Oscar and Emmy-award winning film composer Rachel Portman has written scores for more than 100 major motion pictures, including Lasse Halleström’s The Cider House Rules (Charlie Theron, Tobey Maguire), Chocolat (Johnny Depp, Juliette Binoche), and Benny & Joon (Johnny Depp, Mary Stuart Masterson). She received the Academy Award for her work on Douglas McGrath’s 1996 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma (Gwyneth Paltrow). Her music for the HBO television feature Bessie in 2015, garnered her a Primetime Emmy Award. Rachel made history as one of the first female composers to win an Academy Award in the category of Best Musical or Comedy Score in 1997 (for Emma). In 2010, she received an OBE in the New Year’s Honours, which was the same year she was the first woman to win the Richard Kirk Award at the BMI Film and TV Awards.
Rachel’s scores are inherently inspired by her love of nature and the natural world. This love has transcended with her latest debut release of her solo project, aptly titled ask the river, out now on Node Records. The album explores the tranquility and calm of nature with solo piano, two pianos, violin, and cello, with Rachel describing it as “this music takes its starting point from the human experience and the earth.” She teamed up with her longtime collaborators, violinist Clio Gould and cellist Caroline Dale, for several tracks. Each song has a consistent theme revolving around nature, including the innocent plight of childhood and flourishing freedom; these songs ooze the elements of nature and the emotion it evokes of us.
Being a fan of Rachel’s music and composition since childhood, it was an honor to discuss her debut solo album, her work in some of the most infamous films, and how she thinks the industry is changing for women and a few of her favorites in music.
Grab your copy of or stream ask the trees HERE.
Referencing nature and being outside, is there anything specific about nature that drew you to create your latest release with ask the river?
Rachel Portman: Well, yes, in that I…It’s terribly hard to talk about what one has created. I find it really hard to talk about music because music is ephemeral. It’s something that exists in the moment and you can’t hold onto it. What I can say is that it’s an album and it’s a response to being immersed in nature. I guess it’s an invitation to the listener to be a part of nature too and whatever anyone else might feel when they listen to it. My feeling is that we’ve become very disconnected from nature, wild things, and the Earth. Quite a lot of what I’ve been doing over the past 15, 20 years is uptake more and more interest in the environment. This album is really a response to my feelings of feeling that we’re not separate. We’re one. Human beings, we are part of nature. If we hurt the natural world around us, we’re hurting ourselves. I’m not trying to beat a drum, but what I can do is create music and hopefully share my own connection, my own feeling towards the nature that I see around me and that I’m in.
I love it. It’s absolutely beautiful. I love your videos and music. It’s so calming and soothing. It’s something that we all should listen to during today’s time, especially with everything that’s going on around us. It’s just listening to it getting lost in the sounds. That’s what it’s intended to do.
Rachel: Absolutely. Absolutely. It is quite reflective… I know that. I think that’s the invitation is to stop and listen. For me, it’s to stop and ask questions, to stop and listen to the sounds around me when I’m outside, and to ask the Earth what it needs…which is why the title is ask the river.
I love the fact that also amongst your numerous film and television compositions that this is your first-ever CD release aside from that. Why is now the right time for you to release it, in your opinion?
Rachel: Because I’m interested in writing lots of different kinds of music. I love composing for film. I love it. It feeds me. It’s probably my greatest love. I’m also really interested in writing for other forms. I’ve written an opera. I’m going to write another opera. I’ve written some concert pieces and various other things. Worked with singers, texts, and worked with poets. I’ve developed a real interest in creating my own voice away from film. This is really a natural extension of that, in that, I’m searching within myself for music that I’m writing on this rather than working with someone else or setting someone else’s text. I’ve spent and spend so much of my life writing music that’s basically telling stories. I’m very comfortable doing that.
It’s like a going within to write a different kind of music. I know it sounds like all the rest of my music probably. I don’t know about that. But it’s doing something different and I wanted so much to write these pieces and to put together a body of work. Then the other thing that is a first for me is to actually perform them as well because I never perform on the film. I just don’t. I’ve always stood in the background.
It was great to challenge myself to do this because even though I play the piano and sit at the piano while I write every day, it’s like putting yourself in front of the camera; I’ve never pushed myself forward to do that. I really enjoyed doing that. I worked with a fantastic cellist and violinist as well. Most of the pieces, apart from one, they’re all piano-led. The piano is like the big bedrock in the middle. It’s been a great journey for me actually. It’s been great. It took a surprisingly long time as well. It was on and off over 18 months, I was writing with them and really challenging myself with them. So it was good. It was fun.
