Making ‘The Haunting of Bly Manor’s menacing music & sound design:

The composing duo of Andy Grush and Taylor Newton Stewart, also known as The Newton Brothers, are writer/director Mike Flanagan’s go-to for music since Flanagan’s 2013 film Oculus. Since then they’ve worked with Flanagan on all his films (including Doctor Sleep and Gerald’s Game) and series — in particular The Haunting of…. anthology for Netflix.

Emmy-winning supervising sound editor Trevor Gates at Formosa Group and re-recording mixer Jonathan Wales are also a long-time collaborates with Flanagan. They first worked together on Flanagan’s 2016 film Ouija: Origin of Evil and continued on to Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep, and The Haunting of… series.

While The Haunting of Hill House leaned farther into the horror genre than the newly released The Haunting of Bly Manor, both series are set in spooky old houses populated by interesting and complex characters. Bly Manor‘s story unfolds more slowly, following the path of an American au pair, Dani Clayton (Victoria Pedretti), who moves into an English country house called Bly Manor where two orphaned children Flora (Amelie Bea Smith) and Miles (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) live with a caretaker, a cook, and a gardener. Dani discovers the house’s haunted history and why its residents have a hard time leaving.

Here, The Newton Brothers, Gates, and Wales discuss the sonic differences between Hill House and Bly Manor and share details on their approach to the new series, from remote collaboration to remote recording and mixing and how that remote process brought challenges and opportunities to create their best work in support of the story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tykS7QfTWMQ
The Haunting of Bly Manor | Official Trailer | Netflix

How would you compare your approach to Bly Manor to that of Hill House? What were writer/director Mike Flanagan’s ideas for how the music should sound this time around?

Taylor Newton Stewart (TNS): It’s a process for every project you do. Mike had a very specific idea for this story. He laid out the characters and where they’d go, and we wrote some themes early on for the different emotions of certain sections and scenes.

Really, love is the theme of Bly Manor. I feel it’s the connection and how it affects everyone differently. We wrote these pieces to glue those sections together. There was one specific piece, “O Willow Waly,” (written by George Auric and Paul Dehn, originally created for the 1961 film The Innocents) that was used. And that was very different from Season 1 because we didn’t take an existing piece of music and then re-imagine it for the show which is what we did for Bly Manor.

Really, love is the theme of ‘Bly Manor.’

Andy Grush (AG): We had a good base coming from Season 1. Early on, Mike had told us that he wanted to expand on that just as the story is evolving. It’s a different story and the story is evolving and so the music needed to evolve as well and follow the path that these characters and storylines were taking.

There was a different approach even in the recording of the music and sounds recorded. All of it was a different approach because, as you mentioned, these are different stories and they do have different throughlines. In the first season, we were trying to play between the story and the ambience of how you’re feeling, be it scared or uneasy. There was some of that in this season as well but it’s just different. The themes and the way we recorded things needed to address that. There was no specific way in which we did it. But, like on every project, you dive in and start recording music and writing themes and the marriage of the music, the story, and the visuals and Mike’s vision, it starts to come together as everyone feels out what’s working and what’s not.

 

In terms of sound editorial and mixing, how does your approach to Bly Manor compare to that of Hill House?

Trevor Gates (TG): We’ve done several projects with Mike Flanagan and the DNA of what Mike and producer Trevor Macy expect stay pretty consistent throughout the projects. He has a style and so we stick to that style. What’s cool about his projects is that the writing is really good, and so is the way that they put the scenes together in these episodes and movies. They get great performances. And things just work as they come. Our task is to heighten the experience with some creative sounds.

Jonathan and I on this one spent some time figuring out some of the core design concepts as we worked through the series. And we worked remotely to mix this through Evercast.

We sucked out the sound to create an uneasy feeling that something is different.

Some of the DNA pieces that are consistent with Mike Flanagan are utilizing silence and isolated sounds. There were a few times in the series where Jonathan and I had to explore what reoccurring themes were happening and a lot of it came down to something that was minimal. We sucked out the sound to create an uneasy feeling that something is different.

