At times, the eagle eyed film enthusiast could be forgiven for thinking that there were about four composers scoring high profile films. Hans Zimmer scored five films last year, and four films this year. Alexandre Desplat managed six in 2013, and five in 2014, while Christophe Beck topped both with seven last year, and six in 2014. Once you're in demand, you're really in demand, and the top tier of movies is very much dominated by established figures to the extent that up-and-comers must feel that it's impossible to break through.
But break through they continue to do, and there's a steady stream of exciting musical talent composing terrific work, mostly through the indie world, ensuring that new movies sound as fresh as they look. To pick up our ongoing On The Rise series of ascending stars, which started last week with cinematographers, we've picked out a dozen young composers who've tickled our eardrums in the last year or so. In 2013, one of our picks, Steven Price, went on to win the Academy Award for "Gravity," so we're certainly expecting big things from this year's graduates in the next twelve months or so. You can take a look, and a listen, at our choices below.Devonte Hynes
Watching the hotly-tipped dance-punk/hip-hop/thrash band
Test Icicles, a group only marginally better than their name, back in 2005, a number of things went through our head. None of them were
"less than a decade from now, one of the guys in this band will be scoring a film by a member of the Coppola family." And yet when Devonte Hynes wrote the excellent soundtrack to Gia Coppola's
"Palo Alto" last year, that's exactly what happened. When the band split in 2006, Hynes, who was born in Texas but raised in East London, commented,
"We were never, ever that keen on the music. I understand that people liked it, but we personally didn't." And his dizzylingly diverse subsequent career has backed that up: his first post-Test Icicles project, under the name
Lightspeed Champion, was a lovely country-rock record featuring a number of Bright Eyes collaborators. Another followed in 2010, before two more as another incarnation,
Blood Orange, which went in a slightly more electronic-tinged direction (last year's
Cupid Deluxe is his best work to date). But he was enormously busy beyond that as a songwriter for hire, racking up credits for
Florence And The Machine, The Chemical Brothers, some unused
Britney Spears tracks, and perhaps most notably, for his friend
Solange Knowles, sister of
Beyoncé: their collaboration
"Losing You" is one of the best pop songs in recent memory. Until last year, his major contribution to the soundtrack world had been duetting with
Kristen Wiig on the end-credits song for
"MacGruber," but
Gia Coppola was a fan of Hynes' eariler records, and sought him out when making her first feature, a dreamy adaptation of
James Franco's short story collection. Hynes' woozy, hugely atmospheric work, reminiscent of Air's work on auntie Sofia's debut
"The Virgin Suicides" while beating out its own chilly, industrial path, is one of the best elements of the film, and we can only hope there's more to come from him in the movie world.
Mica Levi
Last time
Jonathan Glazer made a film —2004's fascinating, beguiling
"Birth"— it came complete with maybe the finest score of the decade, via
Alexandre Desplat's unforgettable work. So hopes were high when Glazer returned nine years later with
"Under The Skin," but rather than reteaming with the ever-busy Desplat, or finding another A-list composer to work with,
he instead gave the job to a then-25-year-old first-time film composer named Mica Levi. But there was no reason to doubt the resuts, as Levi knocked it out of the park. Classically trained at London's Guildhall (one of her pieces was performed by the London Philarmonic Orchestra in 2008), Levi actually came to fame first as a DJ, through a mixtape known as
Filthy Friends, then as the frontwoman of indie-pop band
Micachu And The Shapes, whose 2009 record
Jewellery was one of the most acclaimed of that year. The band's 2011 follow-up
Chopped & Screwed, which rearranged the first album as a live collaboration with the London Sinfonietta, was brought to Glazer's attention by his music supervisor, and Levi came on board the film in April 2012, spending nearly a year working on her compositions. Written and recorded principally on viola, rather than the home-made instruments of the Micachu & The Shapes records, and influenced by
Iannis Xenaxis, John Cage, and, in her words,
"strip-club music and euphoric dance" it's astonishing stuff: otherworldly and strangely alluring, like the film itself. It's hardly hummable, with Levi telling The Guardian,
"If your lifeforce is being distilled by an alien, it's not necessarily going to sound very nice. It's supposed to be physical, alarming, hot." The composer messed with the pitch and tone of what she wrote,
"perverting material," as she calls it, to create a finished product that's just as responsible for the film's nervy, agitated, unshakable tone as Glazer and DP Daniel Landin's haunted imagery. As yet, there's no news of Levi taking on another film project, but she just performed the score live alongside the film in London, and we hope there'll be plenty more to come along these lines.
