BY JESSIE WANG, LEAD WRITER (COMMUNITY AND SOCIAL AWARENESS) VIA LEVEL AND GAIN
Many of us have watched Sir David Attenborough’s documentaries. You might’ve tuned in during the COVID-19 lockdowns, when everybody started talking about his witness statement and vision for the future, A Life on Our Planet. Or, if you’ve watched his documentaries from as early as 1954, there’s no doubt Sir Attenborough has taught you about the beauty and fragility of our natural world.
But imagine if these documentaries did not have the music that accompanies them. Would they still have the same awe-inspiring effect? Would you still feel the same energy displayed by the male bird of paradise when he does his mating dance? Would you still feel the peculiarity of this octopus that can walk on land?
We often don’t give enough credit to the composers of nature documentaries, but at the same time, our entire cinematic experience would not be the same without them.
We chat with Ilan Eshkeri, who composed the soundtrack to Sir Attenborough’s latest series A Perfect Planet. The composer talks about his creative process and life as an award-winning composer (International Film Music Critics Award, Malibu Film Festival, BAFTA Awards, and more).
Editor’s note: This interview took place over Zoom. It’s been edited for clarity and length.
Hi Ilan! I wanted to start by saying congratulations on yet another collaboration with Sir David Attenborough! A Perfect Planet was your fourth collaboration. Can you tell us how you got involved with him in the first place?
Well, I got asked to do a project. It was called Natural History Museum Alive, and it was Sir David Attenborough exploring the Natural History Museum in the night and the creatures coming to life – you know, a bit like Night at the Museum. It was a really sweet program. It was an hour long and it was great. It did well, people liked it, it won a bunch of awards.
So perhaps the most memorable thing about it was, he came to Abbey Road Studios where we were recording the orchestra, and we spent the morning together. We were recording in November, so it was freezing outside. But the studio, as you might imagine, isn’t open to the elements. There are lots of doors you need to get through before you get to the inner sanctum of the studio.
David spent the whole morning with us, before leaving shortly before the lunch break. By the way, David’s really into music, and he plays the piano! Just as David leaves, I went to have a quick word with the orchestra about something they were going to play. But as I walked up to stand on the conductor’s podium, out of nowhere, a butterfly comes and lands on the music stand.
The orchestra and I were just stunned into silence. I mean, why was the butterfly alive and in mid-November, first of all? And second of all, what on earth was it doing in the middle of a recording studio? It was so bizarre. It was such a magical moment.
I’d like to think that David had released it into the studio as a sign of his approval. Thinking about it now, it seems almost like I made it up or something. If it had been only me, I wouldn’t be sure that it actually happened, but there were lots of people, and I also got a photo of it, so it did happen.
Oh, wow! So that’s where the first collaboration started. And what about this particular project? How did you get involved with it?
An old friend of mine was one of the directors on the projects. And I think the producer liked my work, so they called me in for a meeting and we had a conversation. I told them I wanted to take a contemporary approach to the project. I wanted to make the music a bit more modern than you’d typically get in these kinds of shows. I also wanted to anchor it with a theme that we kept returning to, which is the main theme, the title track, A Perfect Planet. And they liked those ideas.
They liked the idea that I was going to try and do something different from what had come before. They gave me a lot of leeway to explore whatever idea I wanted, and they were really good at letting me approach it in a creative way. And I’m grateful for that, because it’s a leap of faith and a risk for them. It takes guts to make that decision and to let me do my thing like that. It’s much easier to say: ‘No, just do that thing! That sounds like that!’ It’s a much easier thing to say than to say: ‘All right, I’m going to believe in him. He has a crazy plan that he’s going to throw at us but he should go for it.’ And they really did. So I’m grateful to them for letting me express myself in that way.
You mentioned how you wanted to make it more contemporary. Can you give us some examples of musical features you used?
Sure. There’s a scene in the sun episode with snakes. That’s completely electronic – just synths. And there’s a scene with the manta rays in the oceans episode, which is mostly electronic with just some strings coming in at the end.
All the music is supported by a band with bass and guitars and percussion. Then there are a couple of occasions where it is a more traditional symphonic style orchestra. There’s the Red Crabs, which has very classical instruments like solo violins, solo cello, solo oboe, and solo flute – but at the heart of it is all percussion and guitars and ukulele and keyboards.
Silver Ants, that’s all really intense synths, really fast synthesisers pulsing away. Plus some scratchy sounds I made on my violin, ‘cause I’m a failed violinist.
No such thing! You’re a sound designer.
Well, thank you. Yeah, I’ll say that from now on!
What was your process of composing the soundtrack? Did you just watch the film and then compose the music, or did you have the narration and then compose on top of it? How did it work?