Jonathan Wales (JW): Mike Flanagan is a storyteller first. And we’re dealing with acting at a very high level so we’re always trying to create the right mood and the right sense of either unease or dread, but do it without getting in the way of the acting and without drawing attention to what the sound is doing. We want to enhance what is happening. This is a project where sound creates this soundscape of what’s happening. But it’s not about that. We have to create that backdrop, that sense of unease.

From my standpoint, I’m dealing a lot with The Newton Brothers’ score. And a lot of the dance is working out whether it’s the score that’s going to do the work or the sound design that’s going to do the work. There are plenty of places in any of these projects where you might not know which is which. Sometimes the score is obvious, sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes something that’s actually sound design you might think is music. That’s part of what makes it a cool voyage of discovery.

…a lot of the dance is working out whether it’s the score that’s going to do the work or the sound design…

TG: We’re seeing an evolution in the quality of sound in series work. We’re seeing sound quality that one might call ‘feature level’ sound design. I’ve always taken the highest level of quality approach to my projects because I care about the art that I do.

In the series, one of the things that I had a challenge with early on was figuring out how to feel a mood inside this new house we’re in and around. A lot of that comes down to subtlety. I’ll prepare some tracks that give a specific feel that I want. I’m able to work with Jonathan and we have that relationship where he can understand what my vision is and we’re able to embrace the subtlety that we’re moving towards. Jonathan and I have been working together for years. He knows what is in my head and I know what is in his head and it’s an enjoyable experience when we put the stuff together.

JW: We’re making nine movies that happen to be around an hour each. That’s the approach to this. I don’t believe that in this day and age there should be this distinction between film work and episodic work. This is what we do. We do the best work that we can regardless of the format because that’s what’s going to enhance the story and give the audience the best impression of what is happening.

 

That line between what’s ‘feature quality’ and ‘TV quality’ is completely gone. There’s such high-quality work in the TV industry that there’s little to no difference between the two…

JW: And I believe that’s as it should be. The way I look at it is that the work should speak for itself and the medium in which you view it should be relatively agnostic. If you make a feature, you make a feature but you also make it so that it will work correctly on small screens. You spend a lot of time doing that.

…the work should speak for itself and the medium in which you view it should be relatively agnostic.

We know that a lot more people are ultimately going to consume any of the work we do on multiple devices at different times in their lives. We need them to have that experience. If they can’t have that experience then the project doesn’t work. It takes a level of commitment to quality to enhance the vision of the director, who in this case, is Mike Flanagan. We want to bring his vision to life in the format that we are working in.

 

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The story of Bly Manor unwraps more slowly than it does in Hill House, and that uneasy feeling is a difficult thing to try to support with sound design. How were you able to support the tension and feeling of unease through sound?

TG: I think that Jonathan and I had an exploration through mixing the series and we evolved the sound as we went through the episodes themselves. There’s definitely an arc to the series, which was very similar to the first season. I’m excited for people to experience that arc.

We have an evolution but as far as our journey a lot of what we needed to do in the beginning was trust the filmmaking and trust Mike Flanagan and do some of our basic things to make sure we support the great performances and allow that evolution to happen.

JW: For me, a lot of it is getting the performances to be as great as they can be. Dialogue mixing is all about making sure that nobody knows you were ever there and that you did anything. But, we did do a lot — whether it was adjusting timing or making minor tweaks to a performance to make the words and sentiments communicate.

Dialogue mixing is all about making sure that nobody knows you were ever there and that you did anything.

Because Trevor and I have worked together so long, we have a fluid process. One interesting thing in this pandemic workflow was that we got to revisit episodes later. Once we were done with a given episode we didn’t have to put it down and let it go. And so, some things evolved. I remember we got halfway through and decided we didn’t like the sound of how this particular room is vibing. So we went back and changed it in all of the previous occurrences. I think it was a cool thing that we were able to do. It’s the kind of thing where the process benefits the end result because we had a little bit of fluidity and the confidence to know that if we think we need to do something then we are just going to go and do it.

