In 2019 I was commissioned to compose the score to Dream Horse, a film charting the extraordinary story of Janet Vokes, a bartender and supermarket worker who raised a prize-winning racehorse on her allotment in South Wales. A film like this represents the work of hundreds if not thousands of different people working across a wide range of specialisms. The more time I spent working with and studying it, the more it dawned on me that every aspect of the production – the editing, the camera work, the sound design, even the colour grading – had been composed to serve a collective vision using similar techniques to those we use to create music: rhythm, motivic development, repetition, fragmentation, modulation. Adding music to this body of work is as much a process of integration as it is of composition, finding a sound to enhance the tone, texture and themes of what’s onscreen.

Writing music for a film presents a different challenge from composing a concert work. To start with, film score is not music for music’s sake, but music created with the sole purpose of serving its parent film. To do this, it needs to be first and foremost an expression of the film’s identity, not the composer’s. This might sound like a constraint to expression and creativity, but I find it liberating – it gives me chance to get out of my own head and inhabit a musical role, crafting a musical language as an actor might craft a character.

In the early days of sound cinema, film music was conceived like a tone poem; limitations in technology meant that the camera could neither convey the scale of momentous events nor the subtleties of the actors’ performances, and so the music would often be required to do a good deal of the heavy lifting, telling the whole story all of the time. However, now that the technology and the craft of visual storytelling have evolved, the modern film composer is no longer required to conjure up a whole unseen narrative but to work with and around what’s already on screen, choosing which threads to tease out. This may suggest why so many of the great film scores from the first half of the 20th century – take, for example, any of Korngold’s fantastically detailed scores from his collaborations with Michael Curtiz and Errol Flynn – translate so well to the concert hall today but would seem overwrought if performed alongside a modern film of similar subject matter.

Recording the soundtrack to Dream Horse at Air Studios

In composing the score to Dream Horse I was aiming not to saturate the viewer’s perception with music, but to work in counterpoint with the film’s narrative and visuals, weaving a musical thread around an existing architecture. Guiding me through this process was the architect himself, director Euros Lyn. Euros wanted the music to be brave and bold, to speak of Wales, and to move its audience in a way they hadn’t experienced before. We both recognised that with a heartwarming British underdog story on our hands, there were certain musical tropes expected of us – all of which we wanted to steer well clear of. Most film directors make use of a temporary (‘temp’) soundtrack to give both the film editor and the composer a musical template for each scene; however in the case of Dream Horse, Euros went to great lengths to shield me from any direct musical references so that we could develop the score organically, building its own syntax from scratch.

One of the freedoms of writing for cinema is to be unbound from the conventions and practicalities of traditional ensemble instrumentation that might accompany a typical concert work commission – you’re free to use whatever instrumentation you think might best suit the film, whether that’s four contrabassoons or a theremin orchestra. For Dream Horse we wanted to create two distinct musical identities: one that reflected the world of the wealthy racing elites; and one that reflected our film’s central characters and their community in the Welsh village of Cefn Fforest.

To represent the Sport of Kings we used a string orchestra: poised and aloof as the racecourses loom into view, then brutal and uncompromising once the races begin. This was for the most part an aesthetic decision – I thought strings could resonate the history and elitism of the racecourse and felt that the controlled buzz of horsehair bow against string could help substantiate the thoroughbreds portrayed onscreen – but also served a practical function: I needed timbres that would cut across the thunderous hooves and crowd noise in the sound design and a string band offered just the right degree of bite and air. To match the sweep of the spectacular locations on film – Aintree, Newbury, Chepstow, the Severn Bridge – we tried to capture a similar sense of grandeur in the recordings, bringing the London Contemporary Orchestra into AIR Studios for a wide, majestic sound. 

‘Aintree – Ground’, performed by the London Contemporary Orchestra

Something that really struck me on watching the film for the first time was how vividly the filmmakers had captured the juxtaposition of beauty and ugliness in the Welsh Valleys, of landscapes and communities scarred by the coming and going of heavy industry, and I wanted the accompanying music to connect with this. To give voice to the band of characters at the film’s heart we created our own ensemble, using a roughshod assortment of instruments you might find in a village hall or gathering dust in the attic: a harmonium, an old upright piano, an accordion, and a selection of small pieces of percussion including a tabwrdd, a traditional rope-tensioned drum that was specially made for us by a drum maker in South Wales, and, naturally, a riding crop.

The tabwrdd drum specially made for Dream Horse

This ensemble accompanies scenes set in more modest surroundings – a working men’s club, a supermarket, an allotment – so we used different recording techniques to capture a closer, more homespun sound, bringing out both the clunk and the warmth from these instruments. Euros wanted the whole film to feel like a journey from darkness into light via the medium of hope. When we first hear this ensemble, it’s subdued and inert – stuck in harmonic stasis and subdued in sonority with the string instruments muted and the harmonium muffled under a picnic rug. As hope begins to filter in, the mutes come off, the sound opens up, and the music begins to breathe. 

‘The Syndicate’, performed by Craig White (harmonium), Rob Barron (piano), Paul Clarvis (percussion), Daniel Pioro (violin), Oliver Coates (‘Cello) and Ian Watson (accordion)

Straddling these two worlds is a solo fiddle, representing the film’s equine lead, Dream Alliance, and performed by Daniel Pioro on the soundtrack. Untamed and capricious, this fiddle breathes new like into the small ensemble but sticks in the craw of the string orchestra, creating the driving force behind the film’s racing sequences. 

An excerpt from Dream Horse, with soloist Daniel Pioro (violin) and the London Contemporary Orchestra. 

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