Composing Star Wars music!

Having scored all of the recent large-scale Star Wars video games, Gordy Haab is a master of the musical Star Wars universe. So after Star Wars Battlefront was announced, it was a thrill when he invited me to collaborate with him on a portion of the score: composing music for the new planet Jakku.

What makes Jakku particularly interesting in this case, is that it's a new planet not yet seen in any of the films or shows - it will be part of the forthcoming Star Wars Episode VII film.  As such, it turns out that Gordy's and my work is the first music ever heard for this new planet, even before the great maestro John Williams himself.  The London Symphony Orchestra absolutely hit the recording out of the park, as they have on all of the films (and numerous games) so far.  As a lifelong Star Wars geek, that all feels pretty cool.

A happy epilogue to my SWBF experience: it also led to me being hired as one of the composers for Star Wars Old Republic: Knights of the Fallen Empire.  This is a PC-only game, with a highly dedicated fan base and active player community.  It's been an absolute pleasure to hear from some of them how much they're enjoying the game, and the music.  Something as iconic as Star Wars is always to be handled with care and respect, and I'm honored to have played even the smallest role in people's enjoyment of this universe. 

Marvel Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Penny Dreadful wrap their scoring seasons

Marvel Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Penny Dreadful have both wrapped scoring for their second seasons.  I was privileged to perform orchestration duties on every episode of both shows this season; each show scored with a live orchestra every episode.  S.H.I.E.L.D. has finished airing all its episodes for the year, but it has been renewed for Season 3 by ABC! Penny Dreadful is in the middle of its run on Showtime, (we score further in advance for this one,) so there are still a number of Season 2 episodes to air.

Jonathan discusses composing the score for Manny In Real Life

Here's a brief video discussing my scoring process for Manny In Real Life - a 10-part series created by Salvador Paniagua (now viewable online at mannyinreallife.com).  You also get a rare chance to hear me messing around on my first and still favorite instrument - the cello - in my project studio at home, where the video was taken.  I played all the cello solos on the first season, which was such a blast to both compose and play for!

Run All Night released worldwide

Run All Night, starring Liam Neeson and Ed Harris, arrives in theaters today.  The film features a fantastic hybrid score composed by Junkie XL, orchestrated by Henri Wilkinson, Edward Trybek, and Jonathan Beard.  Music preparation by Jack Ryan Music.

A few notes from Jonathan:

One of the wonderful elements of working with Tom Holkenborg, a.k.a. Junkie XL, is observing his intense attention to timbre and sonic color.  Tom insists on mixing his own scores, and if he wasn't a world-famous and respected composer/artist, he could easily be known as a world-class mixing engineer.  This is the fourth project I've worked on with Tom, and his attention to sonic detail - at all stages of the score creation process - is impeccable.  In regards to instrumentation, he made a prescient choice on this film to use a large and powerful low brass section, including eight trombones and no tubas.  Of the eight trombones, four were originally intended to to be bass trombones, but we made a late orchestration choice to substitute two of them for contrabass trombones.  The CbTbn. is a rarer instrument, with its own remarkable power and and almost "bright" presence at extremely low pitches.  For the grittiness of the the Run All Night score, it ended up being perfect - with more edge to the sound than Tubas would have had, and more low power to supplement the higher bass trombones.  (Higher bass trombones? That's not a sentence you write every day!)  When combined with a french horn section twelve players strong, the depth and power of the brass as a whole was something special to both to hear and feel.

2014 In Review

With each new year, we always get a slew of “update” emails and newsletters, right?  But with that said - especially as the calendar is starting to fill up already for the new year - I do find it to be a valuable exercise to take a few minutes, breathe, and chronologically catalogue the creative work of my previous twelve months.  (If nothing else, it helps to remind me why I’ve been tired!)  Maybe that’s why we send out these letters. On that note, here is a seasonal summary of what kept my wheels turning this last year.  Happy 2015!

