How The Octatonic Made My Career

My Octatonic Journey

I’ve spoken about the demonic forces within the octatonic scale and how I’ve used these to portray evil in film. I started playing with this scale when I was composing orchestral pieces at UCLA. Having heard it in Stavinsky, Bernard Herrmann and Bartok, I began to explore its peculiarities. Its properties are useful in building tension and spinning layers of music with ever-increasing intensity. Like an Esher drawing, the pitches never find bottom but always turns in upon themselves. I explored many twisting roads with this scale before I found a use for it in film.

The Strangely-Symmetrical Octatonic

As its name spells out, the octatonic scale is an eight-note scale made by alternating whole steps and half steps. This produces a symmetrical structure of which there are only three, each sharing four notes with the others and lacking four. The scale can be viewed in a great many ways, for instance, as two adjacent, fully-diminished seventh chords; or as a collection of four minor triads a minor third apart. There are also four major triads a minor third apart in each scale. It can also be seen as two interlocking trapezoids plotted along the circle of fifths, or also two interlocking squares.

Uses of the Octatonic

With all its possibilities, I am always fascinated to hear someone else use it. It will take you on a very demented trip with all its minor thirds, tritones, perfect intervals a tritone apart and endless symmetries. The polychords are exquisite, and governed by an internal logic of great sonic consistency. John Williams used them in Jaws to get that darkly sensual and uniquely unsettling vibe that can only be created with the octatonic. There is much to discover here and it’s always useful to pit this scale against a good consonant music.

Breaking Into Film

As I was finishing grad school, I began to cut demos of my music and mail them out to get work in film and tv. In this way, I got my first orchestration gigs, B movies and reality tv scoring jobs. At the time, I was reading the trade magazines and crafting montages for specific targets. I decided to cut a demo of my best-sounding octatonic passages and get them to composers, producers and directors of horror films.

It’s All About Timing

Through the girl next door whose producer/boss was having a chance meeting with Jay Rifkin, Hans Zimmer’s partner; I got my octatonic demo to Steve Jablonsky right when he got his first, big break with 2003s Texas Chainsaw Massacre. He’d also gotten an ABC tv series called Threat Matrix and he needed help on both asap. Of course, Hans didn’t know Texas Chainsaw was going to be the hit that it was, and maybe he wouldn’t have given it to Steve if he’d known that through it he would capture the heart of Michael Bay and end up scoring a string of mega hits over the next decade. He probably just thought it was too small a little horror movie, and Steve was next in line.

The Demo that Landed

I decided to cut a short continuous montage that cycled through some of my most intense recordings and sequences. Three minutes seemed like enough to give to a busy composer. The big moment was a massive, modulating octatonic build from my first symphony. I had tailored the demo to peak on that moment and be over in a flash, and it must have made an impression since I got a callback.

A Good Fit

At the meeting, Steve pointed out the passage, and also some of the octatonic string writing from my Fantasia. He clearly felt these kinds of ideas would work within the designs he had on Texas Chainsaw. The music I had written was easily transmuted to fit the vibe of the picture. Steve had created fantastically dark and seething themes, and he hired a sea of cellos and dark brass choirs to bring it to life. The film opened number one at the box office to everyone’s surprise.

Bloody Murder

The octatonic offered a great way to get through a lot of chasing and chainsawing! Cues like these were typical. We used lots of ambient synth design, bowed metal, pig oinks; whatever it took to create a big, dark, ugly world. We layered it thick and then finished with an orchestra in their deepest, darkest range. Whether because of the young, directorial talent, the overboard characters, formulaic narratives or the evil, sonic world; this film hit a nerve and spawned a number of remakes. The whole decade seems like one long horror movie as we scored Friday the Thirteenth, Nightmare on Elm Street, Amityville Horror and many others. All this work came from that one decision I made on a certain day to send a certain scale to a certain person.