Talking About Music

The number-one fear filmmakers have about working with a composer is: "I don't know how to talk about music. I can't read a note. How will I tell them what I want?" Here's the liberating answer: you don't talk about music in musical terms — you talk about it in emotional and referential ones, and translating that into notes is the composer's job, not yours. Your job is to communicate the feeling, intent, and meaning you want, and you already have all the language you need for that. You describe emotions ("this should feel lonely and cold," "I want the audience's chest to tighten here"). You use images and metaphors ("like the moment before a storm breaks," "warm but with something sad underneath"). You point to references — the single most powerful tool — playing your composer music or film scores that capture a quality you're after ("something with the propulsion of this, but darker"). And you use plain adjectives (tense, tender, playful, ominous, hopeful, restrained). A skilled composer takes exactly this kind of input and translates it into the actual musical decisions — the key, the tempo, the instrumentation, the harmony. So the fear is misplaced. Communicating with a composer is a skill about expressing what you feel, and it's entirely learnable by any filmmaker, musician or not.

How to describe the music you want

The language that works:

• Lead with emotion. Describe how the music should make the audience feel — lonely, triumphant, uneasy, tender, dread-filled. Emotion is the truest brief, and exactly what a composer wants to know.
• Use images and metaphors. "Like a held breath," "the calm before a storm," "sunlight through a dusty window." Evocative pictures translate feelings into something a composer can musically chase.
• Give references — the most powerful tool. Play tracks or film scores that capture a quality you want. "Something with this energy," "this kind of instrument," "this mood but half the tempo." References communicate faster than any words.
• Use plain adjectives. Tense, warm, playful, ominous, restrained, sweeping, intimate, mechanical. Simple describing words are genuinely useful and need no musical knowledge.
• Talk about the story and character. Explain what the scene means and what the character feels — the composer scores the story, so context is direction. "She's realizing she's been betrayed" tells them a lot.
• Say what to avoid, too. "Not too sentimental," "no big drums," "steer away from anything that feels heroic." Negative guidance narrows the target as much as positive direction.

Speak feeling; let the composer speak music

The core principle to internalize is a clean division of labor: you are the expert on what your film should feel and mean; your composer is the expert on how to make music do that — so you speak in feeling and reference, and they translate it into notes. This dissolves the anxiety completely, because it means your lack of musical vocabulary is not a handicap; it's simply not your department. The composer wants emotional and referential direction, not technical instructions — in fact, a filmmaker who tries to dictate musical specifics ("use more strings, put it in a minor key") is usually less helpful than one who clearly communicates the feeling and trusts the composer to find the means, because the composer knows a hundred ways to create "unease" that you've never heard of. So invest your energy in getting clear about the feeling and communicating it richly, using the whole toolkit: emotions first, then images and metaphors, then references, then plain adjectives, always grounded in what the story and characters mean. Of all these, references are the single most powerful tool you have, and it's worth leaning on them hard — playing a composer a piece of music that has the quality you're chasing communicates in ten seconds what a paragraph of description can't, whether it's a mood, an instrument, a tempo, or an energy. (References connect directly to temp music, the subject of the very next chapter, which is references formalized into your edit — powerful, and with its own trap.) There's an art to using references well: point to the specific quality you want ("the propulsion of this," "the intimacy of this," "this instrument") rather than saying "make it sound exactly like this," which boxes the composer in and can cause rights and originality problems. And don't forget negative guidance — telling a composer what to avoid is as clarifying as telling them what to pursue, especially for steering away from clichés your film shouldn't have. The deeper truth here is that clear communication, not musical expertise, is what produces a great score, and clear communication is a filmmaking skill you already use with every other collaborator. You direct actors by describing emotions and intentions, not by acting the part yourself; you direct a cinematographer by describing the feeling of a shot, not by naming f-stops; and you direct a composer exactly the same way — by expressing what you feel and mean and trusting your expert collaborator to realize it. Get good at describing feeling, references, and story, get comfortable saying what to avoid, and you'll direct your composer beautifully without ever learning to read music. That skill of communicating musical intent is what makes every other part of the collaboration work — including the double-edged tool we turn to next: temp music, and the love trap that comes with it.