Finding the Right Notes

Composer Rachel Portman didn’t realize what she was getting into when she met with director Jonathan Demme about creating the score for “Beloved.”

She knew the film, which opens Friday, was the kind of challenging project that could stimulate the creative juices of any composer. But she didn’t find out how challenging until Demme told her what he had in mind.

“He told me there was one proviso,” Portman recalled recently during a break from recording in a Burbank studio. “He said, ‘You’re not allowed to use any of the familiar strings, brass, woodwinds--no orchestral instruments, at all.’ ”

Portman, whose Academy Award-winning score for “Emma” was a masterful, symphonic-like effort rich with orchestral textures, swallowed hard and said, “Fine.”

“But then” she adds, “I was terrified. If not orchestral instruments, then what?”

What, indeed? “Beloved,” a dense, multilayered story that takes place in 19th century middle America, post-Civil War, is not an easy task for a composer. It moves swiftly back and forth from the excruciatingly intense, ghost-filled inner voyage of Sethe (the character played by Oprah Winfrey) to the paradoxically contrasting images of violence and accomplishment that characterized the lives of the first generation of former slaves. For many directors and composers, “Beloved” clearly is the kind of picture that demands the rich, complex aural tapestry of a full orchestra score.

But Demme had something else in mind, something far more minimal. Directors often use temporary music cues--”temp scores” as they’re called--when they work with their editors on the first rough assemblage of a film. The music can come from any number of sources, sometimes from existing music, sometimes from the composer’s own library of music. And Demme had collected some music that seemed to fit his needs.

“There were a couple of pieces of old black songs that he had put in and some African stuff that he’d heard and he liked and he really, really wanted to hear in the score. And that was good, because it showed me the kind of elements that were most important to him,” says Portman, who was the first woman to be awarded an Oscar for film composing.

Film composers are not generally fond of temp tracks, if only because the initial ambience they create in a director’s mind can undercut any subsequent music that a composer might supply. Some composers either refuse to listen to a temp track at all, or else agree to a cursory hearing before getting on with their own composing. Others sometimes take the bull by the horns and work with the director to assemble their own temp track in the hope of minimizing the differences between the temp track and their own work.

Portman, 37, a classically trained English composer who also wrote scores for “Only You,” “Benny and Joon,” “The Joy Luck Club” and numerous other films, decided to take the latter path with “Beloved.”

“I broke a few of the rules that I’ve imposed on myself and people I’ve worked with while working on the film,” Portman says. “But I’d listened a lot to what Jonathan was looking for and I was able to put something together that reflected what he wanted.”

It helped that she was involved with the picture from a very early stage, before some of the principal photography took place, writing songs to be sung by Winfrey and Glover.

“When the time came to do the actual score,” she says, “I was so close to the picture that I was able to overcome my early fears, and I was able to do something that was completely different from the temp track, something that gave Jonathan what he wanted, but which was completely mine.”

And something completely different from anything she’d ever done before. Acquiescing to Demme’s request that she use no orchestral instruments, Portman searched far and wide for sounds and timbres that would fit the score that was gradually coalescing in her mind. “I knew I was going to use some African instruments,” she says, “because their sounds had such an impact upon Jonathan, and I wanted to find wind instruments that could carry the kind of emotional qualities that the African percussion and stringed instruments did.”

Portman came up with some unusual solutions--among them, the chalumeau, an early reed pipe instrument;, the tarogato, a Hungarian instrument that is a kind of wooden soprano saxophone; the Persian ney; and various flute-like instruments.

Their sounds are familiar yet unfamiliar. And Portman uses them in deceptively simple fashion, sometimes playing folk-like melodies, at other times joining them with vocal ensembles to create floating, eerie musical textures--essential undercurrents for the maintenance of the picture’s implacable emotional subtext.

“I spent a very long time listening to these instruments,” she says, “trying things out, figuring out the pitches so that I could compose for them.”

Countering the wind instrument sounds, Portman added a surging flow of African percussion and stringed instruments, including the xylophone-like balafon and the multistringed kora. And here, too, the available studio time helped, as she took a semi-improvisational approach to creating some of the rhythm templates.

“Some of the percussion actually came out of sort of jamming sessions,” she says. “I’d say to the drummers, ‘Can you do this?’ or ‘Can you do that?’ And they’d think about it for a moment, and then say, ‘Well, we can do this,’ and they’d play something similar for me. And somewhere between the two, we’d find something that would work.”

The final element was the vocal music. The material was sung by the African Children’s Choir, La Troupe Makandal and, perhaps most telling of all, by the passionate, heartbreak voice of African singer Oumou Sangare.

“She was very nervous when we first got started,” says Portman. “She had to memorize all the pieces, and she put in some of her own words. But everything she did was deeply felt, just beautiful, beautiful work.”

Beyond its importance to the film, the most telling testimony to the effectiveness of Portman’s score may be the fact that it also stands so well as pure music. And it will surely not be surprising if the “Beloved” soundtrack, which was released last week on Epic Records, has a powerful life of its own.

“ ‘Beloved’ was a long, intriguing journey,” Portman concludes, “but we had the time to do it, and it was a journey we needed to take in order to get it right.”