TG: One of the cool signature things we did in Hill House was to take some sounds that were in the environment, whether it was a clock ticking or a cricket chirping, and we would modulate those and bend them as a scene would continue to move on through. It would give the viewer a feeling of dread without them realizing it.

We started to do that same thing, to keep that DNA in the second season, and we realized that the composition of the way this worked was giving up a bit too much and so we needed to pivot and try some different things. There was one design piece where someone has an altered state of mind or their position in reality was a bit different and we worked through some ideas for that.

Just like Jonathan said, we started early with one idea and by the middle we found something that worked better with the story arc. And so we analyzed the effect to really help the viewer to travel through the experience.

…we started early with one idea and by the middle we found something that worked better with the story arc.

JW: You mentioned this The Haunting of… anthology concept and I think originally we were trying to decide if that was going to apply to sound or if it was more high-concept. I think in the end, where that is landing is that it’s more of a vibe thing. It’s also really done with music. Music is the thread that is keeping the anthology together.

Beyond that, it’s just super high quality acting and performances, and we are making the environment be what it needs to be. It’s subtle. It’s a million small things in these types of projects. It’s a combination of little things put together that really creates the result.

TG: Early on, Mike said to me that he’d really need sound to do specific things. And one of those things was to make the audience feel like they are really there. That required some basic design concepts, to build these environments so that we feel like we’re there. That’s pretty common for filmmaking but it is articulate and it is difficult at times to feel the birds and to feel what the inside of this house feels like, especially when someone is going to be listening back on an iPad or a TV in a stereo format. You have to think about some of those things beforehand and understand how they are going to translate.

We created an identifiable sound for each location and were able to impose that on the world on-screen.

JW: We ended up doing that a lot with reverb — being able to define different places in and around the house by having a different reverb sound. We created an identifiable sound for each location and were able to impose that on the world on-screen. It’s one of those cases where there was an awful lot of work going on — Trevor has done so much design — but the goal is that you shouldn’t be able to tell. It should just be this slow build of disturbingness that ends up working.

TG: To that point, through the mixing process it was Jonathan and I and our music editor Brett ‘Snacky’ Pierce. The three of us stayed really tight and attentive to all of the details, and asked questions to each other. We had some challenges because of the pandemic, with mixing over Evercast. That would stream stereo and we would connect and listen to stereo. Then Jon would send me a 5.1 and I would go through and listen to the relationship of the sound in my room that I built at home. Then I would jump back and say, “You know Jonathan I think we need to be a little less here, and outside it’s a little too much here. And maybe we should go a little harder here.”
Even with these basic concepts, it was all about taking the time to be communicative and not be afraid to push the envelope and take the extra steps through the limitations that we had in doing this work remotely.

JW: It’s great when you’re working with people as talented as Mike Flanagan and Trevor Macy because they know exactly what they like. There is no sense of wishy-washy answers. If they hear something and they love it then you are going to know about it. If they hear something and it’s not working then we know we’re going to need to fix it. That’s kind of a dream for us because we’re given the lead to go create something. We put it out there and see what happens.

We decided to stream a binaural output over Evercast so we could playback through headphones.

From a technical standpoint, it was interesting during the pandemic because we’re mixing in Atmos here. We decided amongst ourselves the best way to do that. We decided to stream a binaural output over Evercast so we could playback through headphones. We made sure everyone had the same headphones at the beginning of the project. So, with headphones on, we had a very high level of certainty that everybody was hearing the same thing. Then, separately, we would send out a 5.1 mix or straight stereo. So we were really trying to cover all the bases everywhere we could because that was the only way we could get to a level of confidence where we felt we knew where we were with the mix.

TG: We even sent the headphones to the filmmakers so that when we were sending stereo outputs to them or if they were on Evercast with us then they were using the same headphones. That was an important piece for us to understand and control.

JW: It worked really well!

