“It might not match in continuity if we do it that way.”
“Just want everyone to be absolutely clear!”
Once all of that is done, we set our aging and dyeing on the task of destroying the costumes, slowly, stage by stage, to match what we are shooting. Except Claire’s skirt, because we are going to need that for a few more eps, so you can get it sort of dirty, but you may not tear it!
They paint them, dye them, scrape them, burn them in their magical alchemy lab….
It all goes back to Storytelling. The visuals are as much a part of things as the actors, the words, the music. It is all a part of the same piece. Again, that symphony. If the music is wrong, or the costumes too clean or modern, the sets jarring, the hair and makeup too contemporary, then the whole piece is not working in tandem.
Everyone watches television episodes many times now. One of those times, just look at all the sets, then look at how they work with the costumes. Gary Steele, our production designer, and I are lucky, we inhabit each other’s creative brains, after 25 years of being best friends. I suppose we became friends because we saw through the same eyes. You should be able to see that when you watch the show. In truth, you can see Ron and I when you watch. We are always in synch creatively, it is how we came together.
It is that old buzzword, synchronicity.
THE COATS
The coats. There has been quite a response to these two coats. What I find fascinating is the focus and interest Claire’s coat is receiving. We have seen it before, in a couple of episodes now. But the renewed interest is a great example of how costume design is so much more than “picking out cute clothes.” Costume designers create visual ensemble pieces, the same way you have an ensemble of actors, or musicians. The costumes must work together, harmonize, and bring out the best in each other.
We knew this was a very dramatic and key scene between these two characters. It keeps setting up their relationship. How they work together visually, how their costumes reflect and provide contrast to each other, and yet harmonize, is like creating music. Each instrument has its own part to play, but together, you have a symphony.
And it is not just the costumes, it is the environment. What are the surroundings, the colors, whether it is outside or on a set, it all has to come together as one. The real beauty is when it comes together without a lot of effort. I think what a lot of people are reacting to in this episode is our orchestra all finally finding harmony. We are playing now from the same sheet of music, we all know each other and have found a kind of perfect symmetry. Gary Steele and I have worked together forever, and share a kind of visual intimacy that is the closest thing I have ever experienced to a marriage, other than my actual marriage. I don’t have to see anything he does ahead of time, and neither does he need to see what I am doing. Whatever we do separately will work perfectly together. Ron is the conductor, the maestro. He brings together all of us and guides us to the harmony. It is hard to sing his praises enough as an artist, I always fear that what I say will be discounted because I am his wife. But he really is a gifted and singular artist.
It can be a beautiful thing when it works.
Claire’s coat. Well, we have seen it before. I will put it on a mannequin this week so I can show the details. But for now, here it is.
This coat is dramatic. It served a couple of purposes, the first being that it kept our actress warm. We were sending her out into freezing temps every day, on horseback. This is the hardest-working actress in Hollywood, and we treasure her.
I wanted her to be cozy and comfortable. And beautiful.
I wanted drama. This is the part in the story where we begin to really understand just how courageous this woman really is. She is about to head out into the Scottish Highlands with a bunch of pretty intimidating and fierce men. One woman alone. She had better be pretty fierce herself, and yet very much a woman. A strong woman able to hold her own. This coat supports that. And in this instance, does it really matter if we have a sign that loudly points to its history, and where it came from? We don’t have time for that in an hourlong show, we have a story to tell. Suffice it to say that Mrs. Fitz has a prodigious number of trunks stored away, just for times like this.
Enter Geillis.
Who the hell is this strange woman; there is something about her that is clearly different, but what is it? I don’t want you to know the answer to that, I want you to not be able to place your finger on who or what she is. I want it to bother you a bit.
This little jacket is based on a real garment, as are all our costumes.
I am so obsessed with this coat. I need to just re-create it at some point. But you are seeing the basic design for the first time in this ep.
