Brad Fiedel рассказывает о работе над музыкой к фильму Терминатор (FSM Volume 18, No. 5, May 2013)

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"TG: In your show you played a recorded experimental piece you said you showed to James Cameron before getting the first Terminator gig. Was that the actual piece you played him?

BF: No, and that’s a really sad story. I had improvised on the piano—this was all done to 24-track, and I don’t even have that machine anymore, let alone the tape. It was this kind of concerto I wrote. It was early technology, and I think I had just gotten my acoustic grand piano MIDI-ed. They had a pretty complex way where they would go into the action of your piano, and there were these little sensors and you could actually generate a MIDI signal from your piano. I could improvise at the piano and at the same time have other instruments beamed to that thing. I didn’t listen to them, I would just record to all the tracks. So here I am playing the piano, but it’s activating percussion instruments and strings and different sounds. Then with my automated mixing board I could go in and open up those sounds at certain points, and create this bizarre concerto kind of form. It was this whole piece I’d been working on for quite a while, and it was pretty out there. Unfortunately I don’t have any recording of it anymore. But it’s really interesting, the karma of it. Because I’d been working before that—I’d done some very prestigious television since like 1980, and this was 1984, so it wasn’t the first thing I did. But it was really my coming out in the feature world and getting my music noticed. Ultimately what got me there was this piece of personal work I exposed to Jim. I could tell he was thinking about it, he was interested in me, but it was something in the passion and darkness of this concerto piece that sealed the deal.

TG: Is that acoustic MIDI-ed piano what you composed on for a long time? Or did you accumulate other gear?

BF: Oh, I had all kinds of other gear. One of the reasons I got the gig in 1975 playing with Hall & Oates was because I was an early synthesizer enthusiast, because I thought it was really cool that you could create sounds nobody had ever heard. And you were creating sounds back then—it wasn’t like now where you push number 76 and that’s the program or loop or whatever. It was a piece of experimental equipment, with oscillators and filters, and you had to plug things in and really experiment and figure out how to make sounds. I had an ARP 2600, which was one of the early, early synthesizers. One of the things, talking about the MIDI piano, is that a lot of my original score for Fright Night, especially the stuff in the basement towards the finale, I actually scored like an old silent movie. It was all this crazy stuff in the basement so I was just improvising like I was playing a silent movie on my piano. Using the same technique as that concerto—recording a lot of stuff, and cymbal loops and crazy string runs and everything were being triggered by the MIDI, but I’m just playing the piano. Later I listened to the 24-track and I’d watch the film, and if he flew by I’d open a pot from the 24-track and there’d be some sound that would help with that flyby. A lot of the action stuff in that score was created through improvisation at the MIDI piano.

TG: Was that a common part of your process for those kinds of sequences?

BF: No. It was something at that moment, because of something about that film, approaching those sequences—there’s very little dialogue, and maybe because of Roddy McDowell and the old movies he showed, it just brought me this vision of silent movies. There were very few times where I actually approached action scenes that way. I would tend to approach them more from a point of view of rhythm, and setting time signatures, and coming up with odd beats and things, and then building from there with percussive stuff, and then layering a melodic thing, or strings or horns, on top of the rhythmic stuff. It was really trying to find the heartbeat of the action sequences. But I did it differently on different films, and a lot of it had to do with what the film said to me. But also what toys were available at that moment that were fun. It was like I had a new film coming up, and it made me think of certain ways I might want to work, and I’d look out in the world and say, “Is there some new this or that that could help me be a little fresh and find new sounds?” I didn’t want my stuff to sound repetitive. At one point it was the Prophet 10, which had this little onboard sequencer. That was when I was doing the original Terminator, and the stuff in that score that goes [ga-gong-ga-gong]. There was no MIDI—I couldn’t MIDI that to anything else, so I had to keep changing little dials to try and keep the rhythms together. The Oberheim was running and the drum machine and all that stuff, but the Prophet 10 couldn’t actually be synched to that—only by hand. So I had to hit the first note and then keep varying it.

A funny story about that is: One day I’m working in my studio, probably sometime in the ’90s. I get this call and there’s a woman on the phone saying, “I have Henry Mancini for you. Is this Mr. Fiedel?” I thought it was a friend of mine joking or something. There’s Hank Mancini, and he says, “RCA’s asked me to do a big band album of film themes, and I think your Terminator theme cooks. I have this idea and I want to do it with a big band.” I was like, “Whoa—that’s fine!”

He asked me for the music. Now, none of the Terminator scores were written anywhere—they were all done in my studio, top to bottom, very free-finding stuff, and I didn’t take the time to write anything down. That would have slowed me up. So I’m sitting there, and I have to bring in this friend of mine who was a musicologist. This is the original Terminator, because on Terminator 2 there was different technology, so it fell more into a musical pocket that was easier to define, because we thought we might go to orchestra on that score—it ended up we didn’t have time, and ultimately I’m not sorry, but I was preparing to have to have beats that could be translated. But the original Terminator was so herky jerky—you’d have to see me in the studio trying to get a take: taking two or three different things and saying, “Oh shit, that one’s getting behind, and that’s not the tempo on this…” We’re listening to it and saying, “What tempo is this in?” (talking about the main theme). I don’t even know what we came up with, but if you really get scientific about it it’s a very bizarre time signature, because the loop that was driving it is so irregular. (I could see Hank was hearing it as like a conga line). When I hit the off button on the Prophet 10 when I was recording that sequence, which creates the loop, I was a little off. So it was a little short. It was constantly undulating. I think we came into the fact that it was 13/8 or literally like 17/32…it was this crazy time signature. In the end we just wrote it as 6/8 and said it sounds a little different than on the tape. [Laughs]"