Throughout lockdown, the Abbey Road team have been finding innovative ways to keep themselves busy. With sessions cancelled, engineers have started remote recording sessions, and with the Abbey Road Shop closed, staff members have written accounts of their musical heroes that have a special connection with the studios.

Abbey Road Red’s Junior Programme Manager David Fong, is the latest member of the team to put their skills to use. In his role at the studios, David works alongside Red’s Innovation Manager, Karim Fanous, managing our audio tech incubator. However, outside of his role, David has a keen passion for composing and playing violin, where he was even part of Italy’s first youth symphony orchestra.

His most recent venture in lockdown saw him enter Spitfire Audio’s scoring contest. Teaming up with HBO’s Westworld, Spitfire gave participants the opportunity to re-imagine the score from a snippet of one of the episodes. David spoke to us about the piece he composed with Xin Ning Lam and the inspiration behind it:

"The intention was to explain some of the chase scene’s psychological subtext musically, because in this particular case it is more humorous than heroic. The start shows how from a human perspective we are flawed but once we understand how machines work, we are able to work well with them, as shown by the addition of electronic elements towards the end of the scene to the symphony orchestra used throughout the cue.
 
To give the cue some narrative coherence, several musical themes and devices were composed and developed. Some of them include a “threat” theme presented firstly at 0:21 in Trumpets and Strings and then in altered form at 1:13, a “Dolores” theme conveying the decisiveness and mischief of the character Dolores heard from 1:40, and an “aleatory” theme entering at 2:16 communicating character Caleb’s lack of control over the situation unfolding."