The best part of the story is that we were planning an entirely different coat. We had chosen this amazing fabric, and were literally waiting for it to arrive. It was nail biting time, and it was clear the day before shooting that the fabric was not going to arrive in time. One of those moments. You’d better figure it out, and fast. So we found this gold fabric on a shelf, but it was kind of dull. So we added the decorative stitching. But it still said nothing much. This was Geillis: In the woods with a Faery babe and Claire!! It had to be special, and by this time it is the night before shooting. I look over on Liz’s (our embroiderer) wall, and she has something pinned up there that looks like some sort of disease on the bark of a tree.
“What the hell is that?” I ask our mad scientist. “Oh, just a wee experiment I did with scraps off the floor,” she says.
Cut to the chase, we are all digging scraps out of the garbage and off the floor. No, I am not exaggerating. Before you know it, Liz is doing some weird felting technique on the machine. We are patchworking the bark growth onto this coat, and it finally starts to look like something. But it still hadn’t completely harmonized. It needed some pop. I pulled out this yellowish/chartreuse thread, and had Liz work that into the mossy growth. Finally we dyed cording to match for a closure, and there it was. When we put it on Lotte, it was absolute magic. That little point! It was gleeful, audacious, once again, Geillis challenges you! A perfect costume moment, created out of thin air, and some stuff from the trash.
I am frequently asked what my favorite garments are. These two coats are at the top of the list….
For all of the historians who will freak about Geillis, again. TRUST US. Trust that we know what we are doing, and that sometimes, you have to just let the story go about its business, and see what happens. I am just not one of those people who reads the last chapter of a book first.
It’s Super Rupert, displaying his prowess with skateboard and laser-sword, ready to take on the British army and anybody else who gets between him and his next cup of ale! This delightful cartoon was drawn by Grant O’Rourke, the lovely actor who plays Rupert in the Outlander TV show, for his son. I saw it, though, was enchanted, and asked his permission to share it with you.
BEAR MCCREARY
Composer
Author’s Note: Bear, like Terry, keeps a wonderful blog, in which he discusses—among many other things—the scoring of each episode, with historical notes, descriptions of the instruments and musical sources, and the emotional necessities of the score. See more at bearmccreary.com.
have visited Scotland more than once, when I was very young. Little remains in my immediate memory, but the country left an unmistakable imprint on my heart. Scottish music and culture became my passion. Growing up in Bellingham, Washington, my friends and I faithfully attended the Highland Games every year. The games were every summer’s highlight, and by the end of each day, the rolling B flat drone of the pipe bands had buried itself so deep in my brain that it would reside there for days, a residual echo. In high school, I blasted bagpipes from my car speakers, and I began researching the folk songs of the Jacobite uprising. I was awestruck by their ability to communicate tales of tragedy and triumph through lyrics with double meaning, woven along deceptively simple melodic lines and evocative harmonic progressio
ns. I fell in love with the writings of Robert Burns and Robert Louis Stevenson. Shortly after high school, I picked up an accordion and began playing folk tunes, transcribing my own arrangements, and composing new harmonic progressions for classic melodies. One of my first was “The Skye Boat Song.”
I carried this Scottish passion with me into my professional life. My first job as composer was scoring Battlestar Galactica, where I met series creator and executive producer Ronald D. Moore. Battlestar offered me the opportunity to write Celtic-influenced themes for uilleann bagpipes and fiddle. After Battlestar, I wanted to incorporate bagpipes into all my scores! I quickly found that producers’ eyebrows raised when they heard bagpipes, and I realized that if I wanted a career, I would need to write for other instruments instead. Then Ron called me again, to work on his new Starz series, Outlander.
I was familiar with Diana Gabaldon’s famous series of time-travel novels and delighted that the story centered on the doomed Jacobite uprising of the 1740s. The series has all the sweeping adventure, romance, fully realized characters, and driving tension a composer could ever hope for. Knowing my background, Ron announced my involvement as composer to a crowded hall of fans six months before the series premiered and quipped, “It turns out by happenstance that Bear is a Jacobite…so he’s the perfect guy to do this.”
