Writing music for nonfiction films

April 10, 2008 [...] capturing and presenting true stories, genuine history, real events and actual people is the enduring challenge facing documentary filmmakers. [...] music can be just as crucial an element in support of a real-world story as it would be for a scripted one; and for composers who score documentaries, the form brings its own special set of rewards and difficulties. Pioneering documentarian Frederick Wiseman has long taken a cinema verite approach that eschews any musical underscore, and for decades the genre had the reputation for scores that sounded canned, rather than crafted.

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