You have the narration – but it’s not David’s voice at the beginning of the process, because the film is being edited so it’s changing all the time. It’s like trying to hit a moving target. But you’ve got a good sense of what each episode is.
Then, I would break it down, because it’s like writing 50 short films. Each scene is its own complete story. So you’d watch the scene with the fig wasps and be like: ‘Well, that’s like a sort of sci-fi horror movie.’ And then you’d watch the fire ants, where their home gets destroyed and their former raft too, and they have to find a new home. That’s like an adventure survival movie! They get attacked by pond skaters too, so it’s like a giant being attacked by a giant science-fiction beast, you know? Or the silver ants I mentioned before, they’re a heist: they’ve got a really short window of time to get some food, to get their prize, before they get burned by the sun. Then all these things happen along the way that are obstacles they have to overcome.
So you can watch each scene and liken it to a type of a genre, […] then work out the instrumentation.
As for the nuts and bolts of the creative process, there were so many. I thought: ‘I’m just going to spend 10 minutes on each one, and just put an idea down and then I’ll come back to it. If that idea is good, I’ll expand on it.’ And that was quite a fun way to do it. I did it all just with guitars and keys, meaning it started only in a contemporary place as I didn’t do anything orchestral at the beginning.
The creative process for me is always a bit of a mystery, because you have to play all these notes – and the notes are just random notes, right? But then there’s a moment where the notes stop being random and start to form a tune. They start to mean something. For me, that’s the magic moment – the moment where they’re greater than the sum of their parts. They’re not just a series of notes. They’ve come together to mean something, to be more than just a series of notes. I’m always looking for that.
That’s fascinating to learn about how you turn notes into tone colours.
You know, even that moment of creativity where we talk about something becoming greater than the sum of its parts – is that because you find something that existed already in nature somehow, or is it because I breathe life into it? I don’t know the answer to that, but I’m fascinated by that question.
Also, you mentioned tone colours – and I have synesthesia. So I’m very affected by colour and music. On an aesthetic level, that affects my choices a lot.
I feel like your choices would be affected on an emotional level, as well. I guess when you’re composing, you’re always aware of how the music will relate to the audience’s emotion, and how it’s all almost like an innate thing to want the music to touch our emotions.
That’s what I would always say, that music is an emotional narrative. That’s the job of the music. Even if you’re scoring an action scene, your job is: ‘How does this person feel in this situation?’ You can have functional music for the sake of propulsion and energy. Music can serve that purpose, but that doesn’t interest me, and I don’t like writing music like that. I’m always asking the question: ‘What is this character feeling in this scenario, and how do I express that through music?’
I think all music is like that. Even if you’re playing Mozart, it might be an abstract emotional narrative – so it may not have a clear a linear narrative, but emotionally it has a narrative. That’s what fascinates me about my work.
So you mentioned you wanted to break away from how most documentary music has been composed before. While I was listening to yours, I noticed the choir is featured prominently in the soundtrack. Was that deliberate?
I think in these kinds of nature documentaries, people don’t use choirs that much because the choir is very human and we all sing all the time. So it’s like the symphony orchestra is this weird and magical thing that’s always far away from you; and that the electric guitar is the instrument of rock stars. But the voice, that’s very human. And the piano as well, that’s an instrument of the home. We often use that.
So if there’s a man lost in the desert, and he’s remembering his family back at home, piano is the perfect instrument to use there, because it’s at odds with the alien landscape of the desert. It’s all about family and home. So choir is an instrument that’s very familiar to us. Voice is very familiar to us. And when you’re writing music about animals, and distant and faraway lands where humans don’t really exist, it doesn’t seem very appropriate, nor does piano. But I wanted my theme to be about Mother Nature, because the program is all the forces of the planet versus humans – that is, what we’re doing to it. So it had to come back to people. So I was like, it’s Mother Nature, it’s people. So we keep coming back to that vocal idea.
I’m so glad you’ve asked this question, because a lot of thought, as you could tell, goes into this, and I’m glad to share these ideas. When we pull out further away from the planet, you get these piano motifs as well. And that was my way of musically saying: ‘This is our home. This magical marble hanging in the sky.’ That’s why you use the homely instrument in that moment. So that was the thinking of the use of the choir.
I particularly like how you said the voice is very human, because it reminded me of growing up and learning music in a choir. It’s something that’s very raw, it’s something that’s very human, and it’s something that kids can get involved with as well. So I really like how you’ve used the choir throughout this soundtrack. Obviously, you wanted this soundtrack to have an educational purpose – to educate children around the topics of climate change and the environment. How do you envision music teachers and parents and other educators to use this soundtrack?
Well, the first thing I did was on the main title track, which is called A Perfect Planet. I got children to sing in that. We engaged a few kids’ choirs. And that was great!