Winter ‘14

2014 began with a whirlwind of activity, two days early in fact.  On December 30, I sat down with director Stewart Schill, my music editor Denise Slenski, and music consultant Weslie Brown, to re-spot Frank vs. God - Stewart’s wonderful new feature that I had just signed on over the holidays to score in January. After an 8-hour marathon spotting session, composition commenced on New Years Day.  We would be done with the entire score - about 70 minutes of music in all - by the end of the month.  Around the same time, final rehearsals were happening for the Los Angeles Master Chorale Oratorio Project performance of Frankenstein: Of Monsters And Men -  which played to capacity audiences in February.  I was also honored to be asked by the Stanford Alumni Association to do an interactive workshop on Film Music, as part of their “Stanford Connects” program in Los Angeles.  (The workshop was sponsored by the Stanford In Entertainment alumni group, an organization for which I’m a board member.)  The workshop was a great success and a lot of fun, as other (mostly non-music) creative professionals learned about the history of music in film, and also got a chance to tackle scoring an iconic scene themselves - in creative, collaborative ways.  (Let’s just say that trash cans and staplers were involved!)  I wrapped up the winter with a wonderful trip to San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference in March - always a whirlwind experience.  It was nice to hang out and catch up with old friends in my favorite city, while making new ones as well.

Spring ‘14

With Spring came some wonderful non-composition opportunities: working with now Grammy-nominated conductor and lutenist Stephen Stubbs and the UCLA Early Music Ensemble on a new production of Handel’s L’Allegro; being invited by the Los Angeles Philharmonic to do a local performance “tour” to more than a dozen of their partner schools across LA County; again joining the lecture faculty at the Herb Alpert School of Music at UCLA; and orchestrating on numerous projects - including Marvel Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. on ABC, composed by friend and mentor Bear McCreary.  By the end of May however, composing responsibilities were heating up again, which leads us to…

Summer ‘14

After delivering the score for a powerful documentary film called Persephone Speaks: The Forgotten Women Of Bosnia - again with a tight turnaround - my plan was to escape to San Francisco for a while to work on Cesare - my original Dr. Caligari opera.  However, this plan needed to be adjusted when my friend Jodie Landau presented a gift too wonderful to pass up: the request to compose an original piece for himself, acclaimed Icelandic women’s choir Graduale Nobili, and fast-becoming-iconic LA new-music group wild Up - for a joint collaborative concert that they would be doing in Iceland at the end of the Summer.  Recording sessions of the program followed, produced by acclaimed producer Valgeir Sigurosson in Reykjavik.  (But not to worry - I still made good progress on the opera as well!)  I also began composition on the score for the wonderful 10-short-episode series Manny In Real Life - which just wrapped up right at the end of 2014.  The score includes jangly guitars, mandolin, cello, marimba, and assorted percussion, as well as other wacky instruments from around my studio. (Any project where I get to play that weird clarinet/saxophone/recorder hybrid instrument I bought on Venice Beach, is a good project in my book!)

Fall ’14

Finally, the last quarter of the year brought a wealth of creative opportunities for which I’m eternally grateful.  First, I was officially named Composer-In-Residence at the Sierra Madre Playhouse, and immediately commenced on my original theater score for the west coast premiere of Amy Herzog’s acclaimed 4,000 Miles.  It is always a pleasure to work with director Christian Lebano, and this production was no exception.  But the SMP news didn’t end there: we received word that my work for the previous season’s Driving Miss Daisy production had been nominated for an NAACP Theatre Award - an unexpected honor!  (The awards ceremony was in November - see previous post.)  I then commenced with collaboration on another oratorio for the Los Angeles Master Chorale Oratorio Project, The Passion of Anne Frank.  I finished the final score to this eleven-movement piece in December, and it will debut in a series of special concerts on January 22/23, 2015.  I can unabashedly say that it has been one of the most artistically meaningful works I’ve ever been a part of.  (I hope to write more about it soon.)  My orchestration plate has stayed full as well, including the second season of S.H.I.E.L.D. and NBC’s new show Constantine.  Last but not least, 2014 came full circle with an invitation late in the year from the Academy of Scoring Arts to do a panel - along with director Stewart Schill, and members of my music team Edward Trybek and Denise Slenski - on the creation of the score to Frank vs. God…which had of course been my very first project of 2014.  A fitting end to a full - and immensely fulfilling - creative year.

May 2015 be a year of health and happiness for us all!  Happy New Year.