The Academy music branch has expanded its Oscar original-score shortlist from 15 to 20 films this year, widening the field of potential nominees in a year of varied approaches and soundscapes.
Composer Kris Bowers already has an Oscar, but it’s not for music; it’s for producing the 2023 documentary short subject “The Last Repair Shop.” His best shot yet for music awards is “The Wild Robot,” about a machine that becomes mother to an orphaned gosling on an island without human inhabitants.
Director Chris Sanders “wanted the music to really be an emotional voice in the story, like another character,” Bowers says. He decided on an orchestral score because “the earthiness of that location required having organic sounds.”
The main theme, representing the island and the idea of family, plays during the film’s migration sequence. There are also themes for Roz the robot, Brightbill the goose and Fink the fox. Also, for the island scenes, he enlisted Sandbox Percussion, a New York quartet of players who make unusual sounds with unconventional instruments.
Last year’s Oscar winner, German composer Volker Bertelmann, reunited with his “All Quiet on the Western Front” director Edward Berger for “Conclave,” a thriller about Vatican intrigue in choosing a new Pope.
Bertelmann quickly discarded more conventional notions of church music like organ and choir in favor of a string ensemble and the Cristal Baschet, whose eerie sound is made by rubbing tuned glass rods with wet fingers. “I needed something that was ethereal, had a spiritual space, but also sounded modern,” the composer says. “It can be beautifully clear and pristine and fragile.”
He uses orchestral sounds, including prepared piano, but the film’s more intense moments are accompanied by what he calls “tension music,” often played by cellos and contrabasses creating “lightning eruptions” and adding “explosive elements” to a story with multiple twists and turns.
For “The Room Next Door,” his 14th collaboration with director Pedro Almodovar, Spanish composer Alberto Iglesias saw the story of dying writer Martha (Tilda Swinton) and best friend Ingrid (Julianne Moore) as “a journey into the light rather than the dark.
“Lights and shadows and moments of dubious light follow each other, leading to the gradual discovery of the supreme value of friendship,” he adds. “The reflection of these powerful truths is delicately portrayed in the music.” Iglesias spent four months writing an hour-long, classically styled score for the film.
Tamar-kali (“Mudbound”) supplied an energetic score for “The Fire Inside” based on the true story of Olympic boxer Claressa Shields. “One thing that I landed on was this space where orchestral and hip-hop meet,” says the composer. “I felt that rhythm and percussion were very important because rhythm, pace, timing are all very integral elements in boxing.”
The score ranges from intimate and contemplative, with a chamber-sized group of strings, to bigger and more epic for the Olympic scenes. Director Rachel Morrison “wanted something that was not typical, not bombastic,” Tamar-kali says.
The opening scenes, of a 10-year-old girl training on the streets of Flint, Mich., were scored with a small women’s choir. “Even then, she was like an army of one,” says the composer. “That’s why I wanted those voices, because this one little child had the spirit of many.”
Andrea Datzman became the first woman composer on a Pixar feature: “Inside Out 2,” which went on to become one of the year’s biggest box-office hits. She drew on her own life experience for teenager Riley, she says: “that chord progression really came deep from my teenage years, the piano rock that I liked then, and the moody coffee-shop stuff that I was really into.”
The challenge was scoring three different worlds: “what’s going on in Headquarters, with (new emotions) Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment and Ennui; what’s going on in Riley’s world; and then what’s going on with our ‘away team’ of Joy, Fear, Anger, Sadness and Disgust.”
Datzman’s own studies of neuropsychology came in handy, especially when writing music for Riley’s panic attack. “I wanted it to sound like the brain was shorting out like a live wire flying around: messages distorted, all that overload. For that alarm, I took a solo violin and ran it through about six or eight different processors.”
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