Clock Work
Part One
Howard Shore Discusses Hugo with Doug Adams
~
Hugo takes place
in Paris in 1931 and tells the tale of an orphan who lives behind the walls of
the Gare Montparnasse railway station. Befriended by a young girl named
Isabelle and hunted by the Station Inspector, Hugo seeks to solve the mystery
his father left behind – a mystery embodied by an imperturbable automaton. Hugo
eventually encounters Papa Georges, who grieves for his own past and, like
Hugo, is haunted by what he has lost to time and circumstance.
Martin
Scorsese’s adaptation of Brain Selznick’s 2007 book The Invention of Hugo Cabret is many things. It is a love letter to
mid-twentieth century Parisian culture; an ode to the early days of film; a
tender story about loss, loneliness, and deliverance; and an experiment in
modern cinematic technique. But most of all, it is a story of characters and passions.
The same can be said of Howard Shore’s score. It is an amalgam of
forward-thinking technique and old-fashioned storytelling. It’s both an homage
to a fascinating period in the budding art of film music, and a continued
evolution of Shore’s deeply personal compositional voice. However, as befits
the story, the score’s primary concerns are place, people, and heart.
“Hugo is very detailed in its use of
motifs and themes,” says Shore. “It’s an older style as we know, but Hugo had a pretty traditional type of
approach to using themes for characters and objects. Marty really got into it.
It’s such a nice way to work.
“It
started off right away. I wrote the first reel, and it had seven themes in it.
And I thought, ‘Oh ok, I know where we’re going!’”
The
score’s first theme is built of interlocking fragments of ticking arpeggios,
which represent the great clocks behind which Hugo builds his home. “It’s all
eighths and quarters working together like the gears of a clock.”
The
clockwork theme often underpins Shore’s mystery theme, which depicts the puzzle
Hugo inherits from his father. Here the melodic line passes slowly and steadily,
falling by recurrent octaves in piano.
“Hugo’s
theme is a waltz that turns into ‘Coeur Volant,’” Shore describes. “It was
written by me, Elizabeth Cotnoir and Isabelle Geffroy, whose professional name
is ‘Zaz.’ She’s a French artist who lives in Paris. She worked with us and
performed the song. It was similar to the way we worked with Annie Lennox. We
had some melody, we had some lyrics, and then we worked with the artist who was
actually going to perform it. Zaz added some nice elements.”
Isabelle’s
theme is closely related to Hugo’s in spirit and flavor. Each has a lonely,
isolated quality that warms as the score progresses. “Isabelle comes into the
toy store and you hear the solo musette for the first time.
“There’s
also a theme that’s heard in the tunnels. It’s a traveling piece. I used it in
various places in the film for Hugo’s movement.”
The
automaton that Hugo’s father left behind is decorated with the most exotic
orchestrations in Shore’s score, but they’re subtly applied. The short motif
for the machine rotates through and around B minor tonalities, and is often
orchestrated for strings, celesta, harp, and the delicate electronic tone of
the ondes Martenot, a kind of French theremin that was created in 1928 and employs
a standard piano-like keyboard with a sliding metal ring.
Finally,
the Station Inspector’s theme is a rigid marche
comique featuring cornet, bassoon, and snare drum, which is heightened then
expanded into any number of burlesque contortions as the inept Inspector chases
Hugo throughout the station. “I experimented with many different trumpet
sounds, and I ended up trying a cornet. At the same time I was also
experimenting with different mutes – wooden mutes, paper mutes, brass mutes –
and found a certain sound that I loved: cornet with a wooden mute. I used that
in many scenes.”
With
these seven themes assembled, Shore was prepared to start into the 105 minutes
of score that Hugo would eventually
require – an unusual amount for a Scorsese project.
~
Doug Adams: There’s a
real depth to the writing in this score. At times it feels like it’s a smaller
ensemble folded into a larger ensemble. It’s such a beautiful way to do it
because it puts you in the mindset of three-dimensional imagery. You think of
things in proximity to the listener. Intimate things are close-up, larger-scale
things are broader.
