The Sound Of Music Interview: Mike Matessino On Creating The New Super Deluxe Edition Soundtrack

The Sound of Music, first released in 1965, is an iconic film that boasts one of the best-selling soundtracks of all time. Nearly 60 years later, the most definitive collection of the film’s music will be available for purchase in a Super Deluxe Edition by Craft Recordings. Releasing December 1st, The Sound of Music Super Deluxe Edition collects every musical element from the Rodgers & Hammerstein show-turned-movie including never-before-heard alternate takes of iconic songs, as well as the film score in its entirety. It comes complete with a Blu-Ray Audio disc that features the full score in high-resolution audio, as well as a new Dolby Atmos mix of the film’s original 16-track soundtrack.

The recordings in The Sound of Music Super Deluxe Edition have been meticulously restored from their original tapes by mixer, producer, and mastering engineer Mike Matessino. Matessino has worked with the film before, previously taking the best songs from The Sound of Music and incorporating them into other exciting collections before tackling this latest—and largest—release. Matessino has previously worked with the music of legendary composers including John Williams, James Horner, Alan Silvestri, Jerry Goldsmith, and Ennio Morricone.

Mike Matessino spoke with Screen Rant about preserving a cultural touchstone and why The Sound of Music is still relevant today. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Mike Matessino Talks The Sound Of Music Super Deluxe Edition Soundtrack

You’ve done quite a bit of work restoring and remixing soundtracks like this. How did you find your way into that in the first place; was it just from being a fan and also having this skill set?

Mike Matessino: I think everything started with being a fan, but it is actually The Sound of Music that is responsible for me getting into that field. In the early ‘90s, when I was doing some things for 20th Century Fox for what were really the first studio-produced special features, they asked me what I wanted to do next. I said, “How about you do something for The Sound of Music? It’s a big, and the 30th anniversary is coming up.” They said, “We think that’s great.” They connected me with Robert Wise, and that began a 10-year collaboration with him.

I was doing a lot of work for a documentary on The Sound of Music for the 30th anniversary. Halfway through it, I got a call from the home video department saying the music department was pulling the scoring masters for The Sound of Music as part of this ongoing music restoration that was getting going there. They asked if I would like to be part of that, and I said, “Sure.”

I went down to the lot, and I was handed a surgical mask like the ones we all wore a few years ago. I was taken into a room, I was hit with this smell of vinegar, and there were the 35-millimeter scoring master reels for The Sound of Music, turning on machines with little trays below them that were catching this dust that was a rust color. I was told, “The reel is shedding; they’re toxic. We’re recording them to backup tape because it’s a health hazard to even be around them.” That was a lightning bolt moment where I realized, “My God. Something like The Sound of Music, which is so important culturally, and so important to the studio as an asset, could disappear if things aren’t taken care of.” That kind of started the whole thing.

I did documentaries for a number of years, and I continued working with Robert Wise on various things culminating with the director’s edition of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but gradually my interest built in this whole area of restoring music and saving film and television music. We were spending a lot of money in those days and doing it in a way where my role was kind of advisory and we had to go with what we were hearing. Gradually, as I learned more and the technology improved, I started realizing that this would be much more efficient, much more cost-effective, and yield much better results if I learned to do this myself. So, I did.

I think it requires specially-tuned ears to how film and TV music is recorded versus pop music. The engineers and the technicians who work in that world are in a different headspace than the people who work in movie music, who really understand how these historic recordings were made, and how they were saved. My skill set and the technology both increased in parallel to the point where this just became my focus, and there’s never been a lack of work to do in it.

Technology has come so far in terms of what you’re able to do. There are even plugins that can separate tracks now. Where do you draw the line between updating the sound and keeping it true to what was originally recorded?

Mike Matessino: I like to say that there’s a thin line between distraction and destruction, and you have to find that little tightrope and walk right down the middle. My ultimate measuring stick — regardless of the sophistication of the technology — is that, at the end of the day, it has to hit me emotionally in the way that the people who created this material intended. That’s always the driving influence for me. If something’s bothering me and it needs to be to be addressed, it has to be because it increases the emotional impact and doesn’t take you out of it because of some technical problems.

The idea is to be as true as you can to what the original artists intended and wanted. If it’s things like dropouts because we had Scotch tape splices back in the day, and now you can smooth those over, that’s a good thing. The technology aids with that tremendously, we can cover up all the seams, and it becomes a polished whole that can then have no encumbrances on the emotional impact. At the end of the day, it always has to be about the emotional impact.

You have alternate takes and a lot of pieces of the score. Different versions of this soundtrack have been released over the years, but with all of the new things that no one’s heard before, what kind of state were those tapes in when you found them? Was there anything that couldn’t be included because it was too damaged, or anything like that?

Mike Matessino: No, I wrestled every alligator. It sometimes becomes a matter of principle where I’m just going to get something to bend to my will, and eventually, I will get it there. Nothing had to be dropped.

Everything, as I said, was backed up in 1994 to analog multi-track, and then all of that was run for me in 2015 when we had a couple of conversations about possibly doing something for the 50th anniversary; it could not be done that quickly and was not administratively able to be done at that time, so it waited until it did become possible. In those five or six years, the technological advancements that we’ve seen are incredible with regard to cleaning things up and addressing wow, flutter, dropouts, ticks and pops, and all that. It sort of benefited from the waiting time.

You’re getting multi-track performances, but this was still made decades ago. How were those tracks divided?

