Song Exploder - Nicholas Britell - Moonlight

Episode Date: January 30, 2017

The film Moonlight tells the story of its main character, Chiron, in three chapters: when Chiron is a young boy, nicknamed Little, when he's a teenager, and when he's an adult, nicknamed Black. For each chapter of the film, composer Nicholas Britell created a theme, and in this episode, Nicholas takes those themes apart. The score for Moonlight was nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe, and the film itself won the Golden Globe for Best Drama. songexploder.net/moonlight

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirwe. The film Moonlight tells the story of its main character, Shiron, in three chapters. When Shiron's a young boy, nicknamed Little, when he's a teenager and goes by Shiron, and when he's an adult, nicknamed Black. For each chapter of the film, composer Nicholas Bertel created a theme, and in this episode, Nicholas takes those themes apart,

revealing how they all evolved out of a single piece of music. The score for Moonlight was nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe, and the film itself won the Golden Globe for Best Drama. This episode is part of a series I'm doing in conjunction with New York Magazine's site Vulture, looking at awards-worthy film music from this season. The first was with Johann Johansson on the score for arrival, the second was with Justin Hurwitz on Lala Land, and now Nicholas Bertel on the score for Moonlight.

For more, visit vulture.com slash awards. My name's Nicholas Bertel, and I'm the composer of Moonlight. When I first read it, I was just overwhelmed by this feeling of beauty and poetry. That was really the starting point for my personal experience with the film. There was just this incredible sense of beauty and of sensitivity and tenderness and intimacy in the screenplay. The director of Moonlight is Barry Jenkins. And what was amazing to me when I first saw the early cuts of the film after it was shot, It was how well Barry had preserved that feeling of poetry in the movie.

I was a wild little shorty, man. Just like you. Running around with no shoes on, the moon was out. This one time, I run by this old lady. I was running, hollering, cutting a fool, boy. This old lady, she stopped me. She said, running around Catch you not bought that light

And moonlight Black boys look blue You blue That's what I'm gonna call you. Blue. Say your name, Blue. At some point you gotta decide for yourself who you don't.

So my first emotional reaction to the film was that sense of poetry. And I actually was saying to myself, you know, what is the musical animal of poetry. And among the first things I sent to Barry was a piece of music I wrote that I called piano and violin poem, because I was sort of trying to channel this idea. And that actually is Little's theme. It's a piano with these alternating harmonies. It's going between the major one and the minor four chord. You're in a major key, so there's this sense of stability. But at the

same time, the alternation back and forth creates, I think, a feeling, at least for me, a feeling of introspection. One of the things that I focused on when I first saw the film was I was imagining how to get inside Little's point of view. He doesn't say much. He is quiet, but you know that there's a lot

that he's thinking and that he's feeling. That idea of introspection and thinking internally felt right with these kinds of harmonies. And there's a violin that's doubling the melody on top. The sound of the violin, in that piece was something that I thought about right away. I've collaborated extensively with a very dear friend of mine, Tim Fain, who's the violinist.

And what I asked him to do was to play it as quiet as he possibly could while still generating enough sound that he felt comfortable with the note. And then we recorded it very close to a mic. I actually do a lot of experimentation with reverb because the sound that you hear of an instrument is entirely related really to where you're... related really to where you're hearing the instrument. The space that you put an instrument in changes so much of the character, you know. And so I often, with recordings that I make,

I will experiment with what do they sound like in different spaces. And so with Tim's violin line, the ocean is a big part of the film, not just literally, but symbolically. And there's something to me just musically that the sound of that long viewer on the violin, To me, it almost felt like sounds almost like washing over itself somehow. There's actually another piano underneath the first piano, which fades in over the course of the track. The first piano is a grand piano, a fully in-tune grand piano.

And the second one is more of a sort of noisier, upright piano with a loud mechanism. It's not a really incredibly in-tuned piano. But I think that's what's beautiful about it. Different pianos have different feelings and different characters, and it feels so human and so true. With Moonlight, which is divided into three chapters, the first chapter is the main character, Shiron, as a young boy, where he goes by the name Little.

