Film music becomes a main character
Movies moving to more modern sound thanks to influx of young composers
Film music is only a little more than 100 years old, but new blood is beginning to course.
Oscar-winner Justin Hurwitz is only 32 — and La La Land was his third score for a feature film. Mica Levi, 30, was nominated for her second feature, Jackie. Moonlight composer Nicholas Britell, 36, scored his first major film in 2015.
Film music is often disparaged as emotional wallpaper, but Levi’s in-your-face, jarring and queasy scores are main characters.
This new wave of composers is emerging partly thanks to young filmmakers entering the field, often looking to their peers for easy collegiality. Hurwitz and director Damien Chazelle went to Harvard, where they played in a band together. That dorm-room rapport contributed to their first collaboration, the musical Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, and to their work on Whiplash and La La Land.
Britell was a producer on the Whiplash short that preceded Chazelle’s feature, and he even worked on an early La La Land song that didn’t make the cut. The composer studied to be a concert pianist but instead went to Harvard to study psychology. There, he joined a hip-hop band and made beats on a daily basis.
Britell favours intimacy and tactility — just right for Barry Jenkins’s Oscar-winning Moonlight. The composer wrote a fragile violin poem for the young protagonist, which grew deeper in sound as the character grows older. He applied the southern hip-hop tactic of “chopped and screwed” to slow the music down.
“It was a beautiful thing,” Jenkins said. “I was speaking in a language, and Nick was speaking in another language, but we were saying the same thing quite often.”
The blockbuster category is still dominated by Hollywood’s old guard. Hans Zimmer, 59, just scored Dunkirk; Danny Elfman, 64, is working on Justice League. Alan Silvestri, 67, has Steven Spielberg ’s Ready Player One and Avengers: Infinity War on his plate. John Williams, 85, is working on the next Star Wars. Michael Giacchino is the youngest genre king at 49, and he brings an old-school, classical Hollywood approach to almost every major franchise, from J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek films to SpiderMan: Homecoming.
In the beginning, film music was written by concert composers. Then avant-garde vocabulary began to sneak in. Jazz trickled in during the 1950s and ’60s. Then came the bombastic sound of Zimmer, who left an ocean full of imitations in his wake. Which makes the recent influx of individualistic newcomers so welcome.
There’s still a lack of women and people of colour, but with broadening concepts and new approaches it may be only a matter of time.