Symphony in the Park: Babe in Concert. March 13, 7.30pm. Commonwealth Park. Admission is free.
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Nigel Westlake knows that orchestral musicians can be very unforgiving of conductors. He's been a clarinet player as well as a composer. So when Richard Mills invited Westlake to conduct his score for the 1995 film Babe in a screening with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra nearly 20 years ago, Westlake says, "I told him I couldn't conduct."
He wasn't simply being modest, or cowardly. Conducting is a very different discipline to playing an instrument or composing, and Westake had never done it before – not even for the recording of the film's soundtrack.
Undaunted, Mills programmed Babe – and Westlake – anyway.
"I told him, 'I need help' and he said, 'Come up and have some lessons'."
The fact he was conducting his own composition helped – he could justifiably say he knew the music better than anybody – but Westlake says he still found the experience "absolutely terrifying".
"You have 80 people in front of you who are incredible musicians – it's incredibly intimidating."
But they were sympathetic, he says, despite his "rawness", and he enjoyed the experience. And he's been doing it again: he conducted the score of Babe for the film's 20th anniversary with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra last year.
"From what I could gather of the Melbourne performances – both of which sold out at the Arts Centre – there was a great response from the audience."
The story of a pig who learns to herd sheep, Babe was adapted from Dick King-Smith's book by producer George Miller and Chris Noonan and directed by Noonan. It was a critical and commercial success both in Australia and internationally.
A free screening in Commonwealth Park with Westlake conducting the Canberra Symphony Orchestra as part of the EventsACT Canberra Day celebrations will be followed by performances in Sydney and Hobart.
While conducting is a talent, conducting the live soundtrack to a film screening is a particular specialisation.
Westlake says, "There are two versions of the movie: the movie the audience sees and the movie projected in front of me on a monitor only I can see."
The movie screening for the audience has been remixed from the multitrack tapes sourced from Universal Studios to have its music track removed, leaving only its dialogue, narration, sound effects and ambient sounds.
The conductor's movie has a series of digitally created flashing lights, called punches, and diagonal lines, called streamers, to act as visual cues for him to keep the orchestra in synchronisation with the picture and to indicate dynamics and other instructions to ensure dialogue is audible and the film works as it should.
It's a system, Westlake says, that goes back to the old Hollywood studio days when composers like Max Steiner, who wrote the music for Gone With the Wind among many other films, used punched holes and streaking lines applied to the projected film stock to help them when they conducted scoring sessions.
This will be Westlake's first Canberra visit in a little while though he's no stranger to the city. His father – who was his music teacher – was head of woodwind at the ANU School of Music in the late 1970s and 1980s and in 2004 he was awarded a Coombs Fellowship by the ANU, working at the School of Music. He was composer in residence at the Canberra International Music Festival last year with some of his pieces being played although work commitments meant he was unable to attend the performances. And he came to hear Timothy Kane record some of his guitar music here.
Westlake took advantage of the 20th-anniversary performances of Babe last year to tinker with the music a bit. He hadn't really looked at the score in the two decades since he wrote it and he'd had a lot more experience as a composer and orchestrator since then.
"It was the first movie I'd worked on and I was a green, inexperienced composer," he says. Now, having learned a lot in the interim, he was able to enhance the score – not, he says, by changing the melodies or the themes but by doing detail work on the scoring, reinforcing some orchestral textures and giving more richness to the bottom end of the sound, for example.
"It's rescored for a slightly smaller orchestra – originally we had access to whatever we needed so we had 80 players. A standard symphony orchestra has far less brass, far less woodwinds, about 56 to 60 players ... and a smaller string section as well."
He recorded this new version for ABC Classics and says when Noonan heard it he said it should be added to a version of the film. But he doesn't think the studio would be interested.
"It would take a lot of money."
As well as revisiting Babe, Westlake has some other commissioned projects coming up including Dream of Flying, an orchestral suite based on the score he wrote for the film Paper Planes that will be performed by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, and an oboe concerto that will be performed by the Sydney Symphony and soloist Diana Doherty next year. There's also another score for an upcoming Australian film, but he can't say anything about that.
"It's about a year's worth of work."
Talking about the difference between concert commissions and writing film scores, Westlake says with the former "all the decisions are essentially in my hands" but with the latter, it's a collaboration – with the film's director, sometimes with the producer, and their input has to be taken on board.
With Babe, the originally commissioned score by Hollywood veteran Jerry Goldsmith had been rejected by Noonan and Miller ("It sounded a bit like a cartoon which was not what they wanted; they wanted something a bit more serious") and Westlake was one of several Australian composers to "audition" by writing music for a few scenes. When he was chosen he had two months to write nearly 80 minutes of music.
The 1977 song If I Had Words, based on a theme from Saint-Saens "Organ" Symphony, had already been selected by the filmmakers for inclusion. Westlake says he "tried to talk them out of it" but as scenes had already been filmed including it he bowed to the inevitable and incorporated its music into the score in different ways using various instruments and combinations.
Westlake also scored the Miller-directed 1998 sequel Babe: Pig in the City which was a more chaotic experience.
"The film got recut two weeks before it was due to be released and quite a lot of music was dropped or replaced – they used quite a lot of stuff from Babe. They felt the music was too dark or too violent. The decision was made to cut or replace it and there wasn't time to rerecord anything before it was released. That's normal by Hollywood standards."
Another Hollywood experience was when Westlake worked on Miss Potter (2006) which Noonan directed. The main producer, Harvey Weinstein, wanted changes to the score but Noonan wouldn't let Westlake make them. Weinstein brought in another composer, Rachel Portman, to write a score but Noonan supported Westlake. So two versions of every scene were prepared: one with Westlake's music, one with Portman's.
"There were 12 producers by this stage and each producer had to vote on each scene," he says.
"Each producer had to vote on each scene. I won most of the votes. They used three of her cues: the rest were mine."