Mychael Danna's Nativity Story

By Michael Beek

It's a story known the world over, told and retold and now The Nativity Story is enchanting audiences across the globe. Director Catherine Hardwicke has brought to the screen a simple tale of hope, faith and love with stunning attention to detail. That detail can also be found in the score composed by Mychael Danna, who has created a resonant and intelligent accompaniment using ancient melodies and instrumentation. The busy composer talks here about the film and the rich soundscape he created...

How did you get involved with The Nativity Story?
Ironically, I think I was approached because of my expertise with ethnic instruments. Most of the scores that have handled this material in the last 10-15 years have all approached it with ethnic instruments and kind of made an ethnic soup of all kinds of different things. I think I was approached because I am sort of an expert in that myself. Ironically, that's not the approach I took.

What attracted you to the project? Was it an important film for you to be involved in personally...
It's been really fun to work with melodies that I've known all my life like "O Come, O Come Emmanuel" which is just a fantastic melody. It's fun to work with those things that have so much emotional power for me personally. That's really been the most fun, to rediscover and redeploy those melodies and to be able to tell this story again. It's been told countless times, but to be able to tell it again in a film setting using my expertise in film scoring has really been fun.

The score has many layers, it's a rich tapestry... did you do a lot of research before embarking on this journey?
I did a lot of research on music of Judea and Palistine at the time. I learned a lot and then decided not to use any of it. The reason for that is I find that ever since Peter Gabriel's work for The Last Temptation of Christ composers have all approached the same era and subject matter with the exact same things. We hear all the same instruments and the same vaguely Middle Eastern sound. The fact is, nobody really knows what the music of that time was. The second temple was destroyed by the Romans around 70 AD and at that point, all of the music of the Jews was pretty much destroyed. Also, out of mourning they banned music from their synagogues from that point on. So nobody knows anything -- other than a few vague images in the Bible - what was going on musically at that time.

The score has a very legitimate ancient sound to it, was that an early intention?
Catherine Hardwicke wanted to hear more than was just there on the screen and to reference the fact that an entire civilization ended up being based around this story. Without landing like a load of bricks with that message, we wanted to subtly reference some of those sources and some of those melodies and instruments that were inspired by that story.

The music features Renaissance, Middle Age, even Roman instruments, how did you go about finding them and the people to play them?
First of all, my record collection is pretty odd compared to most people. Most of the things I listen to are from either very far away places or far away times. My favorite kind of music to listen to on my own is early music, pre-Baroque. I'm pretty familiar with that world and who the players are. As far as Roman instruments, when I was doing some research for the film on the year zero, I found this recording by a group called Synaulia. They were in Rome, but I tracked the gentleman down who runs them. We talked on the phone and he was very fascinating; a guy who was obsessed with historical accuracy.

Were the ancient instruments easy enough to write for, or did you have to do your homework somewhat?
Excellent question. It is very difficult to work with those early instruments. Really, the evolution of Western instruments such as, for example, the violin, comes from basically a piece of wood with a cat gut or sheep gut string on it. It evolved to the very high tech instrument that it is today. The older instruments are difficult because they go out of tune easily and are very uneven over their range. Some notes are louder than others and some are softer. They are more difficult to play. They can't even play certain notes. They can't play the full harmonic scale. They are all those things that the long history of instrument evolution worked on and kind of ironed out. All that has to be taken into account. The best thing to do, I've learned, is to meet with the players and get them to show me the instrument and what it can and cannot do. You have to write for the style and not try to work against what the instrument can do. Then you can write intelligently for it.

Elements of the score were recorded in Hollywood, London and Rome... were you present at all these sessions?
Absolutely. I've never had a session where I wasn't present in one way or another. The London session, I was electronically present. We did it over an ISDN line. We were sitting in LA and we were looking at a big monitor that was the same as looking out the window in AIR studios in London. There was a camera pointed from where I would normally be sitting. I could talk to them and they could talk to me and the sound quality was absolutely perfect with no delay whatsoever. It was uncannily like being there.

You use a number of ancient Christmas tunes in the music, how did you set about choosing which to use and why use them at all?
I've used a lot of melodies from the early Christian church: plain chant, Gregorian chant. I've also used some very early Christmas melodies, for instance "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel," which is a very ancient melody. I've used other tunes like "Of the Father's Love Begotten," which goes back to the late Roman Empire when the empire became Christian from about the year 400. The melodies come from before 1600, or something like that. It's a story of Europe and a story about the west and Western Civilization. That's really been the inspiration.

There's also a big vocal aspect to the music; what are the choir singing?
My sister is a Latin and Greek scholar, which probably doesn't come up very often in the world of film scoring. For The Nativity Story we decided all the words the choir would sing would be in Latin. She wrote some original poetry and did some translating of popular carols - "Silent Night" for instance - and translated back into Latin. That was a really fun experience to be able to work with her.

You seem to have steered clear, largely, from a Golden Age biblical-epic sound for The Nativity Story... would that have been too easy?
It's not that it's so easy. I think the audience nowadays is much more intelligent and more sensitive to emotional manipulation. It's something that puts off modern audiences. Those old scores are dangerously close to that kind of style. People are too sophisticated for that sound. Some of the modalities I used in the orchestral writing kind of harken back to that sound, but it's a much more subtle version of it and a more updated version of it. In the Fifties, they might have mimicked a Middle Eastern ney with an oboe or something. Now, in using a ney, you can update that sound in a sense.

Was there a moment in the film, when you first saw it, that sparked your imagination and made you think "I know how to score this movie"?
On screen, we're seeing a young girl in Judea in a tiny village riding on a donkey. That's what's on screen, but what that means to us as people who have grown up with that imagery and grown up with that icon, it's such a powerful thing to us. On screen, there's nothing particularly special about it but emotionally it means so much. That's the thing the music can say. That's been the fun of the music, to remind people to look at this little girl riding this donkey. This is something that's going to have connotations for thousands of years.

Look out for the complete interview in the next issue of Music from the Movies... Coming Soon!

Thanks to Mychael Danna and Tom Kidd