When I went back in retrospect to our discussion of the music before Paul Smith began the BEAVER VALLEY score, and when I began to consider the task of explaining some of our problems to an audience, I remembered an article by Robert U. Nelson published several years ago in The Pacific Spectator. Its title was "The Craft of the Film Score." Mr. Nelson pointed out that music for films and concert music are two different mediums:
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Suppose we see how these observations apply to BEAVER VALLEY.
If the composer must play "second fiddle" to the screen...
If his music must follow the tempo, the pantomine and the other accidentals of screen story-telling...
And if he must give way constantly to narration and dialogue, how can he be expected to accomplish anything? Well, the composer can and does make important contributions to a film. Certainly Paul Smith's score was tremendously effective in BEAVER VALLEY!
Film music gives a continuity and a cohesion to screen material; this was particularly true in BEAVER VALLEY. It contributes mood, a feeling of warmth, an emotional tone. It "points up" action, and as you have seen, it definitely adds humor.
The music for BEAVER VALLEY was written after the continuity of scenes had been worked out, after the editing was done and after the narration was written. And so one of the first problems the composer had to cope with was the amount of narration. The audience must hear the narrator, or there is no story, thus the music must be subdued when he is talking. This problem is partially solved by the right kind of orchestration during such passages. But of course the real solution lies in having a plan ahead of time so that the narrator is not talking in those sections where the music is to be most effective. It's a compromise situation of give and take. Indeed, in many spots throughout BEAVER VALLEY the music became the story-telling voice, acting, for the moment, as a second narrator.
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