Composer W.G. Snuffy Walden on putting The White House to music.
What iterations did the theme go through before you settled on the final version?
Originally they talked about it being an Americana guitar score, which is totally different than where we ended up. They were talking about a Phil Collins kind of thing, something more rock. But what happened was they shot the first episode and were playing around with music and started putting John Williams up against it – big orchestral music. Then they came to me and said, "Can you do this?"
We didn't have the theme yet when I was scoring the third episode. It was the scene where Bartlet televises his first Oval Office address and I wrote this piece of music at the end of the show and Tommy came over and had a listen to it. We finished the piece and he said, "That's our theme!" I said, "Really?" He said, "Absolutely, that's our theme." So I put it together for an orchestra. As a matter of fact, the first couple of episodes don't have the orchestra version, they have a synth version as we had to get on the air and couldn't get the main title done in time.
How would you describe the elements of the main theme?
If you boil it down to its essence, it's just a little gospel piece. It's very simple; a spiritual kind of gospel piece, just on piano. But as soon as you add french horns and the strings and everything, it becomes very [Aaron] Copland-esque.
It's very different from the end title music, which is more playful.
That end titles piece is actually from a piece in the pilot where we're walking through the White House for the first time. When we started the show, we had a lot more music than we ended up with. We started the show with 25 minutes of music. We ended up with less than half that by the time we got deeper into the show because the characters became so developed and were so crisp and clear in their definition that you had to be very careful with music not to push it one way or the other. We found that less was absolutely more in that situation.
Were there other particular themes you used, for individual characters for example?
No, not really. I had themes off and on, like when Leo had his heart attack I used a piano theme; I used a nylon guitar theme a couple of times, but predominantly it was orchestral and I pulled threads from the fabric of the main title to create the score. I had full-on strings and woodwind and percussion and all that on the main title, so I would just use strings and percussion, maybe, on one cue. And I didn't use the theme very often. I was very careful not to play that every time someone did something good. I probably only used it within the episodes maybe four or five times in the entire series.
The show's schedule was pretty tight, you must have been right down to the wire when it came to scoring the episodes.
Oh, I had sometimes one or two days to do the whole score. You get good at it. You get good at trusting your first instinct. We were originally going to score them all orchestrally and I managed to get about six done that way and then we just ran out of time. There wasn't time enough for me to write the score and get to an orchestra and everything. So all the score after the middle of the first year just became me playing on my black boxes.
How big a deal was getting The West Wing for you?
Well, it was such an iconic show. And up until that point, I was kind of known as the Thirtysomething guy. Then all of a sudden I became The West Wing guy. It's funny, it's one of the high points of my entire career, being on that show but I've never watched it. I scored it, but I've never gone back and watched it. I'm too critical of my work to watch anything within five or six years of when I do it. I just see the moments that I squandered, you know? But at some point I'm going to sit down and watch all seven years.