Next weekend the Doctor Who Symphonic Spectacular – a live performance of music from the show – begins touring the UK.

CultBox recently caught up with Murray via Skype in New York to discuss the concerts, composing for Doctor Who, and just about everything else…

 

So, I guess there’s kind of a difference as a composer between seeing your work performed before a live audience versus seeing it go out on TV, would you say?

“Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it works in an odd way, because sometimes I do write these massive pieces that are quite anthemic – when ‘This Is Gallifrey’ first came on the television, I think people locked onto it because it’s very quiet, and you don’t get much of it, I don’t think you got the whole piece, and it’s just like, just over a little montage about Gallifrey, and then a little bit of it when John Simm’s Master dies in David Tennant’s arms.

“But you know, it’s kind of like there’s a process that happens now, there’s a relationship between the show and me and the fans whereby, you know, the albums have been coming out now for a long time. People hear a little bit of music in the show, you know, it’s quite buried, it’s often very quiet. But it still gets stuck in their head, and now you get this thing where people go and get a 5.1 surround sound version of the broadcast and they isolate the audio channels and they pull out the music and it goes on YouTube before the album comes out!

“And we get these channels which are just unreleased Doctor Who music that have been, using software or – I don’t know how they do it, actually – just somehow manage to get a fairly clean version of the most recent series’ music.”

 

Indeed!

“Like, the Series 8 music hasn’t been released. And then the audience are kind of savvy enough to know that one of these pieces is going to be Capaldi’s theme, and then there’s the game of trying to spot which one is Capaldi’s theme, and slowly through the series you notice that they’ve all figured it out, you know?

“I mean, well, I couldn’t have made it much easier, you know, it was quite embedded this year. But then they start to expect it, the album comes out, they check to see if the things they hoped would be in it are in it, and then it becomes like a favourite piece gets put on the concert list and people are really happy, and people are unhappy that one of the things they really wanted wasn’t on the album and isn’t in the concert, but all of that stuff’s really good because we just couldn’t have even imagined it ten years ago.

“You know, it’s hard to imagine even in 2006 when Julie Gardner said ‘Let’s do a concert of just your music for the show,’ and I was like, ‘What, just the incidental music? People are going to come to a concert of incidental music from a TV show?’ and she said they will. And, you know, she was right.”

 

She certainly was!

“So just the fact that it’s a, it feels a bit like a rock band, you know when a rock band tours and they don’t only play stuff from their latest album, you know, it’s just like ‘I don’t want to hear all David Bowie’s new stuff! I want to hear all his classics!’

“And we have just this huge amount of music to choose from now, so like, every time we go on, in Australia or the Albert Hall or now with the concert tour, we have this kind of roster of music that we can choose to do. The weird thing is a lot of it IS from the new albums. So for the Symphonic Spectacular, something like 50% of it is from the Capaldi era. But it really bowls out, it’s quite overwhelming.”

 

I’m wondering if it does kind of harken back to when you’ve done music for live theatre, even though this is more the music as a performance in itself?

“No, it does, like, definitely I guess there’s a sense where – there’s this theme called ‘A Good Man’, which is Capaldi’s theme, which we played in Australia, and in order to get to Capaldi’s theme, I had to write a complete, full piece. And you know, there was never any time to put the full piece in the show, but I wanted to derive from a full piece, I don’t like just writing bitty pieces of music.”