Mike Matessino: All of the vocals were absolutely clean because they were all done in an isolation booth; either with the orchestra playing outside — so you can kind of hear them muffled in the distance — or, in some cases, sections were re-recorded later, so the singer would be in the booth with headphones on and you might hear a tiny bit of orchestra bleed through that. But most of it is absolutely clean.

In some cases, I was able to compare what was on the film scoring masters to what was on the soundtrack album master, which did have some clean vocals. Occasionally, a word might have dropped out that I could then plug in with another source, so I really stitched the performance back together. But all of it was clean. Basically, the tracks were a six-channel orchestra and then sweetener tracks on top of that for various things. Sometimes there were up to nine tracks of orchestra, but it was all mixed with the standard process at the time for 70-millimeter six-track sound.

Was there anything interesting or special that you found as you were listening section by section or track by track?

Mike Matessino: That’s the beauty of this; you’d think you could get really jaded, but knowing the movie and this score inch-by-inch, as it were, I was surprised when I felt a renewed sense of awe at just how brilliant the music is; the orchestrations, what a genius Richard Rogers was, the team that was working at the 20th Century Fox scoring stage at that time, how technically amazing the recording was, and Irwin Kostal’s conducting and his arrangements.

And the sensitivity that went into what they did in the adaptation [was brilliant], with changing the key of something or changing the tempo a little bit versus the stage show. Every decision that was made that turned the movie into this fixed iconic thing that we’ve lived with. I gained a brand-new appreciation of it all over again. The fact that you can get that, even if you worked on something, deconstructed it, and reverse-engineered it all the way down to its inception, says something about just how good it is.

I love that you also have interviews and other pieces as a part of this, like the Richard Rogers interview. Where did those come from, and why did you want to include them?

Mike Matessino: As you pointed out, there were previous incarnations of the soundtrack over the years that came through Sony Music. I had to learn a new word in doing this project, “quinquennial”, which means something that happens every five years. Each of those 2005, 2010, and 2015 releases were variations; they were remasters of the album with cherry-picked tracks from the gold CD that I’d done in 1995 that was part of that 30th-anniversary package.

Every five years, the soundtrack would be reconstituted, but never really be what we always wanted it to be. Along the way, those interview tracks appeared on one release or another, so the idea here was to make sure it was comprehensive and that we didn’t really have to encounter anybody buying this who had to say, “I have to hold on to my 35th-anniversary edition, because it has that.” We wanted to make sure that everything was included in one package, and it was a one-stop shop for the whole deal.

You wrote the liner notes as well. Was there something that was especially important for you to convey?

Mike Matessino: I think what I enjoyed the most was taking the time to really explore the question of why this thing was so successful, and why it’s so enduring, and to present my thoughts about that. And I surprised myself a little bit with that when I started thinking about it. I was able to get some of that out, and I had the space in our Super Deluxe booklet to ponder each of the songs, how they came to be, when they were recorded, what they do for the narrative, and why they continue to be classics. So, the top thing for me would be exploring the power of the film itself, and why we still watch it, talk about it, and listen to it today.

I would love to hear [some of your thoughts].

Mike Matessino: There are a number of reasons why I think even people who don’t gravitate toward musicals are fine with this one. One of the reasons is that it is not entirely a musical, because the songs are all sung within the story. We’re told through dialogue that singing is going to take place; we don’t just accept the conventions of the genre, where we know it’s in this kind of alternate universe where music plays, and you can sing and think a character’s internal thoughts. I think that takes the edge off of it in a lot of ways, because we have many, many lines of dialogue warning us, for a minute or two, that singing is going to take place.

Then, there’s the fact that music itself is a motivating element in the story. Music itself actually changes people; it changes hearts, it creates a family, it has a power in itself. The power of the music itself is almost like a character in the movie. That’s universal, and is something that everybody can relate to.

The themes of the film are parents and children longing to be closer to each other, finding your purpose in life, and making a moral choice between keeping your soul and keeping your possessions. This is heavy material for a musical, yet there’s not a human being on the planet who can’t relate to it. That’s why it transcends all the language barriers, the cultural barriers, and the barriers of time, and that’s why it’s still relevant.

I further pointed out that it came out in the mid-60s. It’s very easy to say, “It was escapism, because of the civil rights movement and Vietnam; this was old Hollywood escapism.” It’s very easy to make that dismissal, but when I looked more closely at it, I thought, “What do you really have here? You have a tomboy with a bob haircut who goes around with a guitar, dresses children up in curtains, and helps their father dodge his draft.” I said, “This is kind of subversively topical in a way that I don’t think anybody thought of at the time.”

So, when you combine that with the universal themes, the fact that the awkwardness that sometimes comes with musicals isn’t present in this one, and incredible polish that the film has — the nuts and bolts of the filmmaking, and Julie’s presence, and all that — you really can’t go wrong. That’s why it’s this fixed thing in our collective consciousness that won’t ever go away. The screenwriter told me that he thinks that people will be watching this movie in 1,000 years — and I think he’s right.

About The Sound Of Music

The Sound of Music is a musical movie adaptation of the stage play from 1959, which tells the story of the Trapp Family Singers. The classic 1965 musical follows Maria, a young woman who becomes the governess for a family of seven children in Austria just before World War II. It features beloved songs such as “Do-Re-Mi” and “My Favorite Things”.

The Sound of Music Super Deluxe Edition will be released on December 1st, and can be purchased via the Craft Recordings website.