Alexandre Desplat and the Renewal of the Timbre of Hollywood Symphonies: Programmed Sounds as a Form of Casting the Orchestra into Relief with Magical Effect - Text 1
Alexandre Desplat, born in Paris in 1961, has been one of the most sought-after French composers in Hollywood in every genre and using the most varied aesthetics since his score for Jonathan Glazer’s film Birth (2004). This can be seen in the Stephen Gaghan film Syriana (2005), David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla (2014) and Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl (2015). In addition to his earlier collaborations in France with Jacques Audiard, he has worked with such notable directors such as Wes Anderson and Roman Polanski. He has won Academy Awards for best music for Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) and Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water (2017). Although generally speaking he comes out of the new Hollywood current (that of John Williams and Danny Elfman), he strives to find a specific timbre for a film. He also stands apart from the canon established by Hans Zimmer and Remote Control,[1] in which complete digitalizing of the sound, samples and sub-basses dominate. His taste for minimalism and a spare style[2] have led him to conceive the Hollywood symphonic timbre differently and to come up with a singular hybrid form in the digital age. This is what the present text will attempt to cast light on, from highlighting certain sections of orchestral instruments to the invention of a musical texture suggestive of magic.[3]
Modernizing strings and flutes through machines and modes of play
Desplat pays particular attention to the strings, which he wishes to be modern and softened, from the perspective of the composition but also of the performance, recording and mixing. The strings are sometimes played with a mute, and quite often separated. Even when the cellos dominate, as in the score for the Chris Weitz film The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009), as required by the vampire movie tradition, they are much more separated and less opaque than in the score by Wojciech Kilar for Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (1992). The strings avoid vibrato effects (including in a romantic register) and, when tremolo is used, it is distributed throughout the sections (for example, the first violin line will play tremolo while the second violin does not). Playing harmonics is privileged (bowed percussion instruments are sometimes incorporated to create an ether around the strings). Desplat carries out meticulous sound recording for the harmonics, placing the microphones at some distance from the strings to obtain a more ethereal timbre. Overall, he conceives the colouration of the strings with his sound recordist while composing. He selects the microphone and the distance between it and the instruments, and elaborates the various sound planes and their distribution during the recording (the strings can sometimes be spread across the entire width of the stage). The sequence in The Danish Girl in which Einar begins to realize that he wishes to become a woman (“The Mirror”) fits this kind of procedure: a cello motif, played in harmony in open fourths (sharp register) without vibrato, occasionally boosted by a few spare notes on a harp in harmony, emerges under a synth pad of separated first and second violins, dolcissimo.
