How Sonoton is harnessing the narrative power of classical

If ever there was a passion project, it is the recording of Holst’s The Planets created by Gregor Narholz for music production company Sonoton. ‘What, another one?’ You may ask – after all, one leading classical streaming services lists 156 versions of the suite. But the adaptation released by Sonoton Music in November, under the title HOLST, is a very different treatment, recorded by the Vienna Synchron Stage Orchestra using Dolby Atmos technology, with Narholz conducting. While it is available to listen to for its own sake, and performances of the individual movements can be watched on Sonoton’s YouTube channel, the intention is to showcase the suitability of this score for commercial use in film, TV dramas, documentaries and in advertising.

Sonoton was founded in Munich in 1965 by Narholz’s parents, Rotheide and Gerhard, initially as a library consisting of Gerhard Narholz’s original scores for film and TV. Over the following decade, up-and-coming artists and composers working in different genres were invited to write and produce for the publishing house. In 1973 Sonoton launched its own record label and, as the company’s potted history puts it, the monochrome record sleeves of English library music were superseded by colourful, uniquely designed pop covers.

Pioneering moves since then have included making production music available on CD (1984); introducing a computer-based music search program (1992); acquiring the label’s own music studio so that productions could be mixed and mastered in-house (1995); and presenting its repertoire of 130,000 titles on a mobile hard drive (2006), searchable via an Apple app (2010). By 2017 Sonoton’s repertoire had grown to 500,000 tracks from over 100 labels. More than 35 agents worldwide now license the use of its music for TV, film, advertising, internet productions and sampling.

As a trailblazer in this field, Gerhard Narholz was honoured in Hollywood for his life’s work and was the first composer and publisher to receive a Hall of Fame Award from the International Production Music Association. A new era dawned for Sonoton in 2021, however, with a redesign and rebrand of the label, website and music search, the launch of a new studio complex in Munich, and the appointment of Alex Black (pictured above) as chief executive, taking over the leadership of the company from Rotheide and Gerhard Narholz.

Black’s previous career included seven years as global director at EMI Production Music for Sony Music Publishing and a period with Imagem Production Music where he created the Boosey & Hawkes classical library label and managed the development of the company’s media catalogue.

‘The world of film and TV music is not very different from the “old” theatrical world where some of the classical masters plied their trade,’ he says. ‘The use of music and musical themes to underscore the narrative of a play, opera or ballet is certainly similar to how music is used to enhance a scene in a film.

‘The diversity in the usages of our music catalogue and how the visual producers engage with music (from custom scoring through to single needle drop synchronisations) adds another dynamic in terms of how we approach making music. In modern unscripted / “reality” TV editors use a lot of music to signal changes of mood – this is one of the reasons we look to develop copyrights around a single musical theme, as the editor is likely to cut to another piece of music when there is a change in the dynamic of the scene.’

Enter Gregor Narholz, who followed his father into composing for screen and has won several awards for his original scores for film, TV and video games. Having emulated his father in training initially as a classical musician, graduating in classical composition and conducting from the Richard Strauss Conservatoire in Munich, he sees enormous potential for the use of classical music and its themes in production music, and would like to see more classically-trained composers thinking in terms of writing music to create specific moods.

‘In an opera, a ballet or tone poem a very specific mood is created to underscore a certain narrative, a scene, a feeling or image,’ he points out. ‘Think of the fantastic overtures of the Wagner operas or of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. Film scores do the same thing, telling a story in the language of music.

‘Silent films were accompanied live by pianists playing classical music, original compositions or using mood books that were specially composed for silent film accompaniment at the time. Some of the initial common ground of classical and film music got lost over the decades, but we believe these famous melodies and movements still connect with modern audiences today.’

The HOLST project, planned to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth, takes Sonoton’s commitment to creating its own recordings to a new level. Speaking to CM on Zoom from Santa Barbara, California, Narholz was close to completing the process of deconstructing the recording in order to make individual elements of it available for licensing by the Sonoton Music Library. He recalled with enthusiasm the complex challenges of conducting separate sessions with different sections of the orchestra – making sure that the speeds he set with the winds were the same as he’d set for the strings three hours earlier, creating the mini-cadences necessary for the artificial breaks that will be created for the library versions of segments of the work. Many of the players weren’t familiar with The Planets, but that was counterbalanced by the privilege of hearing the sonorous textures created by Austrian brass players from Linz, used to playing Bruckner symphonies.

It has been a huge enterprise that will continue to yield rich treasures for the foreseeable future. Narholz won’t commit himself on future works that might receive this treatment, to which The Planets was ideally suited because of its many dramatic and contrasting themes. But he thinks the worlds of classical and film music have a lot to contribute to one another, and sees Sonoton as a mediator and common platform between the two, inspiring producers to break through listening habits and explore new musical languages.