 

[tweet_box]Making The Haunting of Bly Manor’s menacing music & sound design:[/tweet_box]

Andy and Taylor, can you walk me through your approach to scoring the series? How do you split up the work and collaborate? And how do you get started?

TNS: We usually get started by going away into our separate caves and we write pieces. We obviously had things from season one that we brought back. We knew we had those pieces but there were all of these new pieces that we wanted to riff off of.

So we wrote some pieces and then came together and decided we like this and don’t like that, and then sent out our choices to Mike. He then got back to us on what was working and what wasn’t. We honed in from there. We started to find the characters and the pieces we wanted to elaborate on. That’s usually the way our process goes.

I got on the piano and started writing this piece and that piece ended up being one of the main pieces in ‘Bly Manor.’

There was one piece we wrote and there were all of these power outages and thunderstorms in Los Angeles. So, the entire house was out of power. I got on the piano and started writing this piece and that piece ended up being one of the main pieces in Bly Manor. So it was one of those serendipitous moments.

In a lot of ways, the music in Hill House was different because we didn’t expand on the melodies quite as much as we did on Bly. Some of the cues were slightly richer in harmonic content than Season 1. It naturally fit the context of what was happening in the story. It was great to revisit those themes.

It’s our process to go back and forth and once we got further into the season we had this resource of material to pull from. Then it’s more about arranging and finding musicians — deciding what cello player is going to play on what.

 

Andy, do you have a favorite instrument that you like to start plinking out ideas on?

AG: I love the piano. That was my first instrument. I still love playing it. I still spend time during the day just sitting at the piano playing for no reason. That’s my favorite because it incorporates everything. I think the piano is considered a percussive instrument because you have the hammers hitting the strings. I like that there is rhythm involved; there are chords and structure and melody and harmony. It incorporates everything. I like sitting at the piano and starting there.

…sometimes when I’m trying to come up with melodic ideas I will stick a kazoo in my mouth while I’m sitting at the piano…

TNS: It’s probably better than kazoo.

AG: Taylor is saying that because sometimes when I’m trying to come up with melodic ideas I will stick a kazoo in my mouth while I’m sitting at the piano, to play chords and give the chords color so I’m not playing a melody with all 10 fingers. So I’ll play the chords on the piano and I’ll hum out the melody with the kazoo because the kazoo stands out. Like, no one would ever hear this; I just do this for myself with my voice memo.

It’s actually how the Season 1 main title theme came together.

It’s actually how the Season 1 main title theme came together. There were a lot of piano parts in there and I was playing them while I had the kazoo in my mouth playing this super simple melody. And that’s what ended up being.

 

Well, you’re in good company. Composer Daniel Pemberton is also a huge fan of the kazoo. So, I think you guys are onto something…

AG: Oh really? He’s a great composer. That’s great to hear.

 

Taylor, do you have a favorite instrument you like to start with, to get some ideas going?

TNS: It depends on the project. I feel like certain sounds and instruments can inspire and direct you down a certain path. If it’s a rhythm-based movie, you start out with more percussion and drums. If it’s a guitar-driven film, you go to guitar.

I love coming up with ideas on the piano because if it’s not good on piano (if you can’t find something that you are attaching yourself to) then it’s most likely not going to be amazing when you add all this other stuff in on top of it, with strings and an orchestra. It’s not going to make it better.

… it’s so stripped-down you can hear if something is resonating emotionally…

That’s why I love piano, because it’s so stripped-down you can hear if something is resonating emotionally and that tells me early on whether or not to move forward with it.

Mike Flanagan is a big fan of piano and a lot of his scores are piano-driven. He’s also a great piano player as well. I think for a Flanagan film we tend to gravitate towards piano because I feel like it works really well with the story he tells and obviously he enjoys it too.

 

You mentioned using live musicians. Is that something you often do for scores? Do you mix in virtual instruments as well?

AG: Yeah, for this project we called it (unfortunately) the COVID orchestra. We did all of our mockups which involved Taylor and I playing as much as we can and then using virtual instruments as well. Then we started layering those and swapping things out with live players.

