Composer Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch Talks Soaring Score in “H is for Hawk”
It’s often difficult to capture the sensation of nature through music. One is free and wild, the other is inherently connected to structure. Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s score for the upcoming film, H Is for Hawk, has to find a balance between humans and nature through its music. The film is based on Helen MacDonald’s memoir of the same name. She writes about the painful, sudden loss of her father and how she turned to caring for a goshawk, Mabel, as a means of processing and healing in his absence.
Most composers join a film toward the end of production and are able to begin to sketch out their ideas to a rough cut of the film. Six months before they started filming, director Philippa Lowthorpe called Levienaise-Farrouch to gauge her interest in joining H Is for Hawk.
“I read the book years ago, and then I got a chance to chat about the script, say what I thought about it. I was used as a guinea pig also to find out what wasn’t translating, what was standing out in the script, which I’ve not really had an opportunity to contribute this early on a project.”
“The downside was that in a script like this, you can’t really write the flight scenes. You can’t script out what the hawk is going to do. The script was mostly focused on Helen processing her grief and her internal life, which made both me and Philippa think, oh, it’s going to be a small score. It’s going to be quite intimate. Maybe we can even have a bit more synthesizers and something more atmospheric.”
Courtesy of Roadside Attractions
“When we started seeing the footage, all those unscripted scenes, the scale of it, the excitement of it, and the importance of the natural world in the story, we kind of thought, yeah, that’s not going to work. We need to have a sound that’s a lot bigger, a lot earthier, a lot more grain to it, and also more persuasively performed by humans. We kind of shifted from having just a few soloists to more than twelve musicians.”
Claire Foy plays Helen, while Brendan Gleeson plays her father. Two phenomenal actors who understand when they, like nature, need to be large and loud, but also when they need to withdraw into themselves. Foy’s primary scene partner is a goshawk played by two hawks raised by Lloyd and Rose Buck, a married team who specialize in filmmaking with birds. Unfortunately, Levienaise-Farrouch was not able to make it to set to meet the hawks.
“It’s my greatest regret. I mentioned early on that I really, really wanted to be able to come on set one day when they were doing those things, but I was in the middle of a job when they were filming. I think the filming was probably quite stressful, so everyone kind of forgot about it. I’d love to have been able to meet the Mabels for sure.”
H Is for Hawk was released in 2014 to much acclaim. It won the Samuel Johnson Prize and Costa Book of the Year. The memoir also hit The Sunday Times best-seller list only two weeks after it was published. Levienaise-Farrouch read it years ago and still has her copy. It proved to be an important resource for her throughout her writing.
“My copy is completely battered. At the London premiere, I pestered Helen to sign it for me. I reread it before they started filming because I wanted to remind myself why I connected so strongly with it. There’s a lot in the book that has to do with Helen confronting the relationship with nature to the slightly more Cartesian, old-school mentality that animals are just machines. Helen revisits this with the goshawk. They reflect about how they don’t really relate to this interpretation of domination towards nature.”
“That’s quite hard to put into a film, but it was a necessity. I thought it was quite important for me to remind myself of the intention of the author, so I could still have this fascination with nature at the forefront of my writing.”
While nature and human-made music are inherently at odds with each other, there is a musicality that exists in the natural world. Not just in the songs birds sing or the way they dance, but when you watch the film with Levienaise-Farrouch’s score, there’s a more profound connection. Like when the beating of the drum matches the flapping of the wings of the hawk. Levienaise-Farrouch describes them as “textures.”
“It was textures and sensations. I can imagine the touching of the feather, the textual aspect of that coloring the emotion. I can imagine handling the hawk even with the glove and everything. That it would be very smooth, textural, and stimulating.”
Courtesy of Roadside Attractions
“I also really liked the little call of the hawk. Whether it’s the big, loud, pushing call of the hunt or when Helen is feeling sad, Mabel does this tiny little gentle cooing. That also inspired some elements of the score. I think also it’s the scope of nature, the size of it. I wanted the score to be quite wide at times. Then contracting to the moments that are very intimate with fewer instruments, quite delicate and precise, but also having moments where we expand the size of the sound world to represent how wide and large nature is.”
“It wasn’t necessarily having the loudest sound. I picked a very specific ensemble to work with because there are 12 musicians who don’t have a conductor, and they play together all the time, so they’re very responsive to one another. They can balance each other very well. They’re very familiar with extended technique.”
“I didn’t need to capture the loudness of nature, but it was more about how the elements seem to work with one another. It’s almost an ecosystem where everything works in harmony to create this perfect, unified sound.”
“Also, in the mixing of the music, on a track like ‘Call Me Mabel,’ where it’s much more intimate, we mixed it so that it’s more sensual and more frontal. For those nature scenes, the stereo image is much wider to give the impression of contraction and expansion between the human and the outside world.”
This group of twelve musicians used by Levienaise-Farrouch is an unconducted orchestra. The lead violinist has the film in view and counts off the rest of the group, but no one is standing there keeping time. It’s almost like the musicians are having a conversation among themselves, leaning into the ebbs and flows of how each of them is impacted by the music.
“There’s a lot of eye contact and body language being read by everyone. I’d have to ask them how they managed to be able to be so together and so attuned to one another because there’s no person on the stand with a baton telling them what to do. They’re very able to listen to one another.”
“They’re also people who, if you say, can we try to have more overtone in that gesture, they’re responsive to verbal instruction. They’re all in one room behind glass so there’s no external sound. Then there’s a booth control room where I’m with the engineer and the director who came to the recording session. I can still give notes, I can still press a button that streams into their headphones, and I can chat with them.”
It can feel overwhelming to think about the score as something that speaks to all of humanity’s connection to nature. Instead, Levienaise-Farrouch narrowed her focus to Helen’s relationship with nature, which Levienaise-Farrouch connects with.
“I think I have a similarity with Helen. That makes it easier, in a sense, for me to feel honest in my writing because I’m not pretending to be the bird. I’m connecting really deeply about how Helen is needing to be at one with nature to accept the brutality of nature, because I think it’s a very good way to accept the brutality of grief and to contextualize it within the fact that it’s not unfair, it’s horrible, but it’s a natural thing to happen.”
“I think that contextualization is essential to her grieving process and her being able to find the beauty in something they understand as being brutal and ruthless. To be able to hold this dichotomy is allowing Helen to realize that, yes, she’s in terrible pain and she’s completely lost, and she’s lost her best friend in life, but the love they have for one another, everything that Helen has learned from him, it’s here forever and it’s never gone. It was more trying to be truthful to that relationship to nature than necessarily my own.”
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