one. The opening theme Rob originally wrote sounded very close to Buckbeak’s Flight from the Prisoner of Azkaban – so much so that Rohan told Rob: “You’re not going to get away with that!” So Rob wrote a theme similar to the one we know, but in a major key. Eventually they settled on that theme in a minor key (“it was more dramatic”).
MIDI vs Live Instruments
[42:00] Bit of a technical question from a fan about using MIDI for the soundtrack instead of recording players and singers. This was partly due to the budget but also to the huge amount of music that needed to be produced – it’s a huge undertaking to prepare all parts, get them to the performers, record them, etc. They tried to use live instruments as much as possible, mostly to play the lead line or to play over the MIDI (a practice known as sweetening). Sometimes they also did it in reverse, by sweetening an orchestral performance with MIDI. But it was easier and quicker to tweak the music as needed to suit a scene when using samples. “A lot of the score is actually sampled – probably more than you think.”
Arthur and Gwen’s "Love Theme" and the Producers’ Influence
[50:00] Arthur and Gwen’s “love theme” was originally written by Rohan for Lancelot in episode 1x05 (note: it can be heard towards the end of the episode, when Lancelot leaves Camelot). Rob and Rohan would often expand on each other’s themes while working on an episode, and this is what happened here, since it was Rob who worked on episode 2x02. Rob’s “little touch” to Rohan’s original cue was to put the violin “over the top”, to give it more of a romantic flavour for Arthur and Gwen’s kiss scene(***).
Originally, Rob had written something different for this scene – a piece with a choir. The producers decided they wanted to use the theme Rohan had previously written for Lancelot instead. “They got a lot of confidence out of making that call, because it was the right call – it worked really well.” Unfortunately, from that moment on the producers started to make more calls about changing some of Rohan and Rob’s music “a little too often”.
[55:00] To cite the most egregious example of this, Rohan says that at the end of S3, when Arthur retakes Camelot, the producers used as temp music a cue Rob had previously written, played on a loop. Later, they decided to keep this looped cue as the final music rather than the “beautiful” replacement music Rob had written for this scene, which – in Rob and Rohan’s opinion – would've worked much better. Rohan described the music for this scene as “one of the nicest things [Rob] had written in the series”.
[58:00] Rob wrote a few cues for S5 but, apart from those, the producers mostly re-used music from previous seasons.
Rohan’s Opinion of the Music in 2x02
[1:00:00] Despite "a couple of really great moments" and an iconic romantic theme, he doesn’t think 2x02 is his and Rob's best episode. He would give it a 2.5 out of 5.
Current Projects
[1:00:02] Rohan is now working on developing his own style of music, which he calls “epic steampunk” — “Steampunk is a genre with a very distinct visual style, but no one has really defined a musical style for it”. (He says the score for Loki leans towards it, a little bit.) You can look for Dr Ignatius Cole and the Brassknuckle Steampunk Sinfonia if you're interested – there are 3 albums out already, available on Spotify and Youtube.
Footnotes:
(*) A cue is the basic building block of a film score. Essentially, it is one complete piece of music from start to end, meant to play against a scene or sequence. (Source: x)
(**) It’s not in Fighting in the Market, although that’s the scene Rohan mentions right before saying this, but in the Meeting Arthur cue. Compare 0:44-0-54 to 0:48-1:00 in The Parade of the Ewoks. I suppose this was already obvious to someone familiar with the Star Wars soundtrack – in fact, someone already wrote a piece of meta about this and other similarities between Merlin’s OST and John Williams’s score. (I won’t link to it, but if you Google “Merlin soundtrack Star Wars tumblr” you should find it easily enough).
(***) The cues in ep 1x05 and 2x02 sound pretty much identical to me, to be honest, except the sound of the violin is a bit “louder” in 2x02? I suppose that’s what Rohan meant.