It’s great what you can do with samples nowadays. It’s been about 20 years since I’ve been composing music for film/TV. I can only imagine what Bernard Herrmann would have done had he had the whole Spitfire library. There is so much you can do now. You can play with things. You can sit at the keyboard and come up with your melody with your kazoo and have a great sounding grand piano. You can experiment with how something would sound if it was just woodwinds, or just horns, or all of them, or a guitar.

…you have to create boundaries for yourself because otherwise it would be like you were out in space floating around.

I find that you have to create boundaries for yourself because otherwise it would be like you were out in space floating around. I think creating boundaries for ourselves is something we try to do all of the time, just in theory. We don’t necessarily stick to those boundaries. But we’re starting in a playpen and we try to just stay there and play with those toys. Then, if we’re informed that a toy in someone else’s playpen may work then we go to that playpen.

It’s interesting, too, doing this process with everyone remotely. It’s a bummer to not be in the same room as the musicians because there is this magic that happens. That’s why everyone loves live shows because there’s this magic that happens when people are playing together. But, it does create a benefit for us of getting the true sound that we were going for. So that would be the positive side of this.
 

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…there’s this magic that happens when people are playing together.

TNS: We had to record each player one by one. And we had to take a very technical approach in terms of recording. But, with a great mix and a great mixer and a great team we were able to bring it all together, to glue all of the pieces and players together so it sounded like they were playing in one room.

Then, we added in all the stuff we played and it turned out great. I’m happy with how the final mixes came out in the score.

But, it’s definitely a unique time and it was a unique recording experience.

AG: Especially with what was happening with the pandemic. Our team is a crucial part of this process. Our music editor Snacky (Brett Pierce) was instrumental in making sure everything was getting done the way it should be done and also coming up with good creative feedback. It’s always a great situation when everyone around you is looking at the same goal line. Our music mixer Brad Haehnel and music/dialogue re-recording mixer Jonathan Wales and everyone was really on point to help us get to where we needed to be.

 

Jonathan, what were some of your challenges or opportunities to be creative when mixing the score?

JW: Challenge number one was that it was up in the air for the longest time what we were actually going to be mixing. I was working with the tracks from The Newton Brothers, their output, and we always knew there was going to be more instruments recorded but during the course of the pandemic evolving that changed from musicians getting in a room together to be what we affectionately call the ‘COVID orchestra,’ which was individual musicians in their own houses recording their own parts and then sending them in to get compiled by the music editor and scoring mixer. They had to put it together so that we had the real instruments. And that didn’t come in until very late in the day because that was one of the hardest things to figure out with the shifting rules in the pandemic.

…what we affectionately call the ‘COVID orchestra,’ which was individual musicians in their own houses recording their own parts…

Another consideration is Mike Flanagan’s process of working with the music. Music is always going to change as he hears what Trevor is doing with sound editorial, and he hears how the performances are working together. He starts with a really strong idea for the temp score but The Newton Brothers will add their ideas to it too. The musical construction of the episodes is definitely one of the things that evolve over time. That’s one of the things about the process that is so enjoyable. It becomes a real revelation how that happens.

The musical construction of the episodes is definitely one of the things that evolve over time.

TG: That goes for everything as well. As Jonathan said earlier, we have the ability to be creative and go beyond a normal threshold of what somebody might think is acceptable. We can take the license to be creative and do weird stuff in a very cool way.

True to the mixing process, there will always be a curveball. Mike might say, “You guys are going to hate me but what if we try this…” So we might rip out the music or do another piece of sound design or do something completely different. I think that’s a testament to the entire team — the music team, the sound editorial team, and the mixing team. As showmakers, we can see that vision that Mike Flanagan and Trevor Macy have.

JW: One nice thing is that we all speak music as a language. So there is a common level of understanding there. That makes it nice because we are composing — not with just music but with sound and everything that goes into the final track. We enjoy the evolution of it. Sometimes you have situations where people might be offended if their vision doesn’t necessarily happen but that’s not really an issue here.

