Creating a Database of Paramount Music

Paramount Pictures and the Berklee College of Music are nearing the completion of a mammoth collaborative process–the cataloging of every movie score from every Paramount film released since the 1920s. Debra Gelinas, Director of the Office of Experiential Learning at Berklee and a chief organizer of the program, estimated that the project contains “hundreds of thousands of minutes of music,” and said that Berklee had “never done a project on this scale before.”

Berklee film music professor Richard Davis was essential in instigating the massive undertaking. Paramount was deciding between several film music programs—including those at the University of Southern California, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Berklee; ultimately, only Berklee was chosen for the program. Once in touch with Berklee, Paramount chose a group of 40 of the brightest Berklee film-scoring students who would then use their expertise in music production and composition to assign search tags and key terms to every cue—music for one scene—in the Paramount music archive. Directors and producers can then search for these key terms in the archive to find cues suitable for use in their films. For instance, a director in need of a ‘thrilling’ yet ‘humorous’ cue can search for these tags in the database and come across a few cues that Berklee interns also classified as ‘thrilling or ‘humorous’. After coming to a licensing agreement with Paramount, the director can use these tracks in his or her film.

Although the database clearly helps Paramount organize and license their music, it also helps the Berklee students interning with the project. Professor Davis claimed that cataloging the archive offers the students “access to vast amounts of film music that are not readily available to the public.” By thoroughly studying these tracks the interns can further their understanding of the relationship between film and music. “I also learned a great deal about film music itself. The simplicity of music in a film becomes so easily apparent when you strip it away from the picture,” wrote Bryant J. Fuhrmann, a recent Berklee graduate and former intern for the project, by email.

As further compensation for their unpaid work, each intern was offered the opportunity to score an old short Paramount film to be displayed on the Paramount website. Such opportunities are rare but valuable experiences for aspiring film composers. Fuhrmann was assigned a Paramount cartoon from the ‘30s and began to correspond with Paramount executives about his work. The executives guided the interns through the process to yield a final product that suited the executives’ visions. Scoring the short film was, according to Fuhrmann, “three months of grueling work, that made me go nuts at times.” However, such hard work came with the invaluable experience that Professor Davis describes as working in a “situation that mirrors a professional environment.” Fuhrmann echoed such sentiments; he said that the program taught him “what life in the music industry could be like.”

Although the program seems to be promoting new film music, it also ironically seems to threaten the existence of film composers: its database could eliminate the need for directors to commission new film music. Fuhrmann, however, is not bothered. Invoking Igor Stravinsky, he said that “good musicians borrow, great musicians steal;” he claimed that he can undercut Paramount licensing fees by selling a track to a director that merely mimicks the style of a track in the database.

For success in the film music industry composers must be jacks-of-all-trades. They must be chameleons, able to easily reproduce and create in a variety of styles. Confident with this ability through his experience as an intern for Paramount and his degree from Berklee, Fuhrmann said he is ready to take on the tough and demanding life of a film composer. “I’m now a one stop shop as much as these cue libraries,” he said. “I’m not worried.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction.

CORRECTION: FEB. 21, 2011

The Feb. 15 article "Creating a Database of Paramount Music" incorrectly referred to the Berklee College of Music as the Berklee School of Music.