Gil Talmi & Andrew Gross:
Music Fit for a King
Andrew Gross (left) with Gil Talmi via iChat AV. Though the pair live thousands of miles apart, collaboration is effortless. Photo by Trudi Forristal.
In 2003, three millennia after his death, Egyptian pharaoh Rameses I returned to Cairo. It was a long road home for a mummy of such distinguished lineage. Along the way he’d been bought and sold, stolen and neglected. He’d traveled on ships and planes his wildest fantasies never could have conjured. He’d languished for years on a dusty shelf in a Niagara Falls museum, just another ghoul among the motley pack of animal mutants — including a two-headed calf — that briefly lured tourists away from the crashing cascades outside.
No one knew who he was. How did a king end up in a border town freak show?
“We wanted to do the mummy justice through the music. For us that meant mystery and respect, something regal that reflected ancient and distant times, hints of Middle Eastern influences, and...the melding of East and West, old and new.”
“The Mummy Who Would Be King”
Speculation about the identity of the mysterious mummy piqued the interest of Egyptologists — and that of producers at WGBH/NOVA, who set out to document his long, strange trip in “The Mummy Who Would Be King.” The film follows archeologists, curators, historians, and even an orthodontist, as they apply cutting-edge genetic testing and imaging to ascertain his identity. It’s a documentary that feels like thriller, as wild speculation and careful scholarship gradually unwrap the mummy’s secrets.
Throughout the one-hour film, music plays a key role in evoking the mummy’s ancient world and punctuating the tense drama of his modern-day adventures. That’s why PBS producers Gail Willumsen and Jill Shinefield hired veteran film composers Gil Talmi and Andrew Gross to score their show — the longtime friends and frequent musical collaborators have a knack for otherworldly sounds.
Like the mummy, Talmi, who lives in New York, and Gross, who lives in Los Angeles, had to bridge challenges of time and space. But unlike their silent subject, the composers had help from their Apple music platform. Aided by iChat, iSight, two Power Mac G5s, and Logic Pro 7, they spent three weeks in near-constant communication with each other and their clients, exchanging an exuberant flow of ideas, themes, motifs, and melodies to bring the long-dead pharaoh’s tale back to life.
A Virtual Collaboration
Talmi and Gross each have solid careers as film composers; in recent years they’ve taken on joint projects, too. So when Talmi moved to New York, they simply turned their creative partnership into a cross-country gig. “Lately, our relationship has been 97.3 percent virtual,” says Talmi with a laugh. “We spend so much virtual time together that when we meet in person it’s like, ‘You have a body?’”
Installing iSight and iChat afforded them an instant conference room for client get-togethers. “With iSight they can really get a sense of who we are, even though we’re thousands of miles apart,” says Gross. For the mummy project, “the four of us often ‘met’ at my studio in LA — it was easy to keep Gil in the loop.”
Even the initial spotting session — going through the film to determine which scenes require music and where it starts and stops — was virtual. “I was in my studio with our clients and Gil was in his in New York,” recalls Gross. “I put the film on my monitor and pointed iSight right at it. Then I had an extra videocam positioned behind my Mac, pointing at us. It was easy to switch cameras using my preferences panel, so Gil could watch the film and talk with us and see our reactions as we spotted it.”
“Our clients loved it because they could really interact with both of us,” says Talmi. “It’s much more personal than a conference call.” Adds Gross, “In some ways we actually have more fun working on iSight than working together in person. I’ll upload a piece I’ve just written and Gil will download it and listen to it, and we’ll be watching each other through iSight and talking about it. It’s a blast!”
Divvying Parts
With a close knowledge of, and trust in, one another’s work, Talmi and Gross were able to stay loose about who did what. They started by watching the film and working out the main thematic material together. Next they divvied up the remaining parts. “We just each picked the bits that inspired us,” says Gross. “It might be a scene, a character, or anything that required its own motific development.” But, notes Talmi, “We don’t say, ‘I’ll write a note, now you write a note.’ We just flow with the ideas.”
An Egyption ney. This arcane instrument, as well as the Armenian zurna pictured below and the Armenian duduk on the following page, was played by master woodwind musician Chris Beth in Gross and Talmi’s soundtrack to “The Mummy Who Would Be King.” Photo by Jacquie Bleth.
As it worked out, most of Talmi’s scenes involve the mummy itself and what Talmi calls “the through-line that invokes the enigmatic nature of his life and voyage.” Gross took on sections about the king’s modern-day travels, including Egypt-mad early collectors and the various scientists who unravel his past. “You could say I did the Eurocentric themes, like the parts that deal with how Europeans would bring their mummies to parties or grind them up to ingest as a cure for impotence,” he explains.