If I go back a bit further than that, when I was writing this piece of music, my daughter, who was 4 years old at the time, started singing the tune back to me. Now, this was quite exceptional because my daughter is by far my harshest critic. We were on a long-haul flight once, and she was watching the Shaun the Sheep Movie. A bit of the way through it, I proudly said to her: ‘Do you know Daddy wrote the music for that?’ She looked at me, looked back at the screen, and changed it to something else. I thought that would have started happening when she was a teenager, but she’s deeply unimpressed by me. So the fact that she was singing this music to A Perfect Planet was high praise indeed. And I thought maybe I’ve written something that is simple enough and engaging enough that kids could sing it.
With the idea of education, we first got these children’s choirs to sing on it. And then later, when we were allowed to tell them what they’d sung, they were so inspired. I got messages from their teachers, even from the pupils. They were so excited to have been involved and so interested to watch the program.
I think that’s what really matters, you know – we can inspire change that way. I mean, there’s lots we need to do right now. But I think about when I talked to my daughter, I’d say: ‘This is where the recycling goes. It’s really important. You put this here.’
For me, I was born in the ‘70s and grew up in the ’80s. We didn’t recycle. That wasn’t a thing. That would have been extremely niche. So I wasn’t taught those things, but if collectively around the world we can teach all our children to think about the world in terms of recycling, climate, sustainability, then they’re going to grow up to be the next business leaders, the next scientists, the next doctors, the next world leaders. At their core, they’re going to have a different outlook to us. It’s going to be far easier. We can’t just let them solve it when they’re older – we have a lot of work that needs to happen imminently. But you could see there’s a grassroots thing that’s beginning to change, so if the music is engaging for schools and there are schools out there that would like to sing it, I would love to share it with them. Then, they’d be able to talk about why they were singing it.
That would not only engage the children and the teachers, but also the parents. And suddenly it’s a conversation you’re having around the dinner table. This is perhaps a lofty ambition for a composer, but I would love to make that happen.
Despite what your daughter may think, I’d consider you to have an impressive body of work already, from collaborating with Sir Attenborough four times, to famous movies like Johnny Reborn or Shaun the Sheep Movie, to even video games like Sims Four.
I’m still doing Sims Four. It just keeps on giving!
I love that! So, do you have any tips for the younger composers in our community who may be reading this and are thinking they want to compose for screen?
You know, I think what’s different now from when I started out is that the technology is available. It was very difficult for me to be able to record music and do stuff like that – the technology wasn’t easily available. Now, you can make an album on your phone, literally! So I would say: make music, make an album, put your music out there, find short films to do, find someone making an app game.
The people you start out with, some of them will go on to do something else, and bit by bit you’ll work your way up the ladder. When Max Richter put out his first album The Blue Notebooks, it wasn’t a big deal and nobody heard about it. But you cut to 15 years later, and Deutsche Grammophon is re-releasing it as a seminal important work. So you never know! Just make music, put it out there, express yourself, connect, do as much as possible.
The other bit of advice I’d give, if you want to do video games or TV or film: you need to study narrative. I don’t see enough people saying this – it’s all about story! So, read a book on writing scripts, understand narrative structure in novels, read Aristotle’s poetics, which has the foundation for every possible kind of story that we tell. Understand the art of storytelling, and then you’ll be able to know what it is that you’re meant to be doing better, and you’ll more easily be able to have conversations with your directors and your producers or game developers, or whoever it is. It’s all story, story, story, story!
Yep. Everything is a story. As a writer, it’s always about having a story that shines through – so for me, it’s always about stories, too!
It is! And it’s a human condition, right? From the youngest age, we learn nursery rhymes and we read these books, and they shape us.
Yeah, exactly. Before I let you go, I wanted to ask you this: like Sir Attenborough, you’re passionate about the environment and preventing climate change from hurting future generations. How do you think music helps in a way that other mediums might not be able to do?
I think music helps across so many areas because it inspires, it touches, it gets people through things.
At least once a week, I get an email from a couple getting married who asked me for the music for The Young Victoria, which is a film about Victoria and Albert falling in love. When I wrote that film score, I was falling in love, and so that music is really an expression of my own emotions. This music has connected so many people around the world. Thatso many people, in the hundreds, have emailed me over the years to walk down the aisle or have their first dance to that piece of music – that’s the thing I’m most proud of, to be the one who makes that connection.
Music has the power to inspire, to emote, to help. So in terms of climate, well, maybe that’s all it can do. For people who’ve got difficult tasks ahead of them, maybe a little bit of music is going to help them through that.
Watch A Perfect Planet on BBC.
Want more stories about screen music? Visit our sister publication Level and Gain.
Images supplied.