TG: There’s no ego here.

JW: Different ideas all blend into what it is.

And, we had the best time with The Newton Brothers. They’re incredibly talented but they’re also incredibly able to pivot. They might compose something and Mike might ask them to try something completely different and then five hours later there will be a completely different piece of music that they turned around. It’s a very fluid, very fast process. We have a great time doing it.

 

Taylor and Andy, when writing parts with virtual instruments do you find they are too challenging for live musicians to play? Like, does the Oboe player say, ‘Could we make this change and this change because it’s a bit difficult to play the Oboe like that.’?

TSN: We run into that when we try to push the boundaries of what can be played. If you’re playing something with more difficult articulation or something, that usually gets discovered before we go into record it. We know if a part is kind of difficult to play or impossible to play, especially on something like Doctor Sleep, which has very odd and strange instrumentation. But on Bly Manor, which is based in more traditional instruments and approach, it wasn’t so much a thing.

But, we definitely run into that where a player will say, ‘Oh, man, I don’t know if I can do this.’ And we always encourage them. We tell them that they can do it!

So, the musician will go and play the part and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Obviously, there’s the middle ground of the orchestrator. Mark Graham does a lot of our orchestration. He’ll let us know if a player might struggle with this or that. And usually we know going into it but there may be something we didn’t see. But, it’s always fun to push the boundaries with the players. I love that part. I love when a player says, “Ohhhhh, I don’t know if we are going to be able to play this.” But I tell them, “You can do it.”

… it’s always fun to push the boundaries with the players.

AG: Sometimes it yields happy accidents and sometimes we have to do a different version in a different key. For example, we did this film Life of Crime starring Jennifer Aniston, and there’s this trumpet melody that plays in a few places. We wrote it high. We knew that it was high. So we hired someone specifically who is known for playing high. And he crushed it.

Sometimes it yields happy accidents and sometimes we have to do a different version in a different key.

We had this discussion about why it sounded so great after he did it. And it’s because you’re pushing the boundaries, the physical boundaries of what humans can do with instruments. Like, there are some great amplifiers that sound best when they are on the verge of breaking up. And there’s that thing that just happens with voices too. There are voices that when pushed, there’s something that happens with the way the vibrations work. Good vibrations I guess. It’s all good.

 

Did you have any favorite themes or scenes to score on Bly Manor?

TNS: That’s tough…

AG: I feel like it changed every time we got a new episode.

TNS: For me, there’s a whole scene where Rebecca is walking into the lake. It’s poetic, what’s happening, and she’s not fully aware of what is happening to her. We played the music like a tragic moment but it’s still based in love. That one sequence really resonated with me and obviously there were a couple scenes in Episode 8 and 9 that got me a little teary-eyed.

… there were a couple scenes in Episode 8 and 9 that got me a little teary-eyed.

AG: As we started getting into later episodes, your whole being is becoming more invested in what’s happening. All of the episodes, but especially 8 and 9, were just a joy. It’s all such a joy to be able to work on this project. But coming to the end of the series is always great because Ep. 9 is fulfilling. We use a Zoom-like software for post production, where we can all see each other and the main screen is the project video. As we were watching down one of the final mixes of Ep. 9 towards the end, it really resonated with me. You just get to a point where you really enjoy it. I think Ep. 9 is my favorite.

TNS: I found that there was one character who was slightly devious and I had read the script so I knew where it was going. But because his acting is so great and he’s so charming, it made me really like the guy. I started to feel for him. But why? He’s so horrible. So that was happening; I was starting to root for things that maybe I shouldn’t. That’s a good sign because the viewer is torn on what they should be feeling.

 

Complexity in the storytelling is always a good thing…

TNS: It is. And I love a good love story. You feel bad and you understand why people do bad things sometimes. It doesn’t justify them but you are able to relate in your own way in your own life. I thought that certain characters were very relatable to life and how much they will do in thinking only of themselves and for love. Or something they at least say is because of love. For me, that really resonated in the show while we were scoring it. It was definitely a couple scenes like those I mentioned that took my breath away. I hope the viewers love those scenes as much as I do.

