Edmonton native Darren Fung didn’t need to take home the 2021 Canadian Screen Award for which he was nominated (in the Best Non-Fiction Music category) to feel like he’s won.
He already had two, for The Great Human Odyssey in 2016 and Equus: Story of the Horse in 2019. The latest nod was for A Bee’s Diary, and all three have been CBC co-productions.
“It sounds so cliché,” he says, “but it’s really such an honour to be nominated and, in my mind, the nomination means more than the actual award. The nomination is from a jury of your peers; they’ve taken the time to watch it and say, ‘Hey, this stands out from the rest.’ I mean, we can get into the politics of voting and all of that stuff, but for me, the nomination is really the big thing. I’m obviously very proud, very humbled by it.” The awards will be presented on May 20, 2021.
Fung, a McGill graduate, has more than 100 TV and film scoring credits to his name, including his re-imagining of the nationally treasured “Hockey Theme” for CTV and TSN. While all three of the aforementioned documentaries have been nature-oriented, Fung applies the same exacting criteria for his work on more conventional commissions.
“In my mind, [they’re] not different,” he says, on the phone from his home in Los Angeles. “At the end of the day, you’re telling a story; it’s all about storytelling through music. The tools are the same, whether you’re doing a fiction film, or a documentary, or, quite frankly, a commercial. You’re calling upon that same palette… I’ve always said that I don’t treat the genre of film any different than any other. It’s always a question of, how do we tell the story, and how can my music complement that?”
Writing music to order for someone else’s project is vastly different from writing for yourself. “The screen composer’s job isn’t to write the music that they want for it, it’s to write the music that’s right for the film and for what the filmmakers want,” says Fung.
“That’s one of the big challenges for young screen composers. Everyone has some sort of romantic vision of what a screen composer is, but the reality is that you have to accept the fact that someone else is calling the shots. There’s a lot of people who go into this profession not realizing that, and they get really disenchanted. They don’t get to write what they want to write. You [might] write an amazing piece of music, but it just doesn’t work, and it can be really disheartening at times.”
On the other hand, when you get it right, you might be taking home an award for it.
Streaming Status: Where Composers Stand
(May 30, 2019), Fung had an opinion column published in the Toronto Star advocating for more discussions between various trade organizations and the government about regulating “brutally unfair” subscription services. “In an era of record profits from streaming services and internet service providers, we are seeing the rich get richer and a creative middle class that is shrinking.” Has he seen any progress? “I think that right now, there are people who are on the case, in terms of putting the right pressure on the right people with the new changes to the Broadcast Act,” he says. “I think SOCAN, together with all of the trade organizations – like the Screen Composers Guild of Canada, SPACQ, the Songwriters Association of Canada – I think we’ve played our cards fairly well in terms of advocating to the right people in Ottawa, and saying, ‘Hey, that to sustain the industry in this way, we have to re-imagine it.’ The battle is a long one, right? That’s one of the frustrations that a lot of music creators have. We’re so used to working on quick turnaround times, and from gig to gig, so it’s hard to see the long picture with the amount of time and energy and advocacy we put into it. It’s frustrating that it’s not moving faster. But that’s sort of the way that Ottawa and policy change on that big level works. Is change in the air? Yes. Has change happened? Not quite yet.”