23 February 2009
Debbie Wiseman has found fame as a film and TV composer and now has over 200 productions to her name. We visited her to see what makes her tick.
Other Featured Artist
Debbie lives and works in an extraordinarily beautiful North London house, dominated by a big central living room where her writing studio takes centre stage. The room is surrounded by DVDs, soundtrack albums, numerous awards, and posters of films she has scored. The sitting out area is clearly there as much for visiting Directors’ comfort as hers, and you can immediately see this is a person who is very serious indeed about what they do.
The room is conspicuously tidy and organised which is perhaps at odds with her creative flair. Her choices of melody and orchestration are visceral and intuitive and like all the best composers, never predictable. To Debbie the organisation is simply part of being professional and tidiness is a necessary state of mind. Who’d have thought that this was the room that belongs to the person who has just finished scoring the music for this spring’s comedy/horror movie Lesbian Vampire Killers!?
Click here to listen to Debbie's tracks.
“When you are working with big scores and orchestras and tight production deadlines, you simply have to be organised,” she says, “If you’re not, and you try to busk it, small mistakes can quickly turn into major and expensive muddles.” So quite rightly, Debbie doesn’t do disorder.
Debbie’s credits encompass a wide variety of styles and influences from serious drama (Wilde, The Passion, Warriors, Judge John Deed, He Knew He Was Right, The Project) to documentaries (Stephen Fry in America, The Secret Diary of the Holocaust, Death of Yugoslavia), to comedy (The Private Life of Samuel Pepys, Before You Go, My Uncle Silas) to classic action/adventure (Flood, Arsene Lupin, Jekyll).
Apart from her writing career, Debbie is an eloquent commentator and spokesperson for the music world. She has turned her hand to presenting her own TV series “Backtracks” for Channel 4 examining the role of music in film, and she appears as a guest on various TV and radio programmes including the BBC transmissions of the Proms. She is now composing new works for Audio Network and is enjoying this new challenge.
“I’m enjoying coming up with my own imaginary pictures and writing music that fits the scenes I’m painting in my head” she says. “I’m so used to having a film to inspire me that even when I’m writing without a picture I find I still need some visual stimulus to come up with the musical ideas, and so I draw inspiring pictures in my head and write music to accompany them!”
The art of writing for a production catalogue like Audio Network is that the music needs to be general enough to be useful with a variety of images, but not lose its integrity and individuality. Not as easy to do as some people might think – but done with unerring style by Debbie who brings all the wisdom of 200 productions and nearly as many directors, producers, editors and other creative people to bear with her new works for Audio Network.
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Q&A
| What was your most embarrassing faux pas? | Asking a lovely girl at a recent party when her baby was due. She replied “I’m not pregnant, I’m just fat…” |
| What is your greatest/favourite claim to fame? | Beating the great lyricist Don Black at table tennis. |
| Which album do you air guitar/drum/keyboard to? | Air KEYBOARD??? Er… pass… |
| Any musical guilty pleasures? | Songs from FAME…! |
| Who would play you in a movie? | Bruce Willis... obviously he’d have to grow his hair out… |
| Which composer or band would you bring back from the dead? | Too many to list, but just for starters…Olivier Messiaen, Mozart, Jerry Goldsmith, Debussy, and Elmer Bernstein. |
| What is your greatest extravagance? | Bic Matic 0.7 Pencils! I get through hundreds of them a week…they’re the only ones that you can write quite hard with on manuscript paper and still be able to completely rub it out afterwards…and they are quite expensive compared to ordinary pencils…! |
| Any words of wisdom you would like to offer or have received? | “Write something every day, even if it’s rubbish and you throw it out afterwards; it keeps the creative juices flowing” The wise words of my late composition teacher, the wonderful Buxton Orr. |
| Any hidden talents? | Table tennis and pole dancing… no, actually, just table tennis. |
| What/who would you put in Room 101? | The person who invented traffic road humps, but not before I’d made him dig them all up first. |
| Your top 5 musical works of all time or today are? | Messiaen’s “Turangalila Symphony”; Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring”; Mozart’s Piano Sonata in Bb major (as by playing that piece I was awarded a place at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama); Debussy’s “La Mer”, and Benjamin’s Britten’s “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” as it inspired me as a child and I’ve since composed a new Young Person’s Guide as a kind of tribute! |
| What's behind you? | I don’t know, I never look…but hopefully it’s not lesbian vampires or a steamroller. |
| If you could be reincarnated, who would you come back as? | Me again, but with an added ability to cook and read road maps. |
| Have you ever been on Top of The Pops? | No, not even in the audience…howzaboutthatthen… I’d rather be on Top Gear… |
| What inspires you? | Moving pictures |
| If you weren't writing music for a living what would you be doing? | I’d be Prime Minister, obviously. Or world snooker champion. |
| Do you ever hear a complete piece of music in your head before writing it/ recording it? | Sometimes I have the complete shape of it in my head, but often when I start writing it down it changes shape and develops into something else… |
| Do you download or buy music on CD? | Sometimes for research purposes, but not generally…I’m surrounded by music during the day, and don’t like to listen to too much other music when I’m composing. |
| Other than family, what one thing would you rescue if your house was on fire? | I’m not going back in there… are you having a laugh?? |
| What question have you always wanted someone to ask you, and what would be your answer? | Willy Wonka: “I’ve just invented this dark chocolate that you can eat as much as you like of without putting on any weight. Would you like a lifetime’s supply?”
Me: “Yes please” |