Normand Roger.

Since the early 1970s, composer Normand Roger has been providing music and sound design for some of the most acclaimed short animated films produced in Canada, and around the world. Best known for his work with the National Film Board of Canada, with which he's been associated as a freelancer since 1972, Roger also has been the composer for all of the films of Frédéric Back, including the Academy Award-winning The Man Who Planted Trees, and over the years has worked with everyone from Co Hoedeman (The Sand Castle) and Eugene Fedorenko (Village of Idiots) to Paul Driessen, Michael Dudok de Wit, Chris Hinton and Aleksandr Petrov, most recently on Petrov's 2007 Oscar nominee My Love. He also composed the theme for PBS' long-running Mystery! series, among other TV-related work. While Roger was in town for the Academy Awards in February, we talked about how he came to his singular calling and some of the highlights of his nearly 40-year career.

Jon Hofferman: So is it true that you've done the music for every NFB short since the days of Norman McLaren?

Normand Roger: (laughing) Not at all, of course not. I am a freelance at the Film Board, so, in the best years, it will represent maybe a third of my work. And a third might be with other independent companies in Montreal, or Television Radio-Canada, the producer of the films of Frédéric Back. Another third will be foreign projects from various parts of the world.

JH: And do you work most of the time in the course of a year?

NR: Yes, there's never any stop. There hasn't been, I guess, for 30 years or so. I've been doing it for 37 years now. In the first five years of course it was more occasional, but then… it was nonstop and the projects always overlapped. And that's why I'm looking forward to working less.

JH: What was the first job you did, or the first job that was important?

NR: The first film that I did the soundtrack [for was an NFB film by] a young director named Pierre Veilleux, a French-Canadian. And he knew my work because when I started studying music, I got into trying to write little pieces on modern paintings. My favorites were Paul Klee, di Chirico, and the like... So I was interested in visual art and I thought I would go to the art school and study a little further about [it], and how I could combine music with it -- I was not thinking of film at the time. I have some drawing talent, so I got accepted at the [Ecole des Beaux-Arts] in Montreal, and there I met some young artists who were interested in animation. I [also] had a band for which I was composing the music and we were performing, it would be some sort of progressive rock--I'm talking like 1968, around that time.

Roger has collaborated on two films with Aleksandr Petrov, including the 2007 Oscar nominee My Love. © DAGO-Film Studio.

So in '71, [Pierre] made his first film at the NFB and he asked me to do the music for it -- it was called Dans la vie, "in life." And I think I worked on that -- it was a short film, seven minutes long or so -- for six months. I did everything; I even worked on all the visual aspects of the film -- even the tracing and painting. So, it was a learning process that went on for six months. And the film had some success -- it won a prize at the Canadian Academy Awards, the Genies. And that was it. I discovered a form of animation that I [hadn't been] aware of. I grew up with cartoons like every North American kid, [but] I did not [originally think of] animation in my search for music and visuals. I was exploring, looking, didn't know what I was really looking for, and animation... hit me, you know -- of course.

JH: Once you thought of it, it seemed obvious. For the first films you did, was the music more rock-influenced?

NR: Well, the first one was [pretty close] to the music that I was doing. It was not too rock, but it was kind of modernish -- there were drum and bass and cello, clarinet, and some xylophone. At the Film Board, they had an electronic music studio, a little studio, and that was an occasion for me to try that. So I combined electronic sounds with music that was close to the music that I was doing before. But then the next film, Tchou-Tchou (Co Hoedeman, 1972), was more directed toward children and it called for something completely different, and that seemed to have been natural for me -- to adapt to the film and try to imagine what music will complete it.

JH: How big an influence is French-Canadian music?

NR: [It depends on] the subject--it's as simple as that. And I really love going from one film to another so that I can experiment and learn about different forms of music. I did the first film with Frédéric Back -- Illusion -- in '75, and there is a character who's the bad guy, who carries instruments on him. And Frédéric asked me to do something in the style of Stravinsky -- The Soldier's Story. And I thought, oh wow -- I really didn't know his work. So I went and bought some scores to analyze and listen to see what makes it sound like that. And from that analysis I wrote some music in the film that was in that style, with the odd bar structure and all that, and that was one of my first experiences having to do music that I knew nothing about and had to learn on the spot very fast. It's been a permanent, or constant, learning process, and that's one aspect of my work that I cherish the most.