TOO many films sound the same because composers are “recycling” old scores and failing to write original material, a leading member of the industry said yesterday.

Patrick Doyle, the Oscar-nominated Scottish composer whose latest work with the London Symphony Orchestra will feature in the next Harry Potter film, told The Times: “Sometimes I’ve listened to film scores and felt, ‘Did the composer phone that in?’” Too many composers are playing safe, he said. Others rely too heavily on music from other films, which is regularly used to play against the film for test screenings. Directors and music editors use this temporary soundtrack to convey something of the desired sound, a snatch of Rachmaninov, for example, for a love scene. The problem is that too many composers fail to depart from those sounds in whatever they go on to write.

With the exception of composers such as George Fenton, Stephen Warbeck and Rachel Portman, that is part of the reason that a lot of films tend to sound the same, Doyle believes. “There is a recycling process going on,” he said, noting that hundreds of musicians are being drawn by the industry’s supposed glamour without becoming “informed” about the performing arts in general.

“Film music is becoming quite trendy. When I started 17 years ago, it was slightly in the wilderness. It wasn’t recognised in this country as an art form.

“Now there are film courses everywhere, but the students do not have a solid music background. What goes in is weak and what comes out is weak. If you put rubbish in, rubbish comes out,” he added.

Doyle is constantly studying scores and going to concerts. He does not sense that the students, let alone most composers, are doing the same. He recalled giving a masterclass at a London music college: “When I said to the students, ‘Has anyone seen Jerry Springer The Opera?’, they looked blankly. When I said, ‘Has anyone seen Don Carlos?’, they looked blankly. ‘You should be ashamed of yourselves,’ I told them.”

That attitude is taking its toll on standards, he said: “If they are not going to the theatre and not watching actors, how can they bring anything to the table?” Doyle, 52, who was Oscar-nominated for Sense and Sensibility and Hamlet, was classically trained at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama.

He went on to work on some of some of Britain’s biggest films, including Bridget Jones’s Diary, Gosford Park and Calendar Girls. Doyle’s work can be heard in Wah-Wah, Richard E. Grant’s autobiographical portrait of his upbringing in Swaziland starring Julie Walters, at the Edinburgh film festival tomorrow.

TOP SCORERS

Patrick Doyle’s top five film scores — “scores which seem to inhabit the picture and become at one with the film, being both unusual and original at the same time”, he says

Psycho
Composer: Bernard Herrmann (directed by Alfred Hitchcock) “Unusual score in being entirely a string orchestra. Score brought contemporary 20th-century music into the main arena.”

The Player
Composer: Thomas Newman (directed by Robert Altman) “Captured the paranoia of the Los Angeles film industry like no other film score could.”

North by Northwest.
Composer: Bernard Herrmann (directed by Alfred Hitchcock) “Bold, imaginative, rollercoaster of a score.”

Mulan
Composer: Jerry Goldsmith (directed by Tony Bancroft and Barry Crook) “Extraordinary piece of dramatic enhancement, and original use of oriental ethnicity.”

Fantasia.
Various classical composers (and directors). “This classic Disney animation was absolutely my childhood inspiration.”

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