REEL MUSIC - Numbering the Cue Sheet

John Debney's Cue Sheet to Phantom Manor

As a young fan of film music I remember trying to absorb as much information as possible about the processes that went into the physical production of getting the music onto the celluloid image. Teaching myself everything there was to know about ‘click tracks’ and ‘spotting’ alongside the dreaded ‘temping’ was a fascinating and enlightening process, albeit in the pre-internet era. There was one thing that still had me scratching my inquisitive head and this was what some random letters and numbers were meant to represent on images I would find during my research. It was not until much later that I finally understood what 1M1 along with many other variations stood for and how this was not the original system employed by composers and studios.

It all begins with how music and film would work together in the discussion phase of a picture. In the early days of cinematography the slate board did not have the infamous clapper (as there was no sound yet!) but the trips to the Nickelodeon and Kino would results in a musical experience with live accompaniment. The clapper board came about as a way of synchronising audio to picture and with that came the natural rise of more focused compositional techniques to support the on screen action. As a piece of movie trivia it is suggested that DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation had one of the earliest specially composed scores written for films made in the U.S. Composer (Josep Breil) borrowed from classical music and used music from American folk songs.

The films (pre-digital) were recorded onto reels and it was this that led to the need to spot sessions and make a detailed note of where music would be placed in the picture... thus the origins of a spotting session. A composer will sit down with a director, music editor and other members of the production crew to identify positions where music could and should be placed. In order for this to work successfully a ‘cue sheet’ is needed and this records everything that is discussed and will be used in the recording phase of a score.

Frans Waxman's Cue Sheet for Sunset Boulevard

John Debney's Cue Sheet to Phantom Manor

There are 3 main ways historically that scores have been numbered relating to cue sheets and the film reels and these were:

The first method simply involved numbering a cue chronologically and most often the scores were recorded in that fashion. The example below shows Victor Young’s score to The Quiet Man and is labelled as M:100 to signify it is the first track of the score. There is nothing relating to the reels. Also accompanying it is the name of the cue, in this case Main Title. Extra information is provided in terms of particular arrangements and credits as noted at the top with ‘The Galway Piper – Trad’. This example also shows the handwritten format of a conductor’s score which was more commonly known as a condensed score

Victor Young's condensed score to The Quiet Man

With the development of technology and more advanced recording systems the film industry saw a significant shift in the numbering of cues. The examples below show how the scores now reflect the Reel Number and Music Cue. These can often become very elaborate depending on the sub sections of a particular cue. Reading into Star Wars urban myths there is one theory that suggests whilst working on American Graffiti Sound Editor Walter Murch asked for Reel 2, Dialog Track 2, in the abbreviated form "R-2-D-2".

The more common form of cue numbering that is widely seen today comes in the form of a much more abbreviated format, e.g. 2M5 which would imply the 2nd reel of footage and movie cue 5.

John William's score sheet to Sleepers

The latest and most widely used format is not the only one employed by Composers and Sound Editors and a search of the internet can reveal some enlightening examples. Henry Mancini when scoring Hatari used a very simplified alphanumeric system 1A, 1B, 1C. When viewing the original sketches of Herrmann’s Taxi Driver score last year I noticed that the use of roman numerals featured heavily in his work, and this is evidenced in the book A Heart at Fire's Center. An example would be R4P1-VII from Taxi Driver. Polish composer Wojech Kilar simply used a letter and number on his Dracula score (see below).