GAVIN GREENAWAY

MUSIC

SW: How did you find Gavin Greenaway for this?

DD: Originally Hans Zimmer was supposed to do the music. Hans had made a deal with Michael Eisner. At some point they were talking and Michael said, "You should do a lagoon show soundtrack someday," and Zimmer said, "(casually) No problem, I'll do it for you." So when it was decided we were going to do this show, then it was like, "Okay, we already have a deal with Hans Zimmer so he will be the music guy."

We came out to L.A. and we met with Hans, I described the show to him, gave him the timings and laid out the format and all that, and he said, "This is great, but normally the way I work is I'll do it the night before it's due. So when is it due?" He was being frank, he said, "Listen I've got a lot on my plate, I know I promised this to Michael, so I'll do it, but the way I normally work is when it has to be done it'll be done but don't expect it months in advance."

To pull these kinds of shows together you have to have something to work with because mechanics have to time a certain way and fireworks have to burn a certain length and all those things require lead time to get manufactured.

So we met with him and came back to Florida and reported in and they said, “That's no good, let's see if we can get him down here." So we scheduled him to come down to Florida to see the existing lagoon show and talk to him so we could get a feel for the existing lagoon show and hear it and understand what it was that he was being asked what to do.

He wasn't available for three months, so we waited three months and the day before he was supposed to come he cancelled, he had something else to do. We put him off for another several months and when he cancelled the second time, Ron Logan finally said, "All right, we can't do it this way. Something has to be done." So I called up Hans and said, "Hans, we can't be waiting, is there somebody who's under your wing who you can assign to this?" And he said, "Yeah, I'll have Gavin do it."

SW: Did you know who Gavin was?

DD: I knew nothing of Gavin. He didn't have credits other than he had conducted some scores for Hans. So Gavin came down and he was a little quiet, British guy, very polite, very non-descript, you wouldn't pick him out of a crowd, he's not boisterous or outgoing. He's very quiet and very nice.

I played him music that sounded like this and like that and I want to do this and here's the timings and all that and he goes, "(Nonchalantly) Okay, I've got it." He didn't take notes, so I'm going, "Oh, what am I going to do now?" He went away and I didn't bother him for a month, then I called him and he said, "I've almost got something. I'll send it to you in a few days."

A few days later a CD arrived at Federal Express and I'm shaking as I get this thing going, "Is this just going to be another horrible moment in this thing or is there promise here?" I put in the CD and started playing the music and it brought tears to my eyes because it was good, it was exactly what we needed. Actually his first draft was very close to what we ended up with. Remarkably close. Normally you don't hit the nail on the head the first time out. You get some ideas going and you say, "All right, let's take this and can we redo this part?"

It was so thoughtful and melodic and uplifting that I thought there's something inside him that he really understands what this piece of music has to do. So from there we went through three or four different drafts of little things and then we put the acceleration on the beginning and that was that. Then we went to London and recorded it.

SW: What direction did you give him before he wrote it?

DD: He had the complete format of the show and evolution and the subjects that I wanted to include in the history part. He had that, he had timings, and I had specific moments that had to have a certain kind of a visual effect, certain moods that I wanted to create. I gave him lots of clips, I gave him clips from Cirque du Soleil, clips from jazz, clips from John Williams scores for examples of feeling.

We did have conversations specifically about using odd tempos because the opening sequence, the chaos sequence, I didn't want it to be straight 4/4, so that everybody felt really comfortable with it. I wanted it to feel a little bit off-balance. So I said, “If you want to put this in five or seven or change in the middle, go ahead.” He ended up creating something that goes all over the time scale. There's a lot of it that is in 4/4, but much of it is in five, some of it is in seven.

There's a sequence as it's accelerating towards the end that goes 7, 6, 5, 4, 3 and then you get the big explosion up high. We used that concept of acceleration throughout the show.

I decided on that as a motif as I was watching a hockey game on TV at the Yacht Club one night. I was thinking, "I need some kind of an idea that expresses how things seem to move slowly and then they get a little faster and then a little faster..." If you look at the history of the universe, it's kind of that way. If there was a big bang then it was a long time before things settled down and then some planets formed and then nothing happened and then a little bit of life evolved and then it took a longer time before it came out of the water and just thinking about all these things, this idea of accelerating time seemed like it brought us here and then it moved us into the future.

I said, "Let's use this clapping thing (like the hockey game) that everybody knows what to do... you hear that and you know they're speeding up and you know where they're going so right away your audience is in sync and knows what's going to happen at the end which is it goes so fast you can't keep up." So I said let's do that in drums to kick us off.

One of the hardest things that I had to nail (with the music) was, in this idea of history and the evolution of Earth, the moment at which humans appeared on the planet. Some people would probably say this is a big deal, we're all humans, we're celebrating this, so let's make this a big moment when man arrived, but I said no, "Let's make this just a subtle little turn when things change. We don't know what that means until much later." It's not (snap) now we're born and all right, let's go to town! It's like this is a pivotal moment but you don't know that at the time.

I kept having to back him off of that moment, saying, "No, just find some little subtle thing, unless you know what's happening it means nothing musically, it's just a change." So he finally got this little oboe thing and a modulation there that was just perfect. It's very subtle in the video. It's actually a moment that a live horse freezes and becomes a cave painting and very subtly leading up to that, we chose pictures of animals where the animals all sort of look towards the camera for a brief moment as if they're aware they're being watched and then we see the cave painting which is the result of them being watched, and that's how we introduced the idea of humans on the planet.

We tried to keep it very artistic rather than literal and the only computer generated shot in the whole thing is coming out of the cave, turning from the cave paintings, coming down the corridor and bursting into the sunlight and then we're off on our adventure. Everything else is actual footage. (chuckles) Of course there was no footage way back then.

SW: Why is it that I've heard the Reflections of Earth in non-Disney things. I think maybe commercials?

DD: What happened was, that because Disney bought this piece of music and owned it, and Disney owns ABC, ABC said, "This is great music for bumpers for news programs and they used it for their millennium coverage, they did photo montages of fireworks all over the world to this music. Gavin won an Emmy for the music for the millennium coverage but it was this piece of music. Because ABC owns it you see it on political convention coverage, it's all over the TV.

The songs that we wrote for the end, "Promise," and "We Go On" are derivatives of each other and have been used in numerous weddings. It's used in charity events, cancer survivors want to sing it at their thing.