Witnesses but not Cheerleaders: What Debbie Wiseman's Wolf Hall score tells us about British Television
23 Feb 2015
Wolf Hall, the lavish BBC 2 adaptation of the Hilary Mantel historical novels, is in some ways British television at its most predictable: based on a book, beautiful costumes, a story involving kings and castles, and a central character who is emotionally reserved and unreservedly loyal. But it also happens to be a proud example of the great tradition of public broadcasting: it does not shy away from complexity, and its determination to be understated is refreshing and very welcome.
Like any good music for TV drama, Debbie Wiseman's restrained score reflects and sums up this doing-less-is-more-classy approach. Compare the on-trend sonic maximalism, all big orchestral sweep and "modern" drums, of Trevor Morris' score for The Tudors with Debbie Wiseman's self-consciously intimate palette:
It couldn't be more obvious how much the producers of Wolf Hall must have been at pains for it NOT be like The Tudors, with its sexy antics and over-dramatized goings-on.
Wiseman's score does more than be small and restrained though. It also refuses to bend and twist too much along the narrative arc. With some small exceptions of moments where a bit of dramatic textural underscoring helps a scene along, the themes are fully developed from the beginning and are there to be dipped into in order to provide consistency of mood and textural links throughout the series. We are of course watching history, but it's worth noting that this could also have been approached very differently.
I get the overwhelming sense that Wiseman invites us to be melancholy witnesses rather than nail-biting cheerleaders. The score's refusal to evolve or shift (key, mode, thematic development) has as its narrative counterpart the knowledge that whatever happens, Thomas Cromwell is doomed to be crushed by the relentlessly revolving wheel of royal favour. Unshowy yet superbly classy, this score's ambition lies not in its scope or brilliant technique, but in its depth of reverence for a particular way of doing music for TV.
The score harks back to a Golden Age of British television, pre-HBO, pre-Netflix, and most definitely pre-Game of Thrones. A time where understated music informed but not dependent on its historical subject was realised by small groups of world-class musicians in great little recording studios without a synthesizer or computer in sight. Wolf Hall and its music tick to a different clock, where the most recent Royal Shakespeare Company production at the Barbican is considered a Gold Standard, not the latest $100 million swords-and-boobs blockbuster.
And no matter how conservative that may sound, for art's sake this deserves our applause. Bravo!
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