FIGHTING MUSIC

Hyphen Magazine, Summer 2009 by Seeto, Margot

Four Asian American film composers who are setting the tone for action movies.

PEOPLE WIELDING "Asian radar" can spot every person of Asian descent In any film, band or TV show (and will often gripe about the sparse and terrible nature of Asian American media representation). But even these walking encyclopedias of pop culture can't easily spot every Asian American in the media, especially those who make a name for themselves behind the scenes.

In Hollywood, movie scoring is an unseen yet influential element of the film industry. Musical scores add emotional depth to a viewer's cinematic experience and can become as iconic as the film Itself. Case In point: At any given moment, someone in the world is humming the theme from Jaws or Star Wars.

Movie scores that fall outside the John Williams epic category are perhaps even more underappreciated. Action movie scores in particular can get a bad rap for being simple or too loud.

Hyphen caught up with four Asian American film composers who are raising the bar for action-flick scores. Fueled by superhuman passion, these prolific musicians work maniacal hours under constant deadlines to produce music that soars. For all four composers, musical training began with the piano in childhood and later included some time at the University of Southern California.

Timo Chen, after finishing college at Oberlin College, went on to study Asian music in Asia, where he played in Top 40 bands in hotels and later toured with pop stars Jacky Cheung and Coco Lee. After returning to the states, Chen turned to musical theater, affiliating with the likes of East West Players and filmmaker Chris Tashima. Small movie composing jobs led Chen into the Sundance world, which in turn led to bigger movie gigs. He's done music for Asian Task Force and upcoming sci-fi thriller Afterglow.

Nathan Wang, who started attending university music classes as a child, went to Pomona College and completed graduate work in Oxford, England. Once back in the states, Wang played jazz piano in five-star restaurants and went on to write music for TV's China Beach. Since then, he has composed for a slew of Jackie Chan movies including: Rumble in the Bronx, Who Am I, First Strike and The Myth. George Shaw, a Chinese-Japanese American composer, recently scored Asian Stories starring James Kyson Lee from NBC's Heroes. He has also composed a martial arts-inspired music album called Legendary Warriors and scored an Indiana Jones fan-film called Treasure of the Templars. Shaw aspires to score an epic sci-fi or fantasy movie akin to Star Wars.

Sujin Nam, the sole female composer in this roundup of talent, was born in Seoul, South Korea, and came to the United States for college. Nam, who especially enjoys scoring thrillers, has done musical work for Entrapment, Spider-Man 2 and 3, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Ghost Rider, Conspiracy, Untraceable, The Grudge and HBO's Mad Men.

Technology and the Action Genre

Despite the classical element in their training, all four composers affirmed the importance of staying technology-savvy.

"The most challenging part of being a composer is to stay on top of all the technological advances that music has made over the years. ... As composers who want to keep working in this business, you've got to stay ahead of, or at least with, the curve," Wang says.

All these technological advances can foster laziness, too. "The easy way is to use a loop and build on top of it," Wang says.

The action-movie genre itself, Chen says, can play into the quick-fix tendency as well. "If you're up against a tight deadline, this is the one genre of music where it can be acceptable to just have filler music that is at full volume, high speed and tons of copy/paste - acceptable, but not desired."

"On the upside," Chen says, "It is the genre where you can actually have soaring epic themes blending in heavy distorted guitars with electronics and drum machines, and have that drive a 100-piece orchestra."

Wang also notes that, despite the use of loops, "good action adventure scores still change with the picture, and there is still a good deal of variety within the score. Someone I love to listen to is Alan Silvestri. His action score for Van Helsing is always changing, is always changing meter and always following the myriad of tension and releases within the action."

Nam sheds further light on the technical and artistic nuances called for by certain movie genres and subgenres. As for fantasies and adventures, "the subject can be seen as artsy, free and thinking-outsidethe-box-like, but actual production should be precisely calculated with technology and technique," she says. On the other hand, "good thrillers are almost like battlefields between the filmmakers and the authence telling one another, 1I am smarter.' But the authence wants to be confused and tricked before things unfold," she says.

Speaking to personal preferences among types of scenes, Chen would rather score "a good chase scene over a fight," because it allows for "the background to always be changing and to have tons of edits at every angle, which gives the composer the option to either tie everything together or to blow It all up."