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Peter Rothbart's Film and Television Scoring Class

When I was a kid, I was fascinated with film music. I would come home from the movie theater singing the film’s musical themes, and they would become the soundtrack to my own backyard games—at least until the next big movie came out. Even as I grew older this interest remained; while my friends were buying the latest Matchbox 20 CD, I was listening to the soundtracks from Hollywood action movies like The Mask of Zorro.

Many years later, as a freshman sound recording major at Ithaca College, I knew that I wanted to be a recording engineer. I still loved film soundtracks, and when a friend asked me to score a short film he was making for class, I accepted, even though I had few actual qualifications. I blundered through this project, writing music more from instinct than from a clear sense of purpose, but in the end I wound up with a score that pleased us both.

When the opportunity arose to take Professor Peter Rothbart’s Film and Television Scoring class, I quickly enrolled. The class offered a unique opportunity: not only to compose a score for a real movie but also to have that score performed by a full symphony orchestra and recorded in a session run just like movie studios do for a big budget film. Since the class was geared mainly toward composition majors and not recording majors like myself, I knew I’d have to work hard to catch up to students with more composition experience. I was confident, however, that the music education I had received at Ithaca had prepared me for the challenge.

One of the first things I learned in class was how much preparation is required before a score is actually written. Professor Rothbart walked us through the process professionals follow. We learned how to decide where music should go in a film, how to determine what role the music should play, and how to calculate the proper tempo for the music so that all of the right dramatic moments are hit. In short, we developed a blueprint for the actual writing of the music.

Even with this blueprint, however, the process of actually composing the music was difficult. Dr. Rothbart gave the class two film clips to choose from for our final project: the car chase scene from French Connection and the opening scene of China Syndrome. Choosing between them was hard enough; I labored for hours over the French Connection clip before finally deciding to score the other. When it came time to write the music, I drew initial inspiration from the ambient noise and the emotion of the characters in the movie, writing music to match. Once the music was written and orchestrated for a full symphony there was still the practical consideration of printing out the music for each instrument and making everything look professional and easy to read.

On the day of the orchestra readings, each composer had 15 minutes to get an acceptable recording of his or her piece—a difficult yet practical task, as a full symphony orchestra and recording studio can cost upwards of $1,000 per minute. I was nervous as my turn came, because I had to give directions to the entire orchestra, but it all worked out well in the end. After recording, the engineers mixed the music and laid it back into the movie, so we could watch the movie and hear our soundtrack.

While I still love recording and want to make it a career, this class has opened up new opportunities to me in composition as well. Before this class I would not have considered myself a composer, though I had written several pieces of music. But thanks to  Professor Rothbart and the Film and Television Scoring class, I have written a piece of music that has been performed by one of the finest college orchestras in the country and recorded in a world-class studio. One of the reasons I chose to come to Ithaca College was the amount of freedom students have to determine their own education, and I don’t think that I would have had this opportunity anywhere else.