Super Woman
But composer Pinar Toprak hopes that the novelty of a woman scoring a superhero movie will soon vanish
“Captain Marvel” composer Pinar Toprak breaks new ground for femmes
with the march 8 opening of “Captain Marvel,” composer Pinar Toprak becomes the first woman to score a Marvel superhero movie — possibly the most high-profile accomplishment yet for a female in a notoriously male- dominated profession.
But the Turkish-born musician isn’t interested in gender comparisons. “No man was ever asked, ‘Do you think you got this action film because of your gender?’” she says. “I hope it’s a question that’s not going to be asked in the near future, or ever again. This is going to be the norm. I never had a day in my life when I wasn’t a woman or a composer. Those were who I am from the start.”
Co- director Anna Boden notes, “It’s no secret that both we and Marvel care about trying to be proactive in terms of hiring more women,” while her colleague, codirector Ryan Fleck, points out that the filmmakers did not limit the employment pool. “We weren’t just considering women,” he says. “We just decided that Pinar was our favorite.”
In fact, Toprak’s music soars and thrills like that of previous Marvel movies. Also, in a rarity for many modern scores, audiences leave the theater humming her catchy theme for the title character, played by Brie Larson.
“She’s one of the most powerful beings in the universe, but she’s also very human,” Toprak says of her inspiration for the theme. “Emotions don’t take away from her strength. She’s strong yet sensitive. I wanted to hear the humanity instilled in the hero.”
Yet that’s only one aspect of a 100-minute score that needed to identify characters, drive the action and suggest time and place. Toprak worked for five months to craft a score that would also musically define the Kree and Skrull races, whose centuries-long interstellar war forms the backdrop of the story.
The result, Toprak explains, is a hybrid orchestra-plus- electronics score. “We wanted a cosmic sound, and then we very much had 1990s Earth,” she says. Working in her home studio, she manufactured colorful analog-synthesizer sounds for the aliens. But it was a 90-piece orchestra recorded at London’s Abbey Road Studios that played her heroic theme and provided the foundation for most of the score.
Adding spice is the occasional sound of an electric guitar. “We really loved that idea for Fury,” she says, referring to SHIELD agent Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), Captain Marvel’s Earth-based partner during the adventure. “It was very much a