From the beginning, I wanted to draw predominantly from Scottish instrumentation and folk music. Instruments such as the fiddle, bagpipes, accordion, penny whistle, and bodhrán (a type of frame drum) form the backbone of the score, supported by orchestral strings, haunting vocals, and larger percussion.
The first task to tackle was the series’ Main Title, and Ron and I decided it would be my arrangement of “The Skye Boat Song.” The melody was perfect, but the lyrics by Sir H. Boulton did not capture the essence of the show. Thankfully, vocalist Raya Yarbrough recalled another set of lyrics by Robert Louis Stevenson. The Stevenson lyrics are better suited to Claire’s story, and we altered two words to make them even more so. “Sing me a song of the lad that is gone,” a direct reference to Bonnie Prince Charlie, was changed to “Sing me a song of a lass that is gone.” This simple alteration connects the lyric more directly to Claire. Raya Yarbrough’s intimate and poignant vocal performance solidifies the song’s connection to Claire.
Later in the first episode, the score introduces another important new theme, “The Stones Theme,” when Claire and her husband, Frank, witness the dance of the Druids at Craigh na Dun. For this important moment, I called in my resident music historian, Adam Knight Gilbert, who confirmed my suspicion that no music from the Druids survives today. With no truly authentic piece to draw upon, I decided instead to adapt the oldest lyrics we could uncover. Adam found several candidates, and from those I chose a poem called “Duan Na Muthairn,” or “Rune of the Muthairn.” These were drawn from a collection by Alexander Carmichael called Carmina Gadelica, published in 1900, which was at the forefront of the Gaelic revival movement of the time period. The song is performed in Gaelic by Raya Yarbrough. In English, the text means:
Thou King of the moon,
Thou King of the sun,
Thou King of the planets,
Thou King of the stars,
Thou King of the globe,
Thou King of the sky,
Oh! lovely Thy countenance,
Thou beauteous Beam.
I set this text to an original theme, composed in Dorian Mode, a scale I employ frequently on Outlander for its “old world” flavor and elegant implied harmonies.
Once Claire gets to 1743, I introduce the “Claire and Jamie Theme,” the most important musical melody in the series.
I was careful in the early episodes not to overstate this theme. I let their relationship unfold realistically, always allowing their intimacy to happen first and commenting on it with music afterward. The audience needed to wait for their romantic story to unfold, so the music needed to wait as well. Their theme is never heard in its entirety until “The Wedding”—I saved the fullest expression of their melody for their wedding night!
As Claire adjusts to life in the eighteenth century, I explored more historically accurate instrumentation. On her first morning at Castle Leoch, Claire is awoken by Mrs. Fitz, bringing her breakfast and dressing her. Mrs. Fitz’s theme sounds like a traditional folk song but is actually an original theme I composed for her. Her tune is jaunty and lyrical, personal and slightly intimidating all at once, like Mrs. Fitz herself. This piece features the viola da gamba, a string instrument popular in the late Baroque period, and a Scottish fiddle. I frequently used the viola da gamba to represent other aspects of Highland life, as well, most notably for Colum MacKenzie’s signature theme.
In the first season, I composed over a dozen original themes for specific purposes. However, I also stayed true to my original inspiration and incorporated traditional Scottish folk music wherever possible. I used “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye” for a lively montage of Claire practicing medicine, “Clean Pease Strae” for an aggressive game of shinty, and underscored the doomed Jacobite cause with heartbreaking renditions of “The Skye Boat Song,” “The Highland Widow’s Lament,” “Ye Jacobites by Name,” “MacPherson’s Farewell,” and several others. I frequently select songs based on their lyrical relevance to a scene. Though they are purely instrumental arrangements when used in the score, anyone who knows the songs will have an augmented experience when they realize the song choices comment on the drama.
