Paul Honey on Settling The Score
Paul Honey's latest score is for the BBC's new series Genius Of The Ancient World which starts this Wednesday evening on BBC 4. Here he explains how he finds his musical inspiration...
What do you find is the most exciting part of getting involved in a new production?
PH: Like any new production, I’ve found that starting a new project feels a bit like learning how to write music all over again. I’ve heard quite a few other composers say the same thing.
Every new project places different demands on you as a writer, especially when you are working with new people, as was the case with Children of The Holocaust (nominated for a Bafta in 2014). I would say it’s exciting but also quite daunting!
Where did you find your inspiration for this?
Quite a few different things - 20th Century classical music; Shostakovich for instance, Jewish melodies and in the case of one of the stories, Czech folk music. Really anything that could help me effectively paint a picture of Europe’s descent into darkness.
How did you find the right musical tone for a documentary which conveys such intimate emotion through the telling of the story alone?
It was tricky - the most important thing was to let the story tell itself - I was always very aware of making the music set an overall mood, rather than giving extra emotion to all the twists and turns of the stories that were being told. One of the challenges was a that I was briefed to write music that would play continuously underneath each of the survivor’s stories. When one account is of a young man’s time in Auschwitz, and another tells of a girl’s mother being taken away on a death march where she is shot by German soldiers, it raised the question of whether in those sort of instances music should be used at all. For example, Arek Hersh’s story is of his survival in Auschwitz. Any semblance of melody and harmony would be inappropriate so I wrote music that was largely atonal - scraped percussion, high string harmonics and low discordant piano chords. The most important thing for me working on this film was to respect the stories and those who told them - I really didn’t want the music to be there cheapening the impact of what was being said.
See more at www.thecomposerworks.com/composer/paul-honey/
Watch Children Of The Holocaust here.
