Taken With Laura Karpman
The prolific television composer tackles sci-fi, including an on-line
videogame.
By Jeff Bond
Laura Karpman has scored more than three dozen television projects
since 1989, but while it's unusual enough to see a female film composer
in this male-dominated field, Karpman is the first to admit that the
majority of her work has fallen into the "women's picture" genre, with
titles like The Sitter, The Broken
Cord, Child Lost Forever: The Jerry Sherwood Story, A Mother's Revenge
and Moment of Truth: A Mother's
Deception. But after working on the Showtime sci-fi series Odyssey 5 in 2002, Karpman's star
has risen, and it's gone meteoric with her work on the Sci Fi Channel
miniseries Taken, a surprise
ratings smash produced by Steven Spielberg.
Based on the success of Taken,
Karpman was brought on to score Everquest
II, the second version of Sony's massive multi-user online
videogame Everquest. While
scoring a wide-ranging videogame with action totally determined by
thousands of on-line players might sound like an impossible task,
Karpman's experience writing more than seven hours of music for the Taken miniseries practically made
it a walk in the park. "It's an interesting process because they have
never really made music an important part of the game," the composer
says of Everquest. "They've
had music, but they haven't really gone that far with it. It's odd and
I don't know what experiences other game composers have had but
basically they're developing the game now so they're not that far on
it, and it's an online game and therefore one can never know what's
going to happen because it's determined by the interaction between
players, and there can be up to a hundred thousand players on-line at
any given time. So basically what you do is you talk to the creative
team and get a sense of what each place or environment is like, and
there are many places -- the game is endless and it's really a world in
and of itself. So you kind of score each location. There are no timings
and no perimeters except the limits of your imagination and a basic
guideline as to what the emotive qualities of any place might be. It's
really more like writing programmatic concert music than it is like
writing a film score."
In effect Karpman found herself writing environmental music for a wide
variety of situations. "What I'm doing is writing 60 or 70 minutes of
orchestral music, most of it are these places, and there are also some
action cues, different kinds of attacks and different things that will
happen. Then I'm going to do probably another 10 or 20 minutes of more
sound design cues, where I have a collection of instruments and play
around with those to create some digital environments for some other
places. Altogether we'll have about 90 or 100 minutes of music. You
could go on and on and on and I could spend two years writing on this
but I'm not going to. Nobody knows how it's going to develop because it
hasn't been done for an online game before -- it's still a mystery as
to how it will work and we'll have to wait to see what happens with it."
The scope and depth of Karpman's writing for Taken inspired music executives at
Sony to hire her for Everquest II.
"It's a very important game for Sony; it's their biggest seller and
kind of a big deal, and they wanted something filmic and complicated,"
Karpman says. "I met with the game developers in San Diego and spent a
lot of time down there and saw what they were developing, and we
figured out together how this would work. I had never done a videogame
but even if I had, this is unusual because it's online and it's not
something where if you go to the left this happens and if you go to the
right that happens; one just doesn't know what will happen. They had a
theme that another composer had done for Everquest 1, and I used that and
modified it, and that plays only during the loading of the game. All
the other themes are new and it's sort of a game of main titles, other
than the action stuff -- it's not like scoring and it's much more like
a suite of concert music and much more thematic than it is cue-y."
Just as it works in animation, computer gaming allows composers a far
more intimate working relationship with the creative personnel behind
the project. "Creatively it's one of the most fun projects I've ever
done," Karpman says. "These people are fantastic to work with, you work
very closely with the game developers so it's very organic. I think
it's a huge area for composers, especially the more and more orchestral
they get. The people who are gamers really like music. They printed out
a survey they had done on what people listen to, and the gamers listen
to heavy metal and other stuff but they also listen to classical music
like Carmina Burana and a lot of 20th-century classical music, and they
listen to a lot of fantasy film scores like Lord of the Rings, a lot of John
Williams scores, and they're really interested in music. And what's
interesting is there's no dialogue and it's not like a film score where
you have the timings and perimeters of the scene to control your work;
it's really about imagination and atmosphere. It's a fabulous venue for
composers and a new way for us to go."
Crank up the Volume
In terms of sheer bulk of music, Everquest
II still doesn't compare with Karpman's work on Taken, a project the composer
bagged after DreamWorks music executive Todd Homme heard her music for
the pilot episode of Odyssey 5.
"The pilot was 12 cellos, two contrabassoons, two basses and six french
horns and a lot of sound design and samples I'd done in my studio,"
Karpman says. "I was just doing my thing but doing it orchestrally even
with that kind of small, weird orchestra. [Director] David Carson and
[series creator] Manny Coto hired me to do something different and
people liked it. I had done the pilot about two years ago, and I met
with Todd Homme a year ago last November, in the fall of 2001. They
asked me to do demos for Taken
and I read the scripts and did a bunch of cues based on themes I was
able to cull from the script, with really no direction. I don't even
know how much music there is in Taken,
frankly; I think there was about seven hours of music. There were 10
two-hour movies, so it was huge."
With a storyline (involving human contact with extraterrestrials) that
spans five decades and four generations and involves three families,
Karpman had to score not only some bizarre sci-fi situations but a wide
swath of human drama. "I used largely mid-20th-century music, a lot of
Bartok, Berlioz, Lutoslawski and people like that. I listened to
Copland and Leonard Bernstein for Taken,
too, because it's such a big, American story. That sensibility,
Bernstein of the '50s, is something I've listened to a lot of my life
and seeped into Taken,
especially the parts that took place in the 1950s."
Tackling the sheer tonnage of musical cues in Taken was its own problem, Karpman
says. "I had to write a tremendous amount of music and I was still
working on Odyssey 5, and I
was working literally 16 hours a day every day and I didn't have a day
off for seven months. I would work on Taken
all day, get up really early in the morning, and I would have an
assistant at my second studio set up cues for Odyssey, and then I would come in
and play on those and have her do sound design -- I was writing insane
numbers, just a huge amount of music every day. We recorded all of Taken in Los Angeles and did a
score a day, basically. I did episode one, episode 10 and episode nine
all in November. I was writing seven minutes of music a day and we had
very little time. There were certainly strategies like the ones I do
for Everquest; I would do 30
minutes of orchestral stuff in a score and then do smaller stuff or
sampled stuff for the rest of the score."
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