Choosing the right music for a video

Alex North didn't find out until the premiere. In 1968 he walked into the first screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey expecting to hear his own score: months of work, commissioned by Stanley Kubrick himself, who had already wanted him on Spartacus. What he heard instead was Richard Strauss, György Ligeti, Aram Khachaturian — the pieces Kubrick had been using as temp track, the placeholder music directors lay over early cuts to feel out the rhythm. Kubrick had found them so right that he kept them. North's actual score didn't surface until 1993, recorded by Jerry Goldsmith twenty-five years too late.

It's the extreme version of a question anyone cutting a video ends up asking: is this music right, or is it just right because I've worn it in?

Parallel or contrast

The first decision — before genre, before instrument — is whether the music should agree with the picture or argue with it.

Going parallel is the intuitive one: a tender film gets tender music, a fast cut gets a driving rhythm. It works, it's safe, and that's exactly why it's the far more common choice.

Contrast is riskier, and when it lands it stays with people longer. Kubrick knew this: in A Clockwork Orange he puts Singin' in the Rain over a scene of violence. The cheerfulness of the song doesn't soften anything — it makes it colder.

There's a way to measure what a choice like that can be worth. In 1971 Coca-Cola put a whole hillside on screen singing I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke: a commercial shot on a hill outside Rome, with a jingle so far from the advertising language of its day that somebody decided to cut it as an actual record. Re-released by the New Seekers without a word about the drink, I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing went number one in the UK and seventh in the States. Music written to sell something had come loose from the product and become the product.

What every instrument says without saying it

But why does one instrument sit right on an image and another doesn't?

Every instrument carries associations the audience never consciously processes and recognises anyway. A solo piano, especially low in its range, attaches itself almost automatically to intimacy or grief (count how many television episodes end on a lone piano — it's a habit by now). A strummed acoustic guitar is something close to a shared code for youth and summer, even when the video has nothing to do with either.

Sergio Leone worked backwards compared with almost everyone. For Once Upon a Time in the West) he had Ennio Morricone write the themes before shooting, then played them on set while the actors performed — each character had their own. This wasn't a whim: he wanted the rhythm of the shot to come out of the music rather than the other way round. Watch the final duel in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly with that in mind and you can't unsee it: the glances fall where the theme falls.

_Evan Puschak on why Leone played the music on set, and what it changes for the people acting and the people cutting. Video: Nerdwriter1._

An edit needs points, not just a track

There's a last thing that first-time music choosers almost always underestimate: a video hardly ever uses a piece start to finish as it comes. It needs to cut it, stretch it, make it lift at one precise moment in the story.

A track with a legible shape — a distinct opening, a point where the rhythm arrives, a peak — hands the editor places to build the cut around. A shapeless track, however lovely on its own, forces you to cut blind. It's no accident that working editors ask for the separate parts as well as the finished file: rhythm alone, melody alone, so the picture can breathe where the picture wants it, not where the music does.

Alex North had understood all of this rather too well, and that's exactly why his story is still the instructive one: he had written a technically faultless score for the wrong film. Kubrick wasn't looking for the best music. He was looking for the right music — and those are almost never the same thing.