Output details

‘Lucian Freud - A Painted Life’ (Soundtrack: BBC2 broadcast 18 Feb 2012; winner Ivor Novello Award 2013 and Royal Television Society Award for ‘Best Soundtrack’ 2012)

Harle’s score was written for the Blakeway Productions/BBC2 documentary ‘Lucien Freud – This Painted Life’ and won the Ivor Novello Award 2013 and Royal Television Society Award for ‘Best Soundtrack’.

Whilst composed in response to a commercial brief, this score explores how melodic, harmonic and timbral compositional devices can be utilised to perform functional roles (such as cueing and underscoring) whilst simultaneously creating a parallel musical structure with its own internal logic and narrative drive.

Harle’s approach develops three characteristic methods:

‘underscoring’: the development of functional (non-invasive, complementary) material that underscores spoken word narration relating to factual, chronological events in Freud’s life, such as his childhood, his move to London, etc;

‘motivic/thematic’: the development of recurring intervallic material that is used to suggest a narrative beneath the images displayed; e.g., a theme for Freud is established and then subjected to chromatic variation throughout the documentary as Freud’s character is analysed from multiple perspectives;

‘invasive’: – the development of material that is designed to temporarily subvert the listener’s attention through short sound events, such as fragmented attacks on a prepared piano or an isolated triple-tongued motive on the saxophone.

Through careful interplay, these three catagories of material are juxtaposed beneath the spoken word and foley soundtrack to provide an aesthetic depth to the documentary that both supports the commercial brief and creates a coherent musical statement.