The complexity in stories is always so rewarding because that’s what we’re dealing with in life, and not just in 2020.

AG: The complexity in stories is always so rewarding because that’s what we’re dealing with in life, and not just in 2020. We want every day to look like an IKEA showroom, of ‘this is the table and the beautiful fruit on the table.’ We want it to be this perfect picture that we see all over the Internet now, with these perfect posts of everything. But that doesn’t exist for anyone. This season, even as it was unfurling for us as we were reading the script and seeing it come to life, I think that anyone who thinks about life more than just the day-to-day (which I think is everyone) it resonates differently for everyone. When you think about grief, everyone deals with grief, whether it’s death or loss of love and I think that lands truthfully with every human.

 

[tweet_box]Honing in the Sound and Music for ‘The Haunting of Bly Manor'[/tweet_box]

This series is definitely a blend of drama, mystery, and love with just a bit of horror. There’s some weighty subject material. How do you reflect those themes and emotional content of the story in your music without overtly leading the audience as to how they should feel, or how the director wants them to feel?

TNS: That’s a great question. It’s really easy, especially with drama, to get into melodrama where the music is telling you to feel overly saccharine about something or you should feel overly sweet love for something. We are always very cautious with that. I know Mike is also very sensitive to leading the witness — when to do something and when not to do something.

Mike is also very sensitive to leading the witness…

A lot of the themes we wrote in Season 1 and the new themes in Season 2 are rooted in neutral ground where if you took the piece and put it on a sad scene it could work and if you put it on a happy scene it could also work. It has this ability to mold to certain scenes to be neutral in some ways. You can add in certain chords or certain things to draw out the emotion that you are wanting to. We tread that water very carefully, especially in Season 2 because there is so much love in the story even though it’s a horror show. I think the key ingredient was being very careful.

We tread that water very carefully, especially in Season 2 because there is so much love in the story even though it’s a horror show.

But the actual music itself isn’t written with these overly happy chords or overly saccharine things. I think that really helped with the balance of that. Also, when there was a scene that was really happy and filled with this overjoy, then maybe that’s the time to go dry — the time to not have any music. You really want people to relate their own experiences to this, to what they’re feeling as much as relating to the characters. You don’t want to have made a decision about a character early on. You want to be open to the idea that this person isn’t necessarily bad or this person is doing something out of a good place that he/she is coming from.

I think that was the goal. And Mike really carved that out in Season 1 and even more so in Season 2 and we followed the blueprints and it worked really well.

AG: There’s a constant sensitivity to what’s going on. It’s been really great on these two seasons for the team, from the top down.

And by sensitivity, I mean sensitivity to themes and ideas for scenes that Taylor and I listen to later and decide if we should dial it down or dial it up. It doesn’t come from a place of being unconfident; it comes from a place of confidence in that sensitivity, which is a difficult thing to find because I don’t think there is an exact right answer. It’s different for everyone.

Everyone on the show has a similar stance. Mike will comment on music based on how he feels about it. We might all agree that this certain sound should do this certain thing and it needs to have motion and do a list of things. We will all have a call about it and Taylor and I will go and do it. When we feel like we’re in a good place, we’ll all watch it down and we’re able to say, ‘Oh that’s not working for this reason.’

There’s a sensitivity to being aware of what’s working and what’s not working.

There’s a sensitivity to being aware of what’s working and what’s not working. That’s what made this process so much fun. Everyone is aware of that specific sensitivity. There’s the craft of what you are doing and there’s this weird thing coming in from the other side. If those two things can meet at a point they become something that’s not what they were by themselves. The confluence of ideas and craft etc.. Being aware of that and looking out for that is hard to do. It takes time. You have to have time on the schedule and luckily we had time to do this. And we had the entire team being open to that idea. From the top down, everyone was honest and it made it a real joy.

