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Tweet Soundtrax 2023-2a
Special Edition:
- Remembering Christopher Gunning
by Randall D. Larson
Christopher Gunning, English composer of concert works and music for films and television, passed away on March 25, 2023, at the age of 78. A prolific composer best known, perhaps, for his film music, of which he composed nearly 60 scores from 1970’s GOODBYE GEMINI to 2014’s GRACE OF MONACO. I had the opportunity to interview Gunning a couple of times, first in 1993 for my book Music from the House of Hammer (portions later appeared in an essay in Film Score Monthly, Sept. 1993) and then again in 2013 for my Musique Fantastique book project. With fond memories of his music and sincerest sympathies for his passing, I present some of our discussions from these interviews as a remembrance of the composer and the enduring impressions of his music.
Q: What was your background in music and how you got involved in film scoring?
Gunning: Briefly, my background is this: I trained at the Guildhall School of Music, in drama, in London, for four years. I studied piano, I studied composition, and I also studied for a Bachelor of Music degree. I think I’ve always been interested in just about every kind of music, and although, of course, my musical education was basically of a classical nature, however I also got interested in jazz at the same time, I used to buy Miles Davis records as soon as they became available and I developed an interest in pop music at the same time. Whilst I was at the Guildhall School of Music, I studied composition, firstly with Edwin Rubbra and later on with Richard Rodney Bennett – I went to him specifically because I was interested, already, in writing for films, and I thought that, since he was already a very, very successful film composer, he might be able to help me with some of the technical aspects, etcetera. And in fact he did, he was most helpful. My very first jobs in film were arranging some music for him, I arranged bits – the sort of bits that he didn’t want to do, I guess – for NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA and also another film called THE BUTTERCUP CHAIN.
Round about the same time, I started writing music for television commercials. That came about completely by accident. Actually what I was doing, I was doing some arrangements for a singer who worked on the end of Brighton Pier and it turned out that his day job was producing television commercials and one day he said “Chris, how would you like to write the music for a commercial,?” And I don’t mind admitting that I’d heard that there was a fortune to be made at this, so I said yes, in view of the fact that I was really earning no money at all at that time. That’s how I became involved in commercials, and I was to be involved in commercials for the next ten years or so, on and off. At the same time, I was involved with pop music a little bit, mostly doing arrangements for singers. Some of the names are Cilla Black, Tommy Steele, Colin Blundstone, the Hollies, and later on of course I was to become involved with an album made by Mel Torme, which was a great joy, and also a couple of albums by Phil Woods, the saxophonist.
Q: What were some of your first films?
Gunning: The first films that I was involved with were all documentary films. Once again, I think it was on the recommendation of Richard Rodney Bennett that I became involved with these. I wrote films about all manner of things, about 20 of them in total. But the first feature film that I composed was GOODBYE GEMINI, which was a [horror] film about twins. That was produced by Joseph Shaftel, and directed by the late Alan Gibson.
Q: GOODBYE GEMINI (aka TWINSANITY) harbored a much different approach to fear and fantasy – through orchestral melody and a touch of jazz here and there. Do you recall what challenges this first score posed for you and how you came up with the musical approach you did?
Gunning: The challenge for me was suddenly, at an early age, having to cope with a substantial film score! Alan Gibson (director) was quite helpful in explaining the emotions required for each scene, but Jo Shaftel (producer) made things difficult by telephoning frequently and telling me “this has to be the greatest goddamn score in the world.” Aaaaaargh! Regarding the actual music, I don’t remember having big difficulties with any sections other than the ritual murder. This I found perplexingly hard to do, and sought help from John Scott, who looked at what I was doing and assisted from the mid point on to the end. What a brilliant friend to have!
The score for GOODBYE GEMINI was partly pop music and partly orchestral music – and some of the orchestral music was pretty freaky, I think, for its time. The main theme, with the two duetting flutes, was partly based on a theme I had already written, so it was good to find a use for it. I wanted something that would create a sense of the love between the twins, of how things might have been if their relationship had not become so bitterly twisted. Elsewhere in the score there is music which echoed the kind of thing you would have heard in London at that time – Blood, Sweat and Tears, folky music, and of course there was also straightforward score too. I enjoyed working on that, quite a lot.
Q: How did you become involved with Hammer Films?
