Film composer Isham follows his destiny to fantasy series
He was one of the original recording artists for the 1980s new age music label Windham Hill. As a child growing up in New York City, he was captivated by the music of Miles Davis, and learned to play the flugelhorn at a young age. He won a Grammy Award for his self- titled album Mark Isham in 1990, and went on to score the background music for the feature films Never Cry Wolf, Alan Rudolph’s The Moderns, Carroll Ballard’s Fly Away Home, Michael Apted’s Nell, Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs, Jodie Foster’s Little Man Tate and, for London, Ont. filmmaker Paul Haggis, the Oscar- winning Crash and In the Valley of Elah.
He was nominated for an Academy Award for his film score for Redford’s A River Runs Through It. He has scored the background music for 10 feature films in the last three years, including Fame, Crossing Over, Dolphin Tale and The Secret Life of Bees.
The last thing Mark Isham expected, or wanted, was to commit himself to the onerous task of scoring the background music for a full- blown TV series, with its demands and time constraints. The rigours of juggling a film career and jazz tours with a TV series — 22 hour- long episodes over an eight- month period — can wear on any composer. Many film composers compose the title themes of hit TV shows, but relatively few commit to the actual series itself.
When Isham saw early, unfinished scenes of Once Upon a Time, though, the heady, intoxicating fantasy drama about fairy tale characters trapped in a timeless limbo between their fairy tale pasts and a presentday small town in New England, he was floored.
Once Upon a Time, with its larger- than- life characters and themes of love, loss and longing touched a nerve in Isham, a nerve he hadn’t felt since the early 1990s, when he penned the background music for a series of children’s albums, Rabbit Ears Storybook Classics, children’s’ tales narrated by such film luminaries as Susan Sarandon, Kelly Mcgillis, John Gielgud, Glenn Close, William Hurt and Jeremy Irons.
Isham considers the music for those albums — The Steadfast Tin Soldier, Thumbelina, The Emperor and the Nightingale, The Boy Who Drew Cats and more — to be among his finest work. The makers of Once Upon a Time could not know it, but the moment Isham saw Once Upon a Time’s impressionistic tale of an ill- fated princess, a charming prince and a curse designed to keep them forever apart, he saw his own music destiny.
Once Upon a Time, a modernday fairy tale created by Lost writers Ed Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, is network television’s most- watched new drama, and is now airing overseas.
An extended play album of four tracks of Isham’s music has just been released on the U. S. itunes service and at ABC. com; a full- length album will be released later this spring, in Canada as well as the U. S. Once Upon a Time debuted last October on a wing and a prayer, but now looks as if it will be around for a long time.
Isham is fine with that, he said on the phone from his Los Angeles studio, even if it cuts into his touring schedule and film work. Isham was last in Vancouver, home of Once Upon a Time’s set, for the Vancouver Jazz Festival, but ironically has never been on the series’ set.
“Vancouver has a vibrant music scene, and I’ve always enjoyed playing there,” he said. “It’s always struck me as being more of a European city, with the influences of different languages and cultures, especially for someone like me, who spends so much time in Southern California. I’ve always enjoyed going there. I’ve never been to the set, though.”
Isham composes the music for Once Upon a Time from his studio in Los Angeles. He taps his imagination to fill in the emotional blanks, much as he did with Storybook Classics.
“These are iconic images driving all these stories. There’s real power there. It goes back to the basics of storytelling and the first stories we all learned as children.”
Isham was aware, when he agreed to take on the job, that the odds were stacked against Once Upon a Time’s survival. Few new series succeed, even fewer become hits.
He didn’t mind, though. The story, and the way Once Upon a Time creators Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz told that story, was all that mattered to him.
“I long ago gave up trying to predict popular tastes,” Isham said.
“I stopped thinking about whether something would be a success or not. I know that when I read the script, I thought, ‘ Well, even if people decide they don’t want to watch it, even if it falls apart and goes down and is not as successful as we’d all like it to be, at least I will have taken on this challenge and tested myself and seen what I can do to make this as good as I possibly can.’ It’s all about risk taking.
“And quite frankly, I knew that Ed and Adam had been a big part of Lost. And Lost succeeded, despite the risks. For me, the challenge alone made it worthwhile. But then, when I saw what Ed and Adam came up with, and when I see what comes out from the actors and writers every week, it makes my task easy.”
Once Upon a Time airs Sundays on CTV at 7 ET/ PT, ABC at 8 ET/ PT. It returns March 4, following this weekend’s pre- emption for the Academy Awards.