Film fans will know you as the composer for the filmBabe. How proud are you of the fact your music has been heard by a generation?
21 years ago I had only composed two movie scores and a handful of documentaries, so I was very surprised when George Miller (producer) and Chris Noonan (director) invited me to audition for Babe. When they offered me the gig, it took me about a week to pick up my jaw off the floor! It’s rare a film endures the test of time, but Babe still looks as fresh as the day it was made.
You’ll conduct the Sydney Symphony Orchestra as it performs your score live with a screening of the film. What new challenges does this bring?
Keeping 80 musicians in sync with the picture requires incredible concentration and endurance from everyone onstage. The score is very detailed and technically challenging for the musicians. I have to take all my cues from a monitor which indicates the start, tempo, hit points and end of each piece of music.
How long and involved is the process for composing a score, as opposed to a standalone piece?
Composing for film is a collaborative process and a close working relationship with the director is a prerequisite. The director usually plays a major role in guiding the genre, instrumentation and emotional contour of the score. Composing a standalone concert piece is usually a much more isolated experience, where you are left to your own devices. Films usually have to be composed very quickly, whereas standalone concert works are not usually prone to such tight deadlines.
Is there one musical moment that defines Babe, and if so, did you know at the time of writing it was going to leave a legacy?
The emotional peak of the story occurs when Babe wins the sheepdog trials at the end of the film. The chorale from Saint-Saëns’ third symphony is the predominant music for this scene, but it has been re-orchestrated and I have added variations and a coda. In the process of writing, recording, revising and performing the score, I must have seen the film many hundreds of times, yet every time I conduct a performance, I still get just as excited and emotionally involved as I did 21 years ago. None of us working on the film had any idea just how successful the film would become when it was released in 1995.
Nigel Westlake conducts The Sydney Symphony Orchestra in Babe: Pig At The Symphony, takingplaceThursday April 28 – Saturday April 30 at theConcert Hall, Sydney Opera House.
