Velton Ray Bunch

By Jeff Bond

Excerpted from FSM Vol. 7, No. 1, on sale now...

If you're looking for a helpful demonstration of the word "counterintuitive," you need look no further than the current state of music for the Star Trek television franchise. Here's a series featuring the vastness of space, starships, interstellar wars and bizarre aliens -- a treasure trove of inspiration for any composer. And Star Trek music budgets and resources are the envy of any genre show, with all episodes accorded the luxury of a full studio orchestra that can range from 30 to 50 players. But composers hired for the show who think they're going to write Star Wars music for television are in for a rude shock: Trek television scoring is a highly specialized field. Over the course of the past 14 years (during which there has been at least one new Star Trek TV series running on the air at any given time), the style of music for the franchise has gone from a bombastic reflection of the earlier Star Trek TV and movie scores to a streamlined and mostly textural approach that Trek veteran Dennis McCarthy has described as "sonic wallpaper."

Star Trek has had an experienced stable of composers for several years now, including McCarthy, Jay Chattaway, David Bell and Paul Baillargeon. Since launching the newest entry in the series, Enterprise, starring Scott Bakula, the show's producers (including Rick Berman and Peter Lauritson) have loosened up some of the musical guidelines for the series, but any composer entering this crucible must be prepared to tailor their music to the dictates of the producers. Velton Ray Bunch recently discovered that when he scored his first Enterprise episode, "Silent Enemy," which involves the Enterprise facing off against a mysterious and hostile alien vessel that refuses to communicate with them.

Bunch got his scoring career started like many current television composers, working for Mike Post on shows like Hill Street Blues. After joining a group of composers with Post on producer Donald Bellisario's series Quantum Leap, Bunch's work was singled out and Bellisario requested that he become the sole composer on the series. "Quantum Leap was an interesting animal in terms of musical styles," Bunch says. "The first two years I believe were orchestral acoustic scores albeit very small orchestras, and about that time was when electronic scoring and packaging came into the mix, and so due to budgetary reasons at Universal they cut the music budget exactly in half, and of course there was really no way to do orchestral scores then and we went to electronic scores then. But when the Lee Harvey Oswald episode came up, Don Bellisario and I talked and I said that I didn't think this show should be done electronically. It was an important show for him because he had written it and he went out and got a lot of money to do the score and so we did it with what at that time was the largest group they'd ever used at Universal, about 75 people, which was a huge group for television. And then the next week we went back to electronic scoring." Bunch received an Emmy nomination for his scoring of the Lee Harvey Oswald episode of Quantum Leap.

Since many of the Quantum Leap episodes featured songs or other kinds of musical interaction as Scott Bakula's character stepped into the lives of various performers or musicians, Bunch found himself working closely with Bakula and the two developed a friendship that led to Bakula recommending Bunch for a job on Enterprise. Bunch states that he had little familiarity with the Trek franchise, but he prepared heavily for his debut scoring assignment on Enterprise, the episode "Silent Enemy." "I sort of went to school the last few weeks and I attended a few Dennis McCarthy sessions and he was very helpful, and I got a compilation of some of the soundtracks and did my homework that way," the composer says, noting that he ran into the Trek franchise's well-known group of post-production producers and their concerns fairly early. "There's a layer of producers and a couple of them had indicated that they didn't want me to stray too far from the palette that had been set, and a couple of the others were sort of the opposite and encouraged me to push the envelope. What I think I haven't heard before and I've been told they haven't used is that I tend to score even orchestrally a bit more rhythmic than others, and so a lot of the cues I did for that episode have a rhythmic base. I don't mean drums or traps, but just a constant kind of pulsing tension and I did that using a few more percussion players than I think Dennis or Jay do and a couple of synthesizers and then layered the orchestra around it. I was really terrified that they would hate it but they didn't."

Viewers tuning in to "Silent Enemy" on January 16th got a taste of a much more percussive and rhythmically driven Enterprise score than had been previously featured on the series. Nevertheless, the final recorded score was notably different from what Bunch first presented to the post-production team. "To my experience the changes were extensive," Bunch acknowledges. "I don't think I've ever been through a session where there have been quite so many changes and I was actually quite distraught about it, but after talking to Dennis I found out that that's really the norm for the show. I frankly overwrote a little bit and especially in the battle scenes I think I wrote more action-oriented music than they're used to, and that was the main thing I had to clean out and make a little less aggressive. They really liked the tension in some four- or five-minute cues that had some sort of lurking tension, and they really loved those and I didn't have to change those too much, but the battle scenes I had to fix."

Watching Bunch at work on the scoring stage provides a remarkable example of flexibility and preparedness as the composer is able to convert a quite complex, agitated and lengthy piece of scoring down to the "smooth" textural style favored by the show's producers with only a few instructions to the orchestra. Bunch explains that being able to undertake such radical changes quickly is part of any television composer's job. "You have to think so fast on your feet," he notes. "You just don't have the endless days that you have on a feature film to fix things so I've fortunately become pretty good at that. Dennis McCarthy has called some of the scores sonic wallpaper, and I think that I have seen the light and I understand what he means more now, because when the big ruler comes down and sort of levels everything you don't have the spikes. I wrote the battle scenes much more cinematically and much more dramatic and those things got smoothed out and leveled out so it does create a wallpaper effect in a sense."

So far reaction to Bunch's "Silent Enemy" score has been generally favorable, with many fans pointing out the score's differing approach as highly successful -- although at least one online fan critic seemed annoyed that she'd noticed the music in the episode. Bunch has been slated to score a second Enterprise episode this spring, however, and he seems prepared for the challenge of getting his musical voice heard. "Everybody wants to make their mark, but at the same time I realize that they're used to hearing something, and if you go too far it's going to get thrown out."

For the full story, check out FSM Vol. 7, No. 1...

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