Outlander also gave me the opportunity to invent new folk music. The third episode features several musical performances by Gwyllyn the Bard, played by Scottish musician Gillebrìde MacMillan. His final song, “The Woman of Balnain,” references a woman who journeys through standing stones, giving Claire hope that she can escape back to her own time. I composed an original song based on Diana Gabaldon’s text and collaborated with Gillebrìde so he could perform it on set. I then incorporated his performance into my score to form a single piece of music that seamlessly transitions from on-camera performance to narrative score.
The richly layered characters in Outlander make every episode more creatively challenging. Rarely do I write music solely for the obvious events onscreen. Instead, I strive to comment on the subtext beneath the surface. A fantastic example of this kind of scoring is the sixth episode, “The Garrison Commander.”
The episode opens as Claire and Dougal travel with redcoats to their garrison. The travel-montage cue I composed is a mixture of English military sounds and Scottish folk instrumentation. Military field drums provide a tense, ominous rhythm, perfectly suited to the rigid British soldiers. Above them, small Scottish pipes, bodhrán, and acoustic guitars offer Highland colors, while the orchestral strings provide an energetic cinematic backbone. The music, I believe, perfectly captures the feeling of clashing cultures as British and Scottish sounds spar against one another.
Once the characters arrived at the garri son, I asked my historian Adam Gilbert about the kind of music an eighteenth-century British officer might be familiar with. We discussed the music of George Frideric Handel and Johann Christoph Pepusch as potential candidates, but their music didn’t fit the scene for me. Adam then introduced me to the works of Thomas Arne. Arne was a British composer of the time period, best known to modern-day audiences for his patriotic songs “Rule, Britannia!” and “God Save the King,” which would eventually become the British national anthem. Obviously, any of those melodies would have been cliché choices for this scene. However, Arne also composed a short piece for harpsichord and viola da gamba, “Blow, Blow Thou Winter Wind,” which worked elegantly. The tune features a harpsichord and viola da gamba that evoke upper-class parlor music. Music-history fans will chuckle knowing that the tune was by the composer most inextricably connected to the British Empire.
Enter Black Jack Randall. Alone, face-to-face with Claire, Randall tells the story of Jamie’s lashing. Scoring this scene was a tremendous challenge. My job was to make the scene as excruciating as possible
. With a lugubrious bed of heartbreaking strings to constantly heighten the emotional tension, the music poured salt, so to speak, on the audience’s wounds, forcing them to watch the horror unfold.
In the lashing scene, the physical tension is obvious: one man ruthlessly whips another. Yet we know that Jamie will survive. So why are we on the edge of our seats as we watch it? The tension comes from trying to anticipate why Randall is telling the story. We are waiting to see what effect the telling of this story will have on his emotional state. While there is always a physical threat to Claire when in Randall’s presence (the music has moments of dissonance to reflect them), the scene is told through Randall’s perspective, not Claire’s. He believes this bloodshed to be beautiful, describing the creation of a “masterpiece.” I strove to write a score that would comment on the depths of his psyche that are revealed in his story: his stages of rage, exhaustion, pride, and awe. The music is, in a horrifying way, strangely beautiful.
The joy of scoring Outlander is that nearly every scene is constructed with this level of dramatic nuance. As the composer, my job is to help guide the audience through the narrative, and the path is rarely obvious. This is the kind of project I love to score the most, and somehow, I feel that Outlander is the score I was born to write. The series allowed me to write the kind of music I had dreamed about since I was a boy, hanging out at the Highland Games, listening to bagpipes and arranging folk songs. In these scoring sessions, hearing the orchestra reach its highest soaring notes while watching the drama unfold, I am frequently overwhelmed with emotion, gratitude, and exhilaration.
The onscreen journey of Outlander is just beginning. More drama and music await in the second season and beyond!
The Companion to the Fiery Cross, a Breath of Snow and Ashes, an Echo in the Bone, and Written in My Own Heart's Blood Page 86