Howard Shore: That was one
of the things I wanted to do very early on. I had not previously worked on 3D
films, but I wanted to make sure I had a lot of depth to the sound of the
recording, so I used a pretty big orchestra: triple winds, brass in threes, 60
strings, and percussion.
The
orchestra was about 88 total, and then I used a second smaller group, which
became its own little band in the middle. It was the sextet: the ondes Martenot,
musette, gypsy guitar, piano, bass, and drums. We used an old 30s drum-kit.
DA: That’s great. All the old
woodblocks and that …
HS: Right, there’s woodblock, and
old cymbals, and snare drum.
I
also used a variety of pianos. The tack piano is actually Mrs. Mills’ piano.
It’s a very famous piano that McCartney used on “Lady Madonna.” They’ve had it
in Abbey Road’s Studio Two for years, so they rolled that out. I used that
quite a lot. It’s a beautiful old Steinway. It has a good tuning, but it’s got
that ‘tack’ sound. I don’t think they’ve done much to it; it’s just an old
beat-up piano!
Mrs.
Mills had a TV show in the UK. Everybody knew the piano. They all called it
“Mrs. Mills’ piano” and made a whole thing of bringing it out! I actually tried
other pianos – small uprights –but we ended up with Mrs. Mills’. A lot of the
ivories are gone, and when the ivories are missing the keys are very rough. So Simon
Chamberlain’s hands would be raw and sore! He’d be playing all these very fast
things, and the piano had no ivory or plastic or anything on the keys.
The
sextet was really the core. I did twelve sessions with the sextet on its own
before I worked with the orchestra. I did a lot of recording with them over the
course of about five months; I would write, and then I would do a live session
with the group. Marty never uses temp – he never puts anything in the film that
doesn’t belong in the film – so whatever I was writing and recording, he would
put in the film. He likes to screen the movie a lot. So it was a way to watch
the film with the right music in it.
DA: I loved the use of the ondes
Martenot in the sextet, because it doesn’t play a novelty role. You’re just
using it as another woodwind; it sits right in that family. It has that
beautiful color but it doesn’t draw undue attention to itself.
HS: That’s right. It’s used like
a woodwind, exactly. It’s such a beautiful instrument. It’s subtly used.
DA: The sextet is creating a very
‘French’ type of sound, but it still feels like it’s entirely connected to the
score. It doesn’t feel like you’re using a different voice and then going back
to the score proper. It’s all one self-contained sound. That’s got to be a
tough thing to accomplish.
HS: Well, I think that’s just
from orchestrating it myself. I get into these grooves. It would have been a
hard score to do with a lot of different people. The completeness is why I like
to do the orchestration.
DA: The other thing that struck
me about the consistency of the score was the harmonic language. If you look at
Hugo’s theme, even when it transforms into the song, it never becomes a
I-IV-V-I thing. You’re not just doing a folk tune. It still has the changes
that are so much a part of your voice, things like the augmented chords and so
on. That made it feel like it was an extension of the score.
HS: I think that’s because you’ve
heard this music all through the film, so it seems it’s most satisfying to hear
a lyric at the end. When you hear that voice come in, it’s like: “Ah, we’re
home!” It just feels so good … if you get it right!
DA: It’s a sense of completion,
like all the parts came together to make something – a last statement.
HS: Exactly. I love that. The
lyric by Elizabeth is so beautiful, and hearing Zaz sing the song in French is just
so gorgeous.
DA: It’s such a beautiful language
anyway.
HS: Exactly. And it just feels so
natural. The lyrics are really beautiful. They’re about the boy and the girl,
and about time and healing. It’s a nice completion.
One
of the things I love about writing film music is that I can delve into these musical
periods. They’re so interesting. Like the world of Naked Lunch, or Ed Wood,
or Georges Méliès, or The Aviator.
That was always a major attraction – to be able to live in these worlds. I
mean, why wouldn’t you want to work in 1930s Paris? Or with the Lumière
brothers or Méliès’ in the late 1800s.
DA: The last themes in the score
deal with Méliès, yes?
