The Woman In White — Soundtrack Album
(this article was originally published in January 2021 on my website, www.jonopstad.com)
My score for the BBC One period drama The Woman In White, from 2018, is being released on January 22nd. It will be available to stream and download from all major digital platforms.
I’m very happy to have this score released. It was a rewarding project to work on, and as my first period drama it was new territory for me. All 5 episodes were directed by Carl Tibbetts, and it was my first time working again with Carl after the two episodes of Black Mirror that I scored for him. The drama had a really strong cast, with three exceptional young leads — Jessie Buckley, Olivia Vinall and Ben Hardy — alongside veteran actors Charles Dance, Dougray Scott and Art Malik.
Carl wanted me to avoid too much of a traditional sweeping period drama sound with the music and his main note for me was to treat the score as a psychological drama rather than a period drama. This made it very interesting ground to explore musically. There was also a wide emotional context to the narrative. The oppression of women by powerful men was a strong theme, leading to an undercurrent of tension, discomfort and claustrophobia running through the score, but there was also a strong element of romance. The score needed to encompass these extremes and the shifting balance between them.
Finding the right palette for the score was an interesting challenge. After discussions with Carl and producer David Thompson we decided that the score should veer neither too far towards an acoustic, string orchestra-type approach, nor too far towards the electronic side, which might jar with the period setting. Around this time, I watched the 1973 Sidney Lumet film The Offence, which features the only film score by contemporary classical composer Harrison Birtwistle. I was struck by the electro-acoustic nature of this score. Acoustic sounds, but manipulated with analogue electronics. I watched an interview with Birtwistle discussing the score, in which he described how the music was written away from picture and recorded with acoustic musicians, and then these recordings were manipulated to the film using analogue tape processing techniques in an electro-acoustic studio to create the score. Having been really struck by the score and this process I became interested in the idea of using tape manipulation of acoustic sounds, and felt that this could work very effectively to create some of the unsettling musical textures that I was looking for in the score for The Woman In White. I got hold of a suitable reel-to-reel tape recorder with different speed settings and began experimenting.
I began work on the score at an early stage, during filming. I would receive rough cuts of each week of filming to get a sense of the atmosphere and characters, and I began writing themes inspired by this footage early on. I knew that solo strings — violin and cello — would be a key element of the score, particularly for the more lyrical, emotional elements, and so I began writing some early sketches for these instruments. Recording some of these early on allowed me to experiment with manipulating some of this material using the tape techniques. I recorded material to tape and then slowed it down to either half speed or quarter speed. This would pitch it down and created unusual, grainy textures.
As well as solo violin material (performed by Clare Wheeler) and solo cello (performed by Peter Gregson), I also manipulated recordings of vocal material, performed by singer Lore Lixenberg, and prepared piano that I recorded myself with screws between the strings to create bell-like effects. I experimented with running the tape recorder through both a vintage WEM Watkins Copicat tape echo, and also various guitar pedals, playing the tape recorder and effects like a musical instrument and improvising the effects in real time — recording into the computer. This gave me a palette of electro-acoustic colours to then sculpt to picture in Logic. This formed a key element of the more unsettling, claustrophobic aspects of the score. This approach is most evident in episode 3, where the score reaches its darkest. On the soundtrack album, the electro-acoustic manipulated tape elements of the score are heard to best effect on the track “Other Side of the Door”.
Another key aspect of the score was the electric guitar work of Norwegian guitarist Eivind Aarset. I have been a strong fan of Eivind’s work for many years, since first hearing him on the albums Khmer and Solid Ether by trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer, through to work such as his solo album Dream Logic on ECM. I knew that Eivind’s unique guitar approach would be a key element of the score — often creating undulating textures that had a similar ambiguity between the electric and acoustic worlds to the analogue tape textures. The cue “A Wedding” on the soundtrack album is — apart from some brief cello at the end — scored entirely for electric guitar and solo violin, with Eivind’s guitar textures functioning musically more like a church organ. Two other good, contrasting, examples of Eivind’s guitar work on the score are the cues “Adam Has Two Eves” (atmospheric textures at the more romantic end of the narrative) and “Fire In The Church” (dark tension).
The palette for the score was falling into place — solo strings (violin, cello and double bass), soprano voice, electric guitar, prepared piano and tape effects. Some use was also made of samples — particularly glassy, bell-like sounds — and here and there there are splashes of analogue synthesis.
Another element of the palette was for the character Erasmus Nash, played by Art Malik. These scenes are largely separate in time and place from the rest of the narrative and so it was important to find a timbre that felt suitably separate from the rest of the score, while also feeling like it came from the same world. I settled on alto and bass flutes for this strand of the music — performed by Gareth Lockrane. This aspect of the score can be heard on the album in the cue “He Took Her In The Carriage”.
Each episode of The Woman In White felt slightly different from each other tonally, with a narrative progression throughout, and this was reflected in the score, with episode 3 significantly darker in tone than episode 1. Episodes 4 and 5 introduced a greater sense of urgency and at this point I introduced percussion in the score. There are two long cues in episode 5 that are largely based around low percussion rhythms, where I experimented with recording bass drums in different ways (with different mallets, with rice poured on them, with kitchen trays on top), as well as less conventional percussion such as an aerosol can played with metal rods. These elements can be heard on the cue “Fire In The Church”.
There was quite a large selection of music cues to choose from for the soundtrack album. I chose to focus a little bit more to towards the lyrical, melodic end of the score than the darker, more textural end. It’s possible that at some point in the future I might release a second volume of the soundtrack focussing more on these darker aspects of the score, with the more experimental end of the music.
The album features all new mixes of each of the tracks by engineer Jake Jackson.
The Woman In White is currently available to view on Amazon Prime.