Gunning: I became involved with Hammer films through HANDS OF THE RIPPER. In fact, it’s the only Hammer horror film that I have composed the music for. What happened was that Philip Martell had heard some of my work and rang up one day, asked me to come and see him. I remember having an interview with him in his house and I played him various bits and pieces of music that I composed and at the end of the interview he said “Well, Chris, that’s marvelous, and I’ll get you a film. It’ll be some time, maybe, but don’t you worry, I will get you a film.” As good as his word, he did.
Q: How would you describe your approach to scoring HANDS OF THE RIPPER?
Gunning: My approach to HANDS OF THE RIPPER was, broadly speaking, this: we needed a number of themes. I think the most important theme was a rather idyllic theme played mostly by a solo flute accompanied by a harp and some strings. This represented the little girl, when she was not possessed by the Ripper of course. And we then needed some contrasting material to be used when she became possessed by the Ripper, and of course this was of much more horrifying nature, and used a fairly large orchestra for a Hammer film I think, about forty or fifty, mostly strings, French horns, and some percussion and harps and vibraphones. Another important thematic ingredient is the trance music. For quite chunks of the film we are aware that Anna is walking around in a trance-like state, and what we needed was something high and suspended, and that’s when I used the vibraphone and the harp and very high strings, suspended, with hardly any movement.
Q: How was it working with Philip Martell as your music director on this film?
Gunning: He was incredibly efficient when it came to conducting the orchestra and getting the music recorded. Phil also deserves a great deal of credit for introducing a lot of composers into films, and sometimes these were people who had never, never scored a film before. I'm thinking of people like John McCabe and Paul Patterson – they’re two that immediately come to mind, and of course they brought with them a freshness that was very, very welcome. Phil Martell used composers who wrote sometimes quite eminent in the concert music field, and really knew their stuff, knew how to write proper music. As I said, he deserves a awful lot of credit for that. I don't think there as anybody else, active at that time, in the British music industry who did anything comparable.
Q: Have you scored any other Hammer films?
Gunning: The only other Hammer film that I worked on was not a horror film at all, it was a spin-off from a television show, and it was called MAN ABOUT THE HOUSE. It was a comedy, in fact, and was made musically for a far lower budget even, than HANDS OF THE RIPPER.
Q: Your score for the 1981 miniseries DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS takes a far different approach than that of the 1961 feature film. Your music is austere, largely atonal, focusing on solo piano and a few supportive instruments, yet it established a thoroughly creepy mood throughout the film. What was your brief when you first came onto the project and how did you conceive of and develop the score for this film?
Gunning: I hadn’t heard the music for the 1961 film when I worked on TRIFFIDS. I enjoyed working with Ken Hanham, the director, because although he had ideas about what the music should say, I was mostly left to my own devices as to how that should be achieved. I decided on a largely atonal idiom because I felt that would give the creepiest atmosphere. I was also interested in some newly emerging styles of “classical” music, particularly from Poland, and wanted to try my hand at some of the newer techniques being developed. Some of the music, quite a lot in fact, has no metre as such, and consists of improvised sequences, with the notes being given to the performers but the time in which they played them not specified. Of course all this was done within strict limits, otherwise complete chaos would have resulted!
Q: Your main title music also contains very evocative yet spooky moans from a chorus (heard nowhere else in the film score). How did this sonic element come about and what were you trying to say with this unique choral pattern?Gunning: The choral music for the titles actually has sung lyrics. The text was devised, at my request, by my ex wife, who invented some biological Latin. We had a small choir – about 12 voices, accompanied by some brass and percussion, with two pianos and a harp. There was a very tight budget, so it was out of the question to have a choir for the incidental music. Instead I kept the two pianos with harp and percussion. The percussion was used to create eerie effects with a vast number of different instruments. I used the pianos in various ways, often giving them note patterns to play in their own time to create random, almost disorganized “rippling” effects. They would play these patterns for a number of seconds, then move on to the next pattern at a sign from the conductor (me). The harmony that these note sequences made was very important – the music was actually highly organized within the limits outlined already. If there was action on screen, I would sometimes abandon this technique and revert to more “normal” music, with a definite tempo.
