Solo Movement : The one-man-band formula is taking an electronic, highly eclectic turn for composers

Hear the words “one-man band,” what comes to mind? A wild-looking guy at a carnival tooting a horn, playing a snare drum with one hand, a cymbal with another and a bass drum with his feet, right?

Or maybe it’s a more contemporary image, a Venice Beach street performer with a portable amp playing a guitar and a keyboard while blowing on a harmonica.

But a much more complex variation on the one-man band formula has been emerging lately in the music world. Television and film composer Frank Becker is a prime example. His performing arena is neither a carnival nor a beachfront , but the carefully ordered clutter of a converted Woodland Hills garage studio.

“It wasn’t cheap,” the gray-bearded composer said, pointing out the structural details of the conversion. What was once a two-car garage has been transformed into a myriad buttons, dials, keyboards, blinking lights and computer monitors that look as if they could belong on the control panel of the Starship Enterprise.

“The kind of work I do demands that I have a lot of equipment within easy reach,” he said. “I had to have adequate soundproofing, of course, and I had to be able to set a thermostat to keep this stuff from overheating.”

The “kind of work” Becker does is typical of an emerging generation of composers whose orchestras consist of banks of synthesizers, sound samplers, drum machines and computer programs. His music scores for television and films are carefully assembled pastiches of sound, every note of which has been performed by him, fed into a computer and poured out into music that sounds remarkably as though it was created by an ensemble of real, live musicians.

Becker’s highly eclectic music can be heard on a variety of KABC-TV news shows (including a morning news program and 4 p.m. and 11 p.m. newscasts); he’s just finishing a new theme for “Eye On L.A.”; he scored all 65 episodes of the “Brave Starr” animated series (which just completed a run on KTLA/Channel 5), and his music has enlivened a long list of documentaries and dramatic shows on HBO and PBS.

With a degree from Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Oberlin, Ohio, a Ford Foundation Fellowship and numerous music festival awards, Becker says he turned to electronics almost as a matter of necessity.

“The awards were great,” he said, laughing, “but I’ve got shelves full of orchestra music that has never been performed because orchestras won’t, generally, perform modern music. I went to Holland once for a performance of a complex 15-minute piece that I worked on for a year. I got one rehearsal before the performance.

“But now, with all this equipment at my disposal, I can work directly with my material. And that’s why I originally got into electronics and sampling--so that I could hear my music, so I could realize it and get it off the shelf. This collection of keyboards has become my medium, my palette, the way I do my musical paintings.”

Becker moved to Japan from New York City in the late 1960s as part of a Mennonite educational project; it was the final stage of a voluntary service obligation associated with his status as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. He stayed for more than a decade, married a Japanese woman, had two children and saw his music career blossom.

“It was a very exciting time for me,” he said. “I did concerts with Morton Feldman and Toshi Ichiyanagi, I taught at an International School in Yokohama, I recorded for EMI-Toshiba two albums of Beatles music, a synthesized version of Vivaldi’s ‘The Four Seasons’ and a collection of original music, and I was writing my own orchestral music.”

But when an opportunity to return to the States arose in the early 1980s, Becker couldn’t resist.

The decision was almost catastrophic. The television pilot he’d scored, and which appeared to be his ticket to financial stability, fell through. “So there I was,” he said. “I’d gone from a position in Japan in which I was earning income from teaching, concerts, records and working with equipment companies to sheer, open-ended free-lancing.”

But Becker’s one-man band skills coincided perfectly with the tightening economies of the entertainment business. His ability to produce--in his own studio--everything from symphonic variations to rock rhythms soon made him a busy free-lancer.

“I took the techniques I’d learned as a classical musician,” he said, “applied them to a pop style or a rock style or full orchestra and then put it all together electronically. As the sound sources got better, with synthesizers replaced by the real world sounds of music samplers, the music got better.”

So much better that Becker is only one of many composers who work in similarly solitary musical environments. Jan Hammer of “Miami Vice” was one of the first to prove that scores could be provided by a solo performer. Other TV shows-- “The Equalizer” is a good example--followed.

Burt Berman, senior vice president of Universal Pictures, who supervises the feature music for the studio, feels that musical technology has even moved beyond the one-man band, solo performance phenomenon.

“Yes, it’s definitely evolving,” he said. “We’re seeing more hybrid kinds of scores, where you have a certain basis in the electronics--Synclaviers, samplers and all the machines--but where you integrate it with live music. The best example for me is ‘Field of Dreams,’ in which there is a combination of solo piano--which is, of course, the primordial one-man band--synthesizers and live orchestra. That’s the ideal, where you work in all these disciplines within one score, for the color and the shading they can give you.”

But Berman acknowledges that every situation is not quite as fortunate. “Sometimes, because of money factors, an independent studio or producer will say to the composer, ‘Look, we’ve got $50,000. It’s got to cover your fee, plus all the musicians, the copying and the recording costs. If you record it for $10,000 you keep $40,000. If recording costs are $45,000, your fee’s $5,000.’ There’s an obvious temptation for a composer to do it all himself, or perhaps sweeten an electronic score with a few ‘live’ musicians.”

Becker’s experience has been somewhat different. “When I compose something for a film or a show, there’s a distinction between the creative fee, which is what the composer makes, and the production fee, which is the cost of recording the music. Most of the time, a producer is not going to give me a production fee on top of my creative fee. You can’t get around the fact that one-man bands are economically useful to producers.

“I did a presentation recently with two budgets, one for a chamber orchestra and one for just me, a one-man band. Guess which one they picked. Right, the one-man band.”

The music created by composers such as Becker is not without its controversial aspects. Since multi-keyboard setups obviously can replace live musicians, it’s understandable that the American Federation of Musicians has made efforts to protect its members.

A price scale, established to cover the work of what the union identifies as “synthesizer players,” gets right to basics. When a composer/performer such as Becker or Hammer creates sounds on a synthesizer or a sampler, which replace other musicians, he is entitled to an additional payment for each musician who is replaced. In principle, this means that if he plays a clarinet part, a violin part or a trumpet on his keyboards, he should be paid for each of those separate sounds.

Becker feels that the problem is academic. “I think I’m competing with music libraries rather than live musicians,” he said. “If there’s a film and they want an orchestra--they’re going to get an orchestra. And I’d be the last person to say that a live orchestra doesn’t sound best.

“Ideally, that’s the way I want to work--with a full orchestra. It’s wonderful, and it’s great to give as many players as much work as possible. If you think I’m a good one-man band, just give me 60 or 70 living, breathing musicians to work with. Then you’ll really hear what I can do.”