Chris Crilly

Education

• BA (Communication Arts) University of Montreal

Areas of expertise

Communication Studies, Cinema, Dean's Office (Fine Arts)

Of Loons, Coyotes And Ballpoint Pens

 Of Stairwells, Coyotes and Ballpoint Pens

        It was never my intention to be a film composer.  I trained, and initially worked, as a cinematographer.  A producer colleague mentioned my musical skills to his director and voilà!  Three weeks later I was in the NFB studio in front of my first little orchestra (a brave piano trio, a timpanist and a fellow on a cheesy circa 1980 synthesizer) conducting with a leaky ballpoint pen as they played my score for a biographical documentary on Hugh McLennan.  In the spirit of 'write what you know' what does a boarding school survivor/fiddler write but variations on ribald rugby songs and Celtic fiddle tunes.  I have not shot a frame of picture since.

            These were giddy days and the good old NFB kept the score contracts coming.  Initially uncomfortable with the lofty screen credit: 'composer,' I was surfing on exhilaration; a pen-wielding neophyte conducting highly trained, professional musicians as they beat, bowed and blew my scores into something akin to film music. 

            Keen to understand what I could have done to deserve all this good fortune, I looked back over the preceding years to see if there was a pattern.  A brief stint in the Grenadier Guards (marching behind pipes and drums I learned that drill sergeants 'sing' rather than 'growl' their loud commands), a Communication Arts degree, studying languages, travel in Europe, North America, South East Asia and Africa, a Sahara crossing, touring, recording and concertizing, photography, cinematography, only compounded things.

            The pattern was not at first easy to see.  Only later would I realise that this eclectic array of interests was steering my artistic focus in a straight line towards film music and sound.  A sound editor must know his birds, clocks, aero-engines and insects.  A film composer, as much filmmaker as musician, needs the broadest possible exposure to the world's music.  

        Languages, music and the sounds of exotic environments were a re-education and it is precisely this enhanced audio 'depth of field' that has fed my work; synthesizing disparate aural events as I wrestle with the scoring and sound editing of films on cultures as distant from mine as the Arctic, Palestine, the Lubovitcher Chassidim, Kenya and that cute little dot in the Gulf of St. Lawrence called Entry Island. 

            Along the way I had learned to listen, not to the meaning of sound, language or music, but to simple aural facts. Tuning my ear to the rhythms and frequency distributions of natural sound was liberating, enhancing my delight in aural environments for their own sake.  I would then turn around and put these sounds to work in films, but not in the same automatic way as before. 

            We filmmakers are constantly thrust into creative situations that are foreign to us.  We must be quick on our feet to survive as film-sound practitioners.  As storytellers we must draw quickly on whatever inner resources we have, gleaning grand tales from human antics, dressing the mutton of unstoried life as the lamb of drama.  As a film composer and sound designer I must cast a broad and intense gaze.  Nothing is too small.  The tinkling of wind chimes, the moan of a draft in an elevator shaft, the complex tones of a church bell, the filter sweeps of a harmonic choir, all wash around me as I seek fresh aural material. 

            Not surprisingly, these natural sounds also inform my use of traditional instruments, although it has not been easy to find in schooled players that rawness so characteristic of the folk musician.  I have worked with conservatory-trained violinists capable of transducing a written score into the music of angels. many of these players are desperately distraught if asked to improvise.  So, while I have often felt formal musical schooling would have made my professional life easier, this may in fact not be true.  Enhanced keyboard musicianship, superior violin technique and truer intonation might well have come, but at a price.  Might that price have included the exuberance of the autodidact composer; the brashness to damn the torpedoes and stick a didgeridoo, viola and Jew’s harp into the score for the first Inuit feature; the effrontery to shoehorn a 16th century Gaelic keening hymn into a documentary about sexually unhinged 20th century monks? 

            I suspect bypassing the traditional composer novitiate has paid more than it has cost. I stumbled gleefully upon steel pan players at Expo 67, drummed under a cottonwood tree in Ghana, faked through dance music at age fifteen with a ship's orchestra (an excellent cure for mal-de-mer), joined a symphony chorus to learn under stellar choral directors and conductors. Starting as a collector of fortunate accidents, I later developed this musical traipsing and trawling into a conscious programme of exposure to whatever musical colours I needed for the job.

            Many varied musical experiences have nourished my dual careers of musician/singer and film composer/sound designer.   My music feeds off choirs of loons and coyotes, the ever-surprising echoes from my barn, the wonderful resonance to be found in a stairwell.  Sounds not normally associated with formal composition, long recognized by creators of musique concrête, are equally available to melodic and rhythmic music, whether or not we give the sounds musical monikers.

            I continue my search for the immediate, un-edited aural experience and try to impress upon my sound students the value of this search.  Ironically, I am drawn to close the circle and listen in new ways to the sound of traditional instruments and their use; to recognize in these august tones the same honesty I value in the less structured aural world. The old truism: that our most important musical instrument is the ear, came by its currency honestly.

CHRIS CRILLY

Havelock, QC

Lá le Pádraig

March 17th 2013