The whole thinking behind the score was to create a sense of chaos. I wanted to emphasize the emotions of the characters and their reactions to the dreadful menace of the invading plants in any way I could. Given the budgetary limits of six or seven musicians, the pianos seemed a sensible way to make the limits work. Also, all the instruments I chose were percussive – although the piano is capable of great lyricism, it’s essentially a percussion instrument after all. And so is the harp. Thus, when rhythm was required, I had the means to create it.
Q: What can you tell us about your score for WHEN THE WHALES CAME?
Gunning: This of course is a far more recent score of mine, and one which I’m inordinately fond of. A series of extraordinary events seemed to come together with WHEN THE WHALES CAME. What happened was: I was on holiday on a small island called Tresco, it’s off the southwest corner of England, a very, very beautiful place. My family and I were there and as soon as we arrived there we noticed that a film was being made on the next island, which is called Bryher, and I jokingly said to my wife, “my goodness me, I should have brought my demo tape on holiday with me!” Day by day we watched from one island to the next – the islands are separated by a sea channel, I suppose about half a mile wide, maybe a little bit wider – and we saw all sorts of things happening, we saw a house being burnt down, we saw lots of shooting taking place at sea, and we saw some inflatable whales, and I learned that the film was called WHEN THE WHALES CAME. This surprised me, because, for one thing, I did know about the book, When The Whales Came, and that it concerned a whale beaching, and many, many years earlier, when I was once in the Canary Islands, I watched absolutely horrified when a whole pod of sperm whales beached themselves in front of my very eyes on the beach, enormous black creatures, some as long as a bus, some no more than maybe three feet long, and they all beached themselves and of course they died out in the hot sun. I was brought up in a family of animal lovers and I found the whole thing one of the most distressing things that I’d ever seen, and of course the memory has lived with me ever since.
The film title, WHEN THE WHALES CAME, immediately struck a chord and I was absolutely astonished to find that, when I got home, there was a message on my answering machine asking if I would be interested in composing the music for that film. I might add that all the time I was on holiday there I never met anybody from the film at all. But it did transpire that the director was somebody with whom I’d worked on commercials and I suppose that’s how that connection came about.
Q: What was needed, musically, for WHEN THE WHALES CAME?
Gunning: There was a variety of music, once again. We used fairly ethnic music for some of it, solo harmonica, solo pipe, solo violin. We felt that these instruments would best conjure the loneliness of the place; the isolation of the place. But, contrasted with that, was some orchestral music, with a lot of singing. For no other reason, I’m afraid, that I felt it instinctively to be appropriate. WHEN THE WHALES CAME is, essentially, a sad fairy tale, and it seemed important to get over a lot of mystery of the story, a little of the romance of it, in a way, and of course to paint musically the incredibly beautiful surroundings – hopefully, in a rather haunting way.
Q: What briefly are your current musical activities now [c. 1993]?
Gunning: Unfortunately I’ve been in a holding point a lot lately. Last year I composed the music for a six-part series called THE BIG BATTALIONS [1992] and in fact I’ve been nominated for a BAFTA award for that. You may know that I have won the BAFTA award for best [original television] music twice before, the first time was for PORTERHOUSE BLUES [1988], the second for AGATHA CHRISTIE’S POIROT [1990]. I have also just completed eight more episodes of AGATHE CHRISTIE’S POIROT – this being the fifth series, and so that has involved me in an awful lot of work. Not too long ago I wrote a large-scale orchestral piece called Yorkshire Glory, to which a film was made by Yorkshire Television – the whole thing lasts about 55 minutes and is scored for a large orchestra, and was performed by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Vernon Handley.
I did write the score to a film called UNDER SUSPICION two years ago, which won me an Ivor Novello Award, which I was very happy about. Otherwise most of the work for composers here is television, and unfortunately the general run of television work is not highly glamorous, I suppose, and certainly not highly paid. And I think what’s more galling than everything is, music budgets sometimes are depressingly small and one has to fight for orchestras as opposed to synthesizers. It’s a great shame. Right now I’m enjoying a bit of a rest, having worked absolutely flat out last year, and later on this year I’m working on a wildlife film that I’m very much looking forward to; it’s set in Africa. I’m also going to be involved in a three-part television drama, and I’m writing a piano piece for a pianist friend of mine, and, oh gosh, various other things on the go!
In Memory of
Composer Christopher Gunning,
(August 5, 1944 – March 25, 2023
