interviews with library music producers - Philip Tagg

20 P Tagg: The Mood Music Libraries
pet-like synth preset (extract 2). These phrases are then taken over by horn a 4
registrations on synthesiser. These figures (ex. 3, p. 20) are even more fanfarish than
the previous ones. Then more pieces of a similar type are played.
Extracts from Alan Hawkshaw’s Terrestrial Journey (Bruton BRI/A2, 1979)
What kind of instructions did you give Alan Hawkshaw when commissioning
this LP? Did you say you wanted so or so many tracks of this or that length
with a particular character, or what?
I suppose the brief is much more involved with what the use of the music is
going to be rather than with the number of tracks and so on. So we have to
think about what ingredients to put in the album, why it would be used when
it comes to the crunch, and work backwards from there.
So what would he hear from you as regards this piece, for example, just to
take a case in point?
What we would try to imply in all the excerpts you heard would obviously be
first of all energy —which means really trying to do things. Then there’s a
bit of prestige and putting it into a serious vein rather than a jokey one. We’d
perhaps ask him to make it very contemporary, aiming at the future rather
than reflecting what’s happening now, you know, so that there’s a feel of
things to come. That’s how we’d start talking. It’s a question of pre-empting
what people need and then trying to get round it musically.
This sort of need that people have, how do you get wind of that? Do you do
any market research into that sort of thing?
Market research is obviously a part of it, but honestly the main ideas come
out of actually listening to music yourself. You have to hear what’s actually
going on around you or see something in a film. For example, there was
Shaft which was a breakthrough on the rhythm field and everybody jumped
on to the bandwagon.
Yes, and they even jumped on that bandwagon in Sweden and used Shaft
as signature for their TV sports magazine. As the final wah-wah chord dies
out they sometimes show a frozen sunlit spray from a water-skier, which I
suppose is a bit corny, but effective. Anyhow, getting back to the composer’s
brief: is there much discussion in musical terms when you talk to
each other?