HS: Yes. With Georges Méliès in
the last half of the film I started to develop the Nostalgia theme. It has to
do with the past. So that’s the theme of his magic show, and the early days of
cinema. It’s used all throughout the ending of the film.
You
know, people forget that the silent film era was actually over 30 years long.
DA: Yes, we think of that period
like a flash in the pan, but it was around a long time.
HS: From
around 1895 – that was the Lumière brothers – up to the beginning of recorded
dialogue and The Jazz Singer in 1927.
But
the silent era was never silent. It always had music. That’s fascinating to me.
In Hugo they show the Lumière
brothers’ film A Train Comes into the
Station [(L'Arrivée d'un train en
gare de La Ciotat)], and it has a man playing a piano into a tent. It’s in
a sideshow, like in a carnival. He’s playing Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre. I really wanted to get Saint-Saëns into the film
because, as we know, Saint-Saëns was the first film composer.
DA: That’s right. Just about the
very first, The Assassination of the Duke
of Guise [(L'Assassinat du duc de Guise]).
HS: You hear his work
predominantly in a couple of key spots. Danse
Macabre was from 1874, and it was a popular classical piece. It was a very
dark piece – people weren’t used to that kind of music evoking rituals.
DA: The figure of death on his
violin and all that.
HS: Yeah, exactly! So it was a
very popular piece, and of course the Lumière brothers’ silent films were also
a popular type of entertainment. And people were frightened by it! A Train Comes into the Station was
tremendously frightening to people. People thought the train was going to run
them over! That sort of reminds me of 3D. Méliès was an early experimenter with
stereoscopic images, and coloring the film, and creating special effects around
the turn of the century. It was a pretty unusual thing to be doing, but he was
such an innovator.
It’s
so fascinating, the silent era. It was the birth of all film music. What was
played in those movie theaters became what we associate now with film. It went
up through Waxman, Korngold, and Steiner. Everybody that came after the silent
films started with this classical idea of music in film.
DA: It’s such a fascinating
period. We think of that as such a logical combination now – a film will almost
always have music whether it’s an original score, or songs, or source, or
whatever. But somebody had to have that idea. They had to think, “We’ll use
music, it’ll help the storytelling.” People take that for granted, “Of course
it’s there, it has to be.” But somebody thought of that. That was an idea; that
was an innovation.
Hugo puts you
right back in that world of large productions and traditional narrative music.
That’s a good place to be as you move into the next year, yes?
HS: Yes, Hugo was a good lead-up for The
Hobbit.
DA: It puts you in that thematic
mindset again?
HS: Exactly, yes. It brought me
back into that whole process. It was a bigger film score than I had done for a
while in terms of the amount of music, and how the music was used in the film.
It’s not quite as long as The Hobbit
will be, but it was a very similar process in terms of composing. The
composition took basically five months, and the production was pretty extensive
– two months of orchestration, two months of recording/editing/mixing. So Hugo was like a mini Rings score.
As Hugo sets out to ‘fix’ Papa Georges – to show him that the world did not forget his contributions and that he is not a failure – Howard Shore’s score reveals its own clocklike sense of rotating gears and cogs. The seven themes introduced in the film’s first reel pull together to reveal the subtle connections between each of them. The musette-based themes for Hugo and Isabelle begin to join together to complete one another’s phrases. The theme for the Station Inspector is shown to open with the same three pitches that tick back-and-forth in the clockwork theme. The automaton theme, which begins as a literal representation of the metal figure in Hugo’s makeshift home, turns away from the ondes Martenot and settles on two other instruments related to Shore’s sextet. Guitar develops the figure into a theme for Hugo’s father, who builds and repairs machines, and is the central hub of young Hugo’s world. After Hugo’s father is killed, the guitar theme rotates again and is, at times, applied to Monsieur Labisse, the one person in the train station who seems to know his place and purpose – the only part of the station’s ‘machine’ that it not broken. On the other hand, solo piano, an instrument originally associated with the mystery theme, applies the developed automaton music to the magic of Méliès’ filmmaking, then more specifically to Mama Jeanne’s appearance in the finished films. Here the theme moves beyond the literal to represent a sort of surrogate humanity – the soul of ‘projected’ imagery.
