In film and television, the score is one of the last pieces of the puzzle to come together. In some cases, it’s being mixed and dubbed mere hours before an episode premieres.
Scottish composer Paul Leonard-Morgan is used to working fast, often spending the month leading up to deadline pulling all-nighters to write and record scores - ensuring the music not only matches the emotions communicated on screen, but sounds unhurried while doing so.
On Friday March 20, Leonard-Morgan - who also scored the new Amazon sci-fi series Tales From the Loop with Phillip Glass - was at his home studio in LA, planning to record a string quartet (sat safely apart) for the premiere episode of The Nest, which was airing the following Sunday. But the night before, a text message from the government ordered the suspension of all non-essential work, axing their ability to record just three days before the episode was due to air.
During the sleepless night that followed, social media became his saviour. Days previously, for an unrelated project, Leonard-Morgan had put out a call for musicians who had remote recording facilities. Suddenly, that became a lifeline, as Leonard-Morgan frantically searched for musicians who could self-record pieces of the score to send back to his studio.
“We were sending out tweets, getting in touch with other people, or people had been tweeting: ‘You should get in touch with this person!' says Leonard-Morgan, over the phone from LA. “I think we had [musicians from] Berlin, Glasgow, London and LA in the end.”
The Nest stars Sophie Rundle and Martin Compston as Dan and Emily, a Glaswegian couple trying to conceive, with Mirren Mack as the young woman who agrees to carry their baby, and Leonard Morgan wanted “a lot of kind of samples, weird electronica and soundscapey stuff” - as well as “beautiful strings” to explore the emotional rollercoaster that Dan and Emily, the central couple, are on.
Leonard-Morgan sent sample recordings of what he needed to the various musicians, along with the sheet music for the parts he wished them to play. In a matter of hours, he was receiving recordings from across the world that he then weaved together to create the score.
“They started sending it back on Friday afternoon, we started chopping up the parts here… and then we're sending it to my mixer who’s on the other side of LA," he says. "He's then working overnight on Friday, and that day sending me mixes when he's finished so I can listen to them, and I'm then giving him feedback on the mixes.”
Once a score is completed, however, it needs to go through the dubbing mixer, who balances all the audial elements of an episode. The mixer for The Nest was over 5,000 miles away. "We then send it to [Kahl Henderson’s] dubbing suite in Glasgow,” says Leonard-Morgan. “He's then dubbing The Nest overnight [on Saturday], and then having it run out on the Sunday night. So I mean - it's insane.”
You wouldn’t know it for listening to The Nest’s beautifully atmospheric score, which features a seamless blend of instruments old and new. It seems astounding that Leonard-Morgan was able to collate such high-quality recordings in one day, but he credits social media with bringing some of the best musicians in the business to his attention.
“What was quite good on the Twitter thing was someone would say, ‘Oh, hi, I'm available,’ - I think it was someone who played on Radiohead's album - and then another bunch of composers would come on and thumbs it up and go, ‘yeah, I can vouch for her, she's great, I can vouch for him, he’s great’,” he says.
“It was like a Yelp system for musicians. So fortunately, all the stuff that came back was bloody amazing.”
And amidst all the chaos, Leonard-Morgan began to realise he was utilising social media in a way he’d never thought to before. Not only was he suddenly exposed to a wealth of exciting new collaborations, but he was observing a supportive community rally together during a time of isolation.
“Musicians are just wonderful people, and there's this lovely community out there,” he says. “It wasn't a case of: ‘I'm going to try and stop everyone else from seeing that tweet because I want the work’ - it really was that people started tagging other people, going ‘hey, check this out’. It was a real eye opener.”
The experience also introduced new creative frontiers to his composing. “[Usually] I'm looking for specific instruments - I want a cello player, I want a violin player,” he says. “But what I hadn't really comprehended was all these other players came up with instruments I've never even heard of, going, ‘I play the tuba’ - or things that I just wouldn't have necessarily thought of.
“Suddenly I've got the possibility of dealing with musicians in Persia; I think there was one in Qatar, there was one in Australia, and god knows how many in Europe. It's a brave new world, and it's made me realise I can try things out that I wouldn't necessarily before. It opened up my eyes to a new way of working.”
And despite the near-disaster, Leonard Morgan says scoring The Nest during lockdown - which he is still working on, with episode three due to air tonight - was a timely reminder of technology's ability to foster genuine human connection.
“The human connectivity here is coming from literally reaching out to other humans that you've never spoken to before and then creating this community,” he says. “Instead of saying, ‘no, don't use them for cello, I'm the best cellist’ - it's like, ‘Them! they're great!’.
“People suddenly seem to actually be becoming a bit more of a collective as far as a society online, but the irony being that you're speaking to them more… It’s helping you stay connected to other people at a time when you're not gonna have any literal connection for a long time.”
The Nest airs on BBC One on Sunday night at 9:05pm.