A Conversation about Music with James Kicklighter & Nicolas Repetto
Scoring The Sound of Identity: James Kicklighter in conversation with composer Nicolas Repetto
Nick, it's great to sit down with you and talk about the score for The Sound of Identity. The thing I love about working with you is the evolution of our process together. We've been working together now for almost ten years. One of the things I was curious about is what the spark may be for you as a composer when you see something. When you saw the first edits of The Sound of Identity, knowing what the film was going to be about, what was your thought process? What was your first feeling when you were looking at it and asking, what should I write?
I think that dabbles a little bit in creativity. Luckily, your film struck a chord from the beginning. I remember watching the first few shots and thinking, that is fantastic. And I started hearing a violin. "Mr. Picker's Opus," the first track, includes a solo violin, which I thought fit fantastically well.
And that was the first piece of music you wrote for the film, too. I remember I was trying things out, and what blew me away when I heard it the first time was that that was it. The dissonance of the violin felt like a nice duality that said something about the characters you're about to see.
Yes. When we were discussing Lucia, the issue of identity came up, so something abstract. The violin doing these arpeggiated lines, really fast, symbolized that feeling of who she is. By the end of the film we have a better picture of who she is.
Trans is such a small part of my identity.
Something we talked about extensively in the writing process was starting big, with the full orchestra, and then stripping all the way down by the end of the score to a quartet. Can you tell me a little about the challenges of doing that?
All the themes are basically there. It's just a matter of subtracting a few instruments and changing the voicings. The challenge was making it sound really good at that small, intimate level, using Lucia's theme within the quartet. And I thought the musicians at the session played beautifully. It was absolutely stunning.
As you know, one of the challenging things about doing any film that's about a classic piece of music is that it puts you in a terrible position. I'm asking you to compete with Mozart and do Don Giovanni. In our initial conversations, that was the first thing we talked about: we have two choices here. One, we can try to out-Mozart Mozart, and I didn't want to do that to you. The second choice was to take elements from it and spin them in our own direction, and I thought you did a great job of doing that. You were able to use the elements of Mozart and Da Ponte's beautiful opera and integrate it as a kind of character in the film, musically.
We could only use three minutes of the actual performance of the opera in the film, per our negotiations with Tulsa Opera and the various unions. So from my standpoint, the challenge was how to condense the three minutes of the performance into something that works in the film. For you, that meant we had to bridge different elements of the opera and make it feel like a single element.
With Hollywood magic. Since it's public domain, we can take that. The orchestra was sitting in the studio anyway. So you gave the direction: we need this section filled up with Mozart, and then a little bit of an arrangement that transitions to get us in and out. I think it turned out seamless.
I think it's seamless, yeah.
It was a good experience, though we were terrified when you told us, "We have to do this." I thought, okay, I've never done that before.
It was very scary, I'm sure. I don't recall asking you, "Is this going to be scary or not?" Apparently it was, because it's a question of how you make it go right. It was perfect.
I want them to feel.