A Media Composer's Moral Responsibilities

The art of writing music for a visual medium and the obvious emotional influence that music can have on the audience has always been subject to exploitation in morally problematic ways. 

Since the beginning of film more than 100 years ago, music has been an integral part of delivering messages and emotionally manipulating the audience in all sorts of propaganda. The enormous power that music can have in shaping how we feel about certain images on screen makes it an ideal vehicle to sugarcoat images and messages that would normally be at least questionable. 

If you work in the media world for a while, you will sooner or later be confronted with projects that ask of you to manipulate the audience.

In many cases, the manipulation happens on relatively innocent things like "That actor is really acting badly, can you push his performance with the music?"or "That scene should be scary but the visuals aren't, can you help with the music?" Interestigly however, the general audience nowadays is reacting more sensitively when they feel that they are manipulated which in too obvious cases will lead to them being thrown out of the movie. So obviously the discrepancy between what's shown on the screen and what you hear from the music should not be too strong. But in any of such cases, the result of such manipulation is at worst an annoyed audience who hates the movie.

However, there are some instances in a media composer's life that are morally a bit more sensitive. 

Composers who work mainly in the corporate and advertising industry are quite often confronted with moral dilemmas. Writing a score for a commercial for a company that has some ethics that you find problematic can become quite an internal struggle.

A few years ago, I wrote the score for a commercial by a company that sells canned fish. The commercial was really fun, had some great cinematic visuals and production value and was fun to score and I really didn't think much about what I was doing back then. A few months later, Greenpeace re-uploaded that commercial in an altered way, intercutting it with scenes that showed gruesome images of the fishing practices of that company that weren't dolphin or whale friendly. And the underscore for this altered version was my music as well. 

The general problem in this industry is that with every relatively large company, you will find problematic business practices if you just dig deep enough so the most consequetial way would be to not accept any commercial or corporate scoring gigs. But of course you have to be in a financial position to allow yourself the luxury of declining such gigs.

Some composers in the industry have the standpoint that just because they work for a specific client doesn't mean that they agree with the conduct of their business. This is of course a useful strategy as long as you can bring this in line with your conscience. But I know that even composers with this attitude have red lines that they would not cross.

This whole issue is incredibly personal and has a lot to do with where you set your own personal moral boundaries that you don't want to cross. As long as you are at financial liberty to be selective about these things, this is a perfectly fine way to handle it. But unfortunately your economical situation might sometimes force you near or even across these boundaries.

And this is not a phenomenon that only exists with media music, or even only with composers.

This whole subject of art versus politics is centuries old and many composers and artists needed to find their position in a cultural, political or social system that they might or might not agree with. It's worth reading Shostakovich's biography on these matters.

In my personal opinion, we live in a time where you can simply not allow to morally completely detach yourself from the client or project you work for. 

Fortunately, as mentioned above, most projects that we work on in "this business" are solely for entertainment, so it is relatively unlikely that our work propagates an idea that is ideolgically charged.  Still, the general audience has become way more sensitive to certain topics than they were just a few decades ago. Depiction of racism, sexism, homophobia etc. in movies are way more often and more publically discussed so as a composer with the attitude of "just doing my job" might involuntarily end up in the line of fire.

As another personal story, a few years ago, I was hired for a corporate video by a charter flight company. The video consisted of several shots of planes flying over different landscapes all over the world. There was one shot where we saw a plane flying over a tropical rainforest and a settlement of indigenous people who were also seen on screen. In the music briefing the client asked me to "score that scene with some jungle drums or ethnic flutes". It took me several days to convince him that this musical idea was racist and we really shouldn't do that in the music. I was close to walking away from this job as I really didn't want to do it but fortunately after sleeping on it for a few nights he came around and agreed that we should score that scene in a more general way.

As I said above, we live in times where as a composer you simply cannot afford to have the attitude of complete detachment from the project as this might eventually fall on your feet.

On the other hand, it should also be clear that the role of the composer in the public perception shouldn't be overestimated. I didn't suffer any negative consequences from the commercial that Greenpeace re-edited and I'm pretty sure that the "jungle drums" in the corporate video would have maybe caused a shitstorm for the company but probably not for me.

There is no ultimate answer to this century old question and it is probably always depending on the surrounding circumstances. Every composer however needs to find a way to deal with such situations as they will come up sooner or later in one's career. And every composer needs to define a moral compass that they follow. In the end, it is not so much about what actual consequences arise from crossing your own moral boundaries but whether you can still look at yourself in the mirror.

Ignorance should however not be the answer to these questions in any case.