 

If you don’t want to make something overly saccharine sweet, is there a chord progression that you avoid like the plague?

TNS: Yes. Especially with piano, you have to be really careful. We’ve all seen those — and this isn’t to make less of them — Hallmark Christmas specials or something.

AG: Hey, I like some of those.

TNS: Some of those are great. But they make you feel this supersweet emotion, overly happy at times. That’s great for those kinds of things. And yeah, some are fantastic. But for a show that is rooted in horror and drama, you can’t do that. Or else you will be shot in the head.

If you are going to use the “Earth Angel” chord progression, you want to be aware that there are expectations.

AG: There are ways to be aware of it. If you are going to use the “Earth Angel” chord progression, you want to be aware that there are expectations. Everyone knows where the next chord is going to go and there are ways you can invert it and use different instrumentation but I think being aware of that with the score is important because you don’t want to ever be too comfortable. It’s easier to go there if you don’t keep it to sort of ‘standard’ for the majority of it. I don’t think it’s necessarily a specific chord progression so much as being aware of what you’re doing. Bach was kind of “pop songs.” It’s chord progressions and the melodies weave throughout them. Being aware of them is good so that people don’t go, “Dude, that’s ‘Earth Angel.’ What are you doing?”

TNS: Since we’re talking about chord progressions, early on before we got the later episodes, a lot of the cues — maybe half of them in an episode — wouldn’t resolve back to the one. They wouldn’t finish. So there was always this feeling of expectation, of waiting for the resolve, but they wouldn’t. Those specific notes came from Mike himself. He would say, “Hey, let’s not resolve here.” And we’d let it ring out but not go back and it definitely gives it a sensation — just like a certain chord progression that’s overly sweet or saccharine would make you feel.

 

I love that Mike is able to express those musical ideas to you in a technical way and not just talk about music in terms of feeling…

TNS: Mike is an amazing musician himself. He’s also a writer (of music) himself when he has time. But, these days, he’s so busy he doesn’t have time to write music.

Every director we enjoy working with and developing a shorthand with but Mike is great. He’ll say change this to an F minor or go here or maybe we should try this inversion.

Everything you do needs to have an intention and purpose.

It’s very refreshing but at the same time the rope is long. You can hang yourself superfast. Everything you do needs to have an intention and purpose. Every time you do a project with Mike and Trevor [Macy], we want to set the bar super-high. And not just because Mike is so in tune with music but also because we want the show and everything to be as great as it can be.

Whenever we get a project with Mike, everyone says, “Oh, it’s going to be super easy.” But no. Mike is easy to work with but there is a lot of effort and I always feel like we’re trying to step it up a notch from our last project. That makes it more fun and a challenge.

AG: We stress ourselves out. Taylor and I are our own therapists. We stress ourselves out at the beginning of every project. But it’s a good stress I think.

TNS: It’s an arc. It’s excitement, fear, and the adrenaline kicks in…

AG: It’s like if you train to run the Boston Marathon, it’s not going to be easy. It’s going to suck. It’s going to be very hard and you might not even finish but you give it your all. That was a bad analogy… but, sort of good I guess.

 

Any other thoughts you’d like to share on creating the sound and score for The Haunting of Bly Manor?

TNS: It’s interesting because when you write a score that is based around horror elements and horrific events that happen, it’s always interesting when the story can draw you in and suck you in. I think that’s by design whenever Mike tells the stories. From a writing standpoint, it’s always an absolute blast to write on something that, for me, is communicating something from the point of emotion, story, and characters rather than just something scary and horrific. We do love those moments too, and that’s been a great thing about The Haunting of… series. Mike is able to tell these stories and it’s super captivating and for us that’s been a great pleasure.

TG: I’d really love to give a solid shout out to my sound editorial team for all their tireless work on this season.

A big thanks to The Newton Brothers, Trevor Gates, and Jonathan Wales for giving us a behind-the-scenes look at the sound of The Haunting of Bly Manor – and to Jennifer Walden for the interview!

 

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