What is your writing process like, if you don’t mind sharing? I’m sure it’s very complex and all over the place, but is there a specific lead-in?
Rachel: I think, like any writer who’s trying to create something, you’ve got to get out of the way. I sit there and I’ve got an idea of what I’m trying to do or whatever and want to stop thinking. That’s how I work. I am thinking. I’m trying to come up with something. I’m thinking about this and that. I wait until inspiration comes, but often it’s a tricky, slippery thing that is quite elusive and it eludes you. When you’re in the flow, you’re not thinking at all, it’s just happening. It’s just an instinctive thing that happens. If you try to stop and think, “Oh, why am I doing this? What’s happening? Am I in that zone now?” it disappears. It’s interesting. That’s what I’ve found anyway.
My process is, I’m really, really disciplined. I get up at a decent hour and my best time to write is in the morning. I sit at my piano and I wait for inspiration. Come the afternoon, mid-afternoon, especially by about this time, I’m no good for writing at all. I’ll be happy to orchestrate then, or write emails, or figure out sessions for orchestra, or that kind of thing, or whatever. But writing is best when you’ve woken up and you haven’t done too much that day yet and you can just go calmly into the writing place where you can think or not think rather.
All of this, collectively, with what you’ve done, what you have been doing, all of it; I know that you’ve done the quirky compositions, you’ve done the melancholy compositions and you’ve done this one about nature. Are there any of those that have influenced your current composition at all, or is it just all free-flowing from nature?
Rachel: I think any writer or composer is developing their language throughout the course of their working life. I’m sure even though it’s different when I’m working on a film, my language, I’m always refining it. As I pass through my life, I’m finding I’m more interested in some things than others than I maybe have done when I was starting out in my 20s.
I don’t know. I’m sure a lot of the music in the album ask the river sounds like my voice or there’s something. But, for me, I always think I’m working out something that feels… I’m not trying to do anything new, it’s just a response to what I’m writing.
It’s really hard to answer that question, to be honest. I don’t think there’s anything in particular. There’s one piece in there called… Hang on, which one is it? I know what it is, flight. flight is one piece that I think is a little bit connected to Never Let Me Go (Keira Knightley, Andrew Garfield), which was one of the scores I’m proudest of. I would recognize that maybe there was a yearning to the violin in the same way that I did in one of the pieces there. But, apart from that, I don’t feel that they’re connected to anything in particular that I can recognize.
Creating making compositions in a primarily male-dominated field, you were the first female to win the Oscar for Best Musical Score (for the film Emma), and with the film, Joker‘s most recent win with Hildur Guðnadóttir, do you think that people in the industry are more open to female composers?
Rachel: I’m hoping. I don’t know because I’m not on the ground. I can’t see what’s actually happening. But, I’m hoping that… It’s true that the more people get used to seeing a woman writing music for a film or a woman up there getting an award, the more we are represented and the more pieces that are… I don’t know. I think, like anything, the perception is that there aren’t that many film composers who are women.
So anything that gets us out there… It’s hugely encouraging for other women I think to see. It really is. That’s important in itself because it gives other women courage not to think about the statistics of there’s so few. I think it will change and this is really good that she had the win for the Joker and much deserved, by the way. I think she’s fantastic.
But I wish it was a bit quicker. I wish everything would hurry up a bit. Personally, I’ve come across some really good, young female film composers who are coming up, who are studying and that kind of thing. There are some really good voices out there and there’s no shortage of people coming up through the ranks. I imagine it won’t be long before there’s much more parity.
Fun Questions
Do you recall your first purchase on cassette, CD, and/or vinyl?
Rachel: The first record I bought on vinyl was a 45 and it was Gary Glitter’s Rock and Roll Part 2, I think. It’s the thing… It’s the piece of music that’s used in that big scene in Joker. That’s his first one I bought. I was 12 or 13.
Who was your first concert, and who has been your favorite so far?
Rachel: I would say that was Black Bush in England, and Bob Dylan played there live. I was 16, 17, something like that.
Which five albums or artists would you not want to live without?
Rachel: I would not want to live without Bach. He can be one of my artists. I would not want to live without Bach. I would not want to live without Shostakovich. I would not want to live without Mozart. Oh. I would not want to live without David Bowie, and I would not want to live without Ravel.
What have you been doing to keep creatively occupied during isolation?
Rachel: I’ve been getting ready to make myself a beautiful face mask from the best material I can find from looking around my cupboards, for something able to make into it, and looking for homemade ways to substitute for elastic which you can’t get a hold of anywhere.
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