CCV Software - Serving education since 1982 | Golden Globe-winner Dario Marianelli offers his thoughts on winning Oscar and Bafta-Nominations for Atonement score using Sibelius 5

Golden Globe-winner Dario Marianelli offers his thoughts on winning Oscar and Bafta-Nominations for Atonement score using Sibelius 5

mary | 22 April, 2008 10:05

Dario Marianelli, composer of the Golden Globe-winning and Oscar and Bafta-nominated score for Atonement has been revealing the thinking behind the acclaimed score, and how Sibelius 5 helped his creative process. The composer has also used Sibelius to repurpose the score for a live performance-taking place at London’s Wigmore Hall in March.

The Italian-born and London-based composer used Sibelius 5 to help craft the score that includes many out-of-the-ordinary flourishes, such as typewriter keys beating time to the music to signify the obsessive writing of one of the central characters, Briony.

On the thought press behind the score he says: “From a really early conversation with Joe [Wright, the Oscar-winning director who also worked with Dario on 2005’s Pride and Prejudice], I knew that Atonement needed two distinct musical themes. There’s the relentlessness of Briony – we called her the girl with faulty brakes, she just can’t stop until she’s wrecked everyone’s lives! Then there’s the intense love story between Keira Knightley’s character, Cecilia, and Robbie” (played by James McAvoy).

To create the first of these two themes, Dario built up an evolving, percussive composition, and then amplified the tension further by adding the metronomic sound of Briony’s typewriter keys over the top of each beat. “That was just one of those crazy ideas, and it just really worked”.

For the love story theme, the composer used a more traditional, strings-based approach, which matched the mood and also the wartime period of the film.

“Panorama view in Sibelius 5 really helped me with arrangements of both these themes – because I don’t think in pages, I just think in music. With Panorama, there are no breaks in your thinking, you can think more laterally.” said Dario. Panorama view hides page breaks in scores, instead, displaying them on an infinitely wide page.

“My orchestrator, Benjamin Wallfisch, is able to send me proofs of the orchestrated cues at an incredible speed, and I can check and correct them directly on the screen, adding to the orchestration as I go along.”

“I think Sibelius 5 is a really fantastic program. I haven’t found anything that I can’t do with it yet. And I don’t think I ever will.”

Now Sibelius 5 and Photoscore Ultimate Bundle are available together! Photoscore Ultimate is a scanning software extension for Sibelius 5 software and an advanced version of the PhotoScore Lite. It can also scan music into other MIDI software such as sequencers and can also be use stand-alone to scan in, play back, transpose and print scores.

Photoscore Ultimate reads printed music in seconds. Not just the notes, but also slurs, dynamics, lyrics, guitar tab, chord diagrams and more. The output can then be edited or transposed, played back, parts extracted and both the score and parts printed.