Scoring the MILLENNIUM

By Richard Blackford
Composer

Two hundred and seventy music cues, more than four hours of music, 43 multi-track tapes, 128 DATs -- no wonder that as I delivered the final master tape for the MILLENNIUM soundtrack I longed for a holiday as never before.

The brief for this, perhaps the most lavish documentary series ever made, was daunting: 10 hours of television to cover 10 centuries, spanning the entire globe and not at all Western-biased. Civilizations and individuals wholly absent from my college course study appear, characters such as Lalibela of Ethiopia and Zheng He of China who, in the 15th century, constructed massive ships that could each carry 5,000 men, rivaling the Titanic in their revolutionary design.

Executive Producer Jeremy Isaacs described his intention for the series as "a magic carpet ride back in time to the world's great civilizations." Each of the 10 films has five individual sections covering a different part of the globe, so that in any one century you might find yourself whisked from China to Mexico, from Japan to India, from Europe to Mali, Ethiopia or Arabia.

Such a vast span naturally posed a few conundrums for the composer. Was MILLENNIUM to be a monument to eclecticism, or was there any way of unifying such a diverse range of material? My first decision was to involve the Bournemouth Symphony Chorus, with whom I had worked on the Sony recording and the BBC film of my cantata, "Mirror Of Perfection." It seemed that if anything could unify the cultures of the last thousand years, it would be the human voice. Much of the choral writing is consequently wordless, although the 12th century, which charts the rise of cathedrals and Lalibela's extraordinary churches carved from the rock, makes use of the Latin Mass.

Supporting the chorus was the superb BBC Concert Orchestra, which endured four breakneck orchestral sessions of virtuoso orchestral playing with humor, patience and panache. I also called on the medieval specialist group The Dufay Collective, the multi-doubling flautist Andy Findon, the horn virtuoso Dave Lee and other folk specialists.

The anchor for the whole nine-month operation was the composer and electronics wizard Glenn Keiles, who not only oversaw the technical strategy of combining folk, choral and orchestral material recorded in different parts of the world, but also composed the rock cues and the beautiful kora solo in Episode 4.

MILLENNIUM soon presented opportunities of working in new ways, recording and sampling onto hard disk and manipulating, retuning and editing material recorded in the field in ways that would have been impossible before advanced computer technology. For example, a pilgrim's song to Shiva recorded by me on the banks of the Ganges is transformed into a viola solo with orchestra, then taken up by sitar and tabla and developed as a raga. Or a shwarm recorded on the banks of the Nile is set in counterpoint with a wordless chorus, then given horn variations as the destruction of Constantinople by Prince Mehmet is recounted.

As the music progressed, it seemed that theme and variations might be the solution to unify so many disparate elements. The title theme that accompanies Bernard Heyes' stunning 3-D graphic sequence attempts in one minute to offer a glimpse of the whole magic carpet ride, and in the course of the subsequent episodes I wrote more than 30 variations, from the Siena Palio race to Columbus, to Darwin, Aztecs, to modern Calcutta and Shanghai.

The 11 directors and four editors all naturally had their own languages of storytelling, and Isaacs actively encouraged a wide stylistic diversity. That sometimes meant my throwing any notion of musical correctness out of the window, as in the portrayal of the Cabinet Of Curiosities in Episode 6 to an accompaniment of Fifties Lounge Music, or the Florentine Renaissance to a strong Club beat.

The sometimes surreal juxtaposition of images from the past with the present and deliberate musical clashes give the series a real energy and vitality that lifts it out of the traditional historical documentary style into something daring and thought-provoking. Sometimes I was offered temporary musical ideas at the viewing of rough cuts. In the case of the Chinese junk sequence mentioned above, the insistent rhythm of Ravel's Bolero proved so irresistible that I was asked to write a "Chinese Bolero."

Musically our magic carpet ride was a voyage of discovery, a crash course in musical cultures about which we had previously only a scanty knowledge and an attempt to respect and give them a proper voice. It brought about a new set of friendships with musicians who were inspired by the scale of the project to experiment often long into the night. It gave me a chance to write large-scale orchestral and choral tracks more usually heard in feature films. The combination of live-action sequences, the documentary material and the computer-generated reconstructions and animations give MILLENNIUM a unique visual texture. Such an opportunity for a composer comes rarely -- perhaps only once a millennium.