BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
A woman wakes up on an island, a conch shell in her hand. Not knowing where she is, she lifts it to her mouth and blows a lengthy tone through this instrument of nature.
It’s the first scene in the Netflix series The I-Land, and not dissimilar to the experience of Emily Rice — the composer who worked on the show and made use of the conch as an instrument throughout her score (albeit working from a studio, not a beach — we assume…).
The I-Land is Emily’s first score for television, and it’s certainly an energizing start to her career in the medium. But it also follows on from an impressive line of documentary credits, along with her work on the music for films Tomb Raider and Alita: Battle Angel, and orchestration for The Mummy, Star Trek: Discovery, and Altered Carbon.
In another first for Emily, she was the first-ever composer to receive a BAFTA Los Angeles scholarship, and she has also completed music studies at the University of York, USC Scoring for Motion Picture program, and Sundance Institute Film Music and Sound Design Lab.
Emily, first up, a huge congratulations for your first-ever TV score. Considering it’s a major Netflix series, that’s a particularly impressive achievement. How did you feel when you first found out you’d landed The I-Land (if you’ll pardon the pun)?
Thank you! It’s funny, because there wasn’t one clear eureka moment that I realised I was doing the show. It all sort of started out from the initial meeting and then everything from there merged together, and before I knew it I was halfway through it.
I think I went through all the emotions you might imagine – joy, excitement, fear and doubt, the anxiety. It’s all part of the process. But overall, I was just very excited to have the chance to work with Netflix and help them tell this particular story.
So, you were discovered by a specialist in production sound technology — right when you were gearing up for your role in a concert called The Future is Female. How did things travel from there, after that initial moment of discovery?
Yeah, I met Ozzie Sutherland during the course of preparing for The Future is Female concert. He was at every rehearsal and was a huge support to the crew organising the event.
We got on really well and he was very kind about my work, and so we figured we should get lunch once the concert was over. I mostly wanted to hang out and be super geeky and get a tour around the Netflix building, but our schedules kept being very unaligned!
Fast-forward eight months, and he got in touch wanting to recommend me for a series that he was working on alongside the production team. So we finally found ourselves having lunch right before going in to the meeting for The I-Land together.
There was obviously some preparation in between, where I sent them a demo reel and they sent me the show to watch. So at the meeting, I was ready to discuss my ideas for the score, and from there I got to work.
Talk us through the background that informed your engagement in the show. What experiences were of the greatest value to you when setting up the skills and systems you needed for this TV scoring project? Your previous credits, or your academic studies, for instance?
I think many aspects of my musical background have helped in different ways, from learning music from a young age to playing electric cello with bands.
Studying in the film scoring program at USC was definitely a huge stepping stone for me in terms of equipping me with skills I didn’t have, and also getting me over to Los Angeles from the United Kingdom.
My jobs assisting various film composers also gave me insight into the inner workings of the industry; and scoring student films and then my first projects, after entering the industry, were all big learning curves — and the curves were more like very straight steep lines, at times!
I also think that scoring as many films as I could was really important, as that’s where you get to practice reading and responding to narrative, which is at least half the job.
In discussions about the series, I’ve heard you were given a sort of free rein when it came to the scoring of The I-Land. How did your creative freedom influence your musical decisions? Did you try anything new or daring — or use the series to continue building your own identifiable sound?
The producers definitely had a rough idea about what they wanted for the score, and luckily when I described what I wanted to do it matched up with their vision, and I was given free rein within that to explore that soundworld.
The show is definitely one of the more experimental projects I’ve worked on and because I recorded a lot of sounds before I started writing, I was working with audio a lot more than I have in the past.
If anything, creative freedom allowed me the chance to follow my instincts. And for me, I’m always trying to find what the story needs, whether that’s something experimental or more traditional.
Talk us through the technical side to your score and your instrumentation (including the conch shell. Conch shells seems to be all the rage for composers at the moment. What a cool device).
So, I started by recording a lot of material on the cello, some stuff on guitars, and also the conch shell. The shells are tough to get sound from and we could only get a few long sustained notes out of it, so that’s all I had to work with. But luckily, I wanted to go down the musical sound design route, which meant I was happy to chop up the long audio clips and make shorter notes, pitch shift them to form little motifs, and all sorts of things like that.
We recorded a larger conch shell and a small one, and the small one was much higher-pitched and ended up being the basis of some more percussive elements.
There had also been discussion about having a sinister kind of rattle sound for the Warden character, and I made that out of rattling a pencil around inside the larger conch shell.
There’s a conch that features in the show on screen, and so I thought that it would be cool to use one in the score too, and tie things together visually and aurally.
A conch shell is literally an instrument made by nature, and so it automatically has a more organic and raw sound. I wanted the score to be very textural and layered, and to have that raw vibe to it, which is why I chose a lot of the sounds that you hear throughout the show.
The I-Land is your first TV series, but you have a long history of scoring — and you’ve worked on some solid documentaries, too. Now that you’ve emerged from The I-Land, what have you noticed are some of the biggest differences in scoring the “real-life” narrative of a doco compared to a constructed, fictional narrative? Or does the truth not matter when it comes to music, which must persuade its listeners to feel something either way?
Yeah, I’m not convinced that there is that much of a difference, broadly speaking. Over the course of a TV series, you might have more time to develop themes and use them in different ways, but telling the story remains the important thing. And although some documentaries are intended to be neutral in their perspective, the picture will still tell you something and the music should probably support that.
I’m scoring a documentary right now, and I’m still latching on to certain people that appear, and the landscapes or the weather, etc. A documentary that is about politics versus a documentary about nature will likely have different musical needs, and a narrative film about politics versus nature will have another set of different needs — but again, the focus is still always on the story or the point of view. It’s the message that matters, not the format.
Although I would say that truth lies in music, the screen will also not lie! You can try all sorts of musical ideas against the picture, and a lot of it won’t stick, so the picture tells you the truth as much as the music. And sometimes even that doesn’t matter, because film-making is a collaborative effort, and something that I think works perfectly for the picture won’t work for the film-makers I’m working with. So maybe it’s that the music and picture have to tell the same truth together.
Before we let you go, what advice would you give to other composers embarking on their first TV series?
Get organised! Do all that boring stuff first so you can go forward focusing on writing the music.
Images supplied. Credit: Merissa Fernandez.