The second chapter is when he's in high school, and he goes by Shiron, which is his name, so Chapter 2 is called Shiron. And then Chapter 3 is many years later, when he's really in his late 20s, and he goes by Black. One of the interesting challenges, I think, from a musical perspective, is how do you provide a sense of cohesion across chapters while also allowing for transformation? And Barry told me about his love for chopped and screwed music, which is a style of southern hip-hop where you take tracks and you slow them down.

And in the process of slowing the music down, the pitch goes way down. You get this incredible, beautiful, deepened and enriched sonic texture. We immediately started talking about, well, could we do that to the score? You know, could we actually write music, classical music for the score, and could we apply these chop and screw techniques to it? And I was immediately into it. I said, I know we could do this. that was an early exciting idea for us, this idea of my writing orchestral music,

and then as a part two to that process, taking my own recordings and chopping and scurring them and bending them and morphing the audio. So with Shiron's theme, that was the first evolution of the track. There was this idea that the key would get lower as the film progressed. It would deepen. So whereas it's in D major, in the beginning in chapter one. In chapter two, it's in B major.

It's not played lower. It's actually chopped and screwed. So there's this, that's the audio actually is bent lower. That violin, it's not like Tim played it in that key. That's actually the Littles theme violin, but just pitched down. I actually used an algorithm. You know, I sort of experiment with a lot of different pitch-shifting algorithms. It's just something fun that I spend probably far too much time doing,

but over the years, I've found algorithms that work better than others. The, quote, chopped and screwed Shiron's theme, which is in the schoolyard fight, that's a full chop and screw where it's pitched down and slowed down. I took Shiron's theme and slowed it way, way down. It's over two octaves down, and then I actually layered a copy of itself on top of it, itself and ran those two through this vinyl filter.

So you're hearing this crackle and then you're feeling this kind of rumbling. That bell is actually the piano from Little's theme. And what sounds like a bass is actually the violin from Little's theme. In Chapter 3, Black's theme is actually an A major cello octet. There are cellos playing some tremolo where the bow is shaking back and forth. Pizzicado cellos where they pluck the strings. And then there are cellos playing Arco with the bow, playing the music of Little's theme. Track, I recorded it in D major, so in the same key as the very beginning of Little's theme.

And then I took that track as a master and pitched it down. The sound of the cellos is fascinatingly changed, where they don't really sound like cellos to me, but they also don't really sound like basses either. they sound like some sort of hybrid string instrument. So that's where Black's name exists. It's a different orchestration, a different key, and then applying the chop and screw technique to it. With all of these ideas, what was so exciting for me as a composer

was that Barry was 100% into trying all of this out. For me, one of the amazing things about the film scoring experience is that I think you really never know how things are. going to turn out our work. There's this fascinating alchemy of how sound and picture relate, and I don't think anyone really knows why these things feel the way they do. So, you know, the more I get the opportunity to do this, the more I feel it's important to follow these kinds of instincts and feelings and let your emotional response to things

drive you in different directions. And now from Moonlight, here's Little's Theme, Shiron's theme, and Black's Theme by Nicholas Bertel, in their entirety. Visit songexploder.net to watch the trailer for Moonlight and for a link to buy the film's soundtrack. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh Her Way.

I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists, and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Robe. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me.

So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album, with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzuchas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In The Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now.

You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, Rishikash.co, or just go to SongExploder.net, slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. SongExploder is produced by me and Christian Coons and is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated network of extraordinary cutting-edge podcasts made possible by the Knight Foundation and by Mailchimp. Learn more at Radiotopia.fm. If you like Song Exploder, visit iTunes.com slash Song Exploder to leave a review or rate the show. It'll help others discover the podcast and let them know it's worth checking out. Next time on Song Exploder, Dropkick Murphys. You can find Song Exploder on Twitter,

Facebook, and Instagram at Song Exploder. And you can find all the past and future episodes of the show at SongExploder.net or wherever you download podcasts. My name is Rishi Keshe Your Way. Thanks for listening.