Kathryn Bostic
At the moment,
Kathryn Bostic feels like a well-kept secret, familiar only to serious jazz heads or those immersed in the American theater scene, but if she carries on in the film world the way she has been, she's likely to break out in a very big way before too long. New York-born Bostic took up the piano at three and has carved out an impressive career as a vocalist and pianist in adulthood, working with the likes of
David Byrne, Nas and Ryuichi Sakamoto, and releasing a self-produced CD of her own songs,
From Me To You. She got her start composing in the theater world, turning heads after working with
August Wilson on the legendary writer's penultimate play,
"Gem Of The Ocean," which premiered only two years before the author's passing. She's worked consistently in theater since, including two plays by
"The Walking Dead" star
Danai Gurira, and writing some acclaimed music for the Broadway production of
Rajiv Joseph's Pulitzer Prize-winning
"Bengal Tiger At The Baghdad Zoo," which starred the late
Robin Williams. On screen, she started working in documentary in the early '00s, but it was her relationship with director
Ava DuVernay that brought her to more attention in the film world. They worked together on DuVernay's debut feature
"I Will Follow," and reteamed for her ESPN doc
"Venus Vs," in addition to the filmmaker's breakout
"Middle Of Nowhere," the latter of which is a subtle, understated score that along with the careful direction and excellent performances, go a long way to keeping the film far away from melodrama. Most recently, she scored documentary
"The New Black," and more notably,
Justin Simeon's Sundance smash "Dear White People," lending a diverse mix of classical, hip-hop and jazz that perfectly encapsulates the film's subject matter. There's no word yet as to whether she's working again with DuVernay on her Oscar-touted
"Selma," but if she is (and we certainly hope so), expect her to be much better known by this time next year.
Jozef Van Wissem
Ever since his debut film, few directors have had such an effortless ability to match music to image as
Jim Jarmusch, from
Tom Waits and
John Lurie in
"Down By Law" through
RZA's score to "Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai," to the Boris-tastic soundtrack to
"The Limits Of Control." But
"Only Lovers Left Alive" isn't just one of Jarmusch's best films; It's one of his most sonically pleasing, and much of that is down to the score by
Jozef Van Wissem. The Dutch avant-garde composer and lute-player studied under the legendary musician
Patrick O"Brien (who passed away last month) and has been a prolific solo artist, whose jobs include being commissioned to write a piece to accompany
Hans Holbein's painting "The Ambassadors," and scoring the video game
"The Sims Medieval." He and Jarmusch met in Brooklyn in 2006, became fast friends, and Jarmusch immediately earmarked him for a vampire-themed project he'd been mulling over for years. While the film was developing,
the pair recorded two albums together, 2011's Concerning The Entrance Into Eternity and 2012's The Mystery Of Heaven (the latter of which features
"Only Lovers Left Alive" star
Tilda Swinton on guest vocals), before the movie got made, and premiered at Cannes 2013, where
Van Wissem won the soundtrack award. The film's infused with music:
Jack White is discussed, and
Tom Hiddleston's character is a musician who collects vintage guitars. Van Wissem's medieval tracks might initially seem an incongruous fit with the drone-rock of Jarmusch's band
SQURL that appears frequently in the film, but the clash between past and present is a key theme of
"Only Lovers Left Alive," and somehow the Dutch composer's beguilingly out-of-time pieces work beautifully, going a huge way towards creating the film's uniquely dream-like tone.
Van Wissem seems to have got the taste for film composition since; he's working on several other projects, including upcoming indie
"Red Right Return."Rich Vreeland
More than one A-list composer has already made their way up from scoring video games to music:
J.J Abrams and Pixar favorite
Michael Giachinno, arguably the most in-demand scorer right now, broke through thanks to the
"Medal Of Honor" game series, which landed him gigs on
"Alias" and
"Lost."Rich Vreeland, whose score for
David Robert Mitchell's much buzzed-about Cannes horror
"It Follows" is one of the standouts of 2014 so far, came up a similar but slightly different route.
Vreeland was a nu-metal fan growing up (presumably the name of his alter-ego,
Disasterpeace, is a reference to the Slipknot song) before studying at the Berklee College Of Music. The Boston native and huge video game fan then got an internship to the Singapore-MIT Game Lab, which started him down the path to scoring games. He worked on indie puzzle games
"Waker" and
"Woosh," and on the franchise game
"Bomberman Live; Battlefest," but he's best known for his seminal score to the 2012 underdog platform game
"Fez," one of the most lauded video games in recent years. 80s chiptune influenced, but cunningly distorted and melded with warmer synth noises, Chopin and guitar, it's something of a classic of the medium, to the extent that one of its cuts was recorded by the London Philarmonic for a compilation album (listen below), and Vreeland has performed the score live in its entirety.
"The Myth Of The American Sleepover" director
Mitchell was a fan of the game, and asked Vreeland (who's continued to work in games and commercials) to work on the soundtrack to his second feature, the ingenious teen horror
"It Follows." The result is an intrinsic part of the film. Taking up the current trend of Carpenter-inspired synth scores and running with it, the score (recorded in only three weeks) has as much Cage as Carpenter therein, and is capable of being overpoweringly abrasive as well as slinkily ominous. The film wouldn't work nearly as well without it (
"more arthouse than grindhouse," as our review said), and once more people catch up to
"It Follows," which will be screening at TIFF, Mitchell should be a very hot ticket.
Rest at
source.
What's your favorite soundtrack or film composer, ONTD?