Nigel Westlake smuggled a cathedral into a film about a pig

The biggest sound in Babe belongs to a French church organ that died in 1921. Nigel Westlake scored Chris Noonan’s 1995 film about a sheep-herding pig by reaching for Camille Saint-Saëns, specifically the Maestoso of the Symphony No. 3 in C minor, the one they call the Organ Symphony, and building the film’s emotional architecture out of it. The song the farmer sings to revive the dying piglet, “If I Had Words,” is that chorale theme with a lyric on top. The orchestral cues that lift the film into something close to the sublime are Westlake arranging and answering Saint-Saëns across the running time. A children’s film about a talking pig is carrying, in its bones, one of the grandest gestures in the nineteenth-century orchestral repertoire.

That is the joke and it is also the whole method. Westlake heard a story about the smallest possible hero, a pig who wants to do a dog’s job, and decided the correct scale for it was cathedral scale. The mismatch is the meaning. The music insists that the pig’s tiny ambition deserves the same harmonic grandeur a symphony spends on God, and because the music believes it, you believe it too.

The clarinettist’s ear

Westlake, born in 1958, did not arrive at film scoring through the usual conservatory-to-screen pipeline. He was a clarinettist first, a working player, and you can hear the woodwind logic in how he writes. His lines breathe in player-sized phrases. He understands the physical fact of an instrument, where the breath runs out, where a reed bites, the attack on a note and the way it decays into the room, and he writes for that physicality rather than against it.

It gives his orchestration a particular transparency. Even at full tilt, a Westlake cue tends to keep its individual voices legible; you can pick out the line a single instrument is carrying inside the mass. That clarity is why the Saint-Saëns gambit in Babe works instead of curdling into pastiche. He is not pasting a famous tune over a farm. He is taking the theme apart and redistributing it through an orchestra he knows how to balance from the inside.

A run of films that needed warmth without sugar

The scores that followed kept testing the same instinct, how to be large-hearted without going soft. Children of the Revolution in 1996, Miss Potter in 2006, Paper Planes in 2015, Ali’s Wedding in 2017: a varied list, comedy and biography and a kids’ film about a boy and a paper aeroplane, and the connective tissue is a composer who refuses to let sentiment off the leash. There is always a counterweight in the writing, a rhythmic spine or a harmonic tartness that keeps the tenderness honest.

Paper Planes is the clearest later case. A film about a country boy and a folded-paper obsession could have drowned in uplift. Westlake scores the flight of the planes with a lift that feels aerodynamic rather than emotional, the music doing the physics of the thing, air under a wing, before it does the feeling. The warmth arrives, but it is earned through motion first. He scores the verb before the adjective.

When the music had to carry the unbearable

In 2008 Westlake’s son Eli was killed, struck down in a road-rage incident at the age of 21. The work that came out of that loss is not a film score. It is Missa Solis: Requiem for Eli, a large concert setting premiered by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra at the Myer Music Bowl in February 2011, and it is the place where everything in his screen writing turns toward something it could only gesture at before.

I am wary of reading a life directly into a piece of music; it flattens both. But the Missa Solis makes the connection unavoidable, because the technique is continuous with the films and the subject is the one thing the films were always rehearsing. The same transparency of orchestration, the same refusal of cheap consolation, the same conviction that a large sound can hold a private grief without exploiting it. A separate later work, Compassion, written with the singer Lior and the Sydney Symphony, extended that voice into settings of Hebrew and Arabic texts. The man who put an organ symphony inside a pig film turned the same ear toward mourning and found it was the same ear.

Why he matters to the way we score

Australian film music has a recurring temptation, which is to let the landscape do the emotional work and have the orchestra simply underline it. Westlake almost never does this. His scores are built from musical ideas first, a theme that can be inverted, a rhythm that can be developed, the kind of material that holds up away from the picture, which is precisely why a Babe concert suite exists and gets programmed by symphony orchestras decades on.

That is the legacy worth naming. He scored the smallest stories at the largest scale and made the scale feel earned rather than borrowed, even when, as in Babe, it was literally borrowed. The cathedral he smuggled into a film about a pig was never a gag. It was an argument about how much feeling a small subject can bear, and Nigel Westlake has spent a career proving the answer is: more than you would think, if the orchestration is honest enough to carry it.