Composer John Williams turns 93 on Feb. 8. To celebrate, enjoy an encore of a special Minnesota Orchestra concert in tribute to the iconic composer. And Saturday Cinema host Lynne Warfel has compiled the Ultimate John Williams Playlist for your pleasure. Listen now!

Minnesota Orchestra pays tribute

In early November, the Minnesota Orchestra performed a concert under the direction of Sarah Hicks to celebrate the music of Williams. Listen to an encore of this special event, with hosts Melissa Ousley and Lynne Warfel, by using the player above. (This on-demand audio will be available until March 8.)

Playlist

• Superman: March

• Jurassic Park: Theme

• Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark: “Marion’s Theme”

• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone: “Hedwig’s Theme”

• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: “Scherzo for Motorcycle”

• Hook: “Flight to Neverland”

• Far and Away: Suite

• Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back: “Imperial March”

• E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial: “Adventures on Earth”

• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: “Fawkes the Phoenix”

• Jaws: Theme

• Across the Stars

• Star Wars: The Force Awakens: “Jedi Steps and Finale”

• Bonus: Violin Concerto: Movements 2 and 3 — performed by James Ehnes and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Stéphane Denève (Pentatone 5187148)

Ultimate John Williams Playlist: On the Rise (1950s-60s)

During his stint in a U.S. Air Force Band stationed in Newfoundland in the early 1950s, Johnny Williams, as he was called then, got his first film gig doing music for You Are Welcome, a German company's documentary on the maritime provinces. After his discharge, he returned home to Los Angeles, studied with Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, went to Julliard and studied piano with Rosina Lhévinne. In fact, he began professionally as a studio pianist working under distinguished musicians such as Henry Mancini, Alfred Newman, Elmer Bernstein and Andre Previn, whom he credits as his mentor.

One of those associations led to his breakthrough as the pianist on Mancini's immortal theme to Peter Gunn. He went on to play piano on the opening of the Main Theme of To Kill a Mockingbird and more.  

An association with prominent producer Irwin Allen led to his hiring as the composer for the TV shows Lost in Space, Time Tunnel and Land of the Giants. Allen went on to hire Williams for some of his big-budget disaster films in the late 1960s:  Earthquake, The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure.

Williams considered his first big break with a big-time director to be How to Steal a Million for legendary filmmaker William Wyler.

His mentoring by Previn led to his collaboration with Andre and Dory Previn on Valley of the Dolls, for which he received his first Oscar nomination.

The Reivers, with Steve McQueen, and the John Wayne offbeat western The Cowboys solidified his reputation in Hollywood, and it also got the attention of a young hopeful named Steven Spielberg. Spielberg, a self-proclaimed movie-score nerd says that when he heard both those scores, he decided that whenever he got his big break, he was "going to hire this John Williams guy." And so he did.

Playlist

• Peter Gunn: Theme

• Lost in Space: Theme (Season 3)

• Time Tunnel: Theme

• How to Steal a Million: Theme

• Valley of the Dolls: Theme

• The Poseidon Adventure: Main Title

• The Towering Inferno: Main Title

• The Reivers: Main Title

• The Cowboys: Overture

Ultimate John Williams Playlist: With Spielberg

Cut to the scene where Spielberg has his first major film in preproduction, Sugarland Express. He schedules a Beverly Hills lunch with Williams, who by now is well-established in L.A. Still enamored with Williams' music for The Reivers, The Cowboys and also a modernist score that Williams did for director Robert Altman’s Images — Williams said that if he had not entered into big orchestral film composition, he might have leaned more toward composing concert hall works in that same modernist style — they sit down to chat.

At that now-historic lunch,  Williams was stunned by Spielberg's youth but impressed by his expertise and passion for classic film scores by the likes of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Miklós Rózsa and Franz Waxman. He also knew a lot about Williams' music. Williams said he felt as if Spielberg knew his music better than he did. He agreed to do Sugarland Express, and one of Hollywood's greatest composer-director partnerships was born.

Williams proceeded to give Spielberg a highly unusual score for Sugarland Express, a small-scale, intimate score using jazz harmonica player Toots Thielemans. Chris Martin of the rock band Coldplay said in the documentary Music by John Williams that "when Johnny and Steven get together, they are a band,” meaning they work symbiotically to tell the story. 

In that same documentary, Spielberg says, "There have been many times when I change the way I see my own film because of what Johnny has written. Sometimes, I start seeing my film the way he sees it."

It's unusual and noteworthy that three pieces by Williams made the Billboard charts in the 1970s: the Main Theme from Jaws in 1975, the Main Theme from Star Wars in 1977 and the Main Theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1978. A humble, self-effacing, classy and quiet man, Williams says he isn't happy 100 percent with any of his scores in their entirety but that he is proud of Close Encounters.

Spielberg has, as you might expect, many stories of his collaborations with Williams, but memorable ones include:

• When Spielberg came to Williams' house to hear sketches of the score to Jaws, Williams sat at his old Steinway piano and played the opening two repetitive notes on the far reaches of the lowest octave of the keyboard. Spielberg was bemused, listened a bit longer, then looking perplexed, laughed and said, "What are ya gonna do with that, Johnny?" Apparently, he thought the whole score of the opening scene was going to be those now-famous notes only on solo piano.

• When Williams presented Spielberg with the first draft of the Main Theme to Schindler's List, Kate Capshaw, Spielberg's wife, was present. Williams played the opening bars on that same piano. Capshaw said she looked over and her husband was in tears, as was she — and, eventually, Williams. Itzhak Perlman, who played on the soundtrack, said that theme is the most requested music when he tours around the world.

Playlist

• Sugarland Express: Theme

• Jaws: Main Theme, “Barrel Chase” and “Shark Cage Fugue”

• Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark: “Raiders March”

• E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial: “Flying Theme”

• Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Suite

• Jurassic Park: Theme

• Amistad: “Dry Your Tears, Afrika”

• Empire of the Sun: “Exsultate Justi”

• Hook: “Flight to Neverland”

• War Horse: “Dartmoor, 1912”

• Catch Me If You Can!: Theme

• Schindler’s List: Theme

• Saving Private Ryan: “Hymn to the Fallen”

Ultimate John Williams Playlist: ‘Star Wars’

By the late 1970s, Williams was considering taking work on a film called A Bridge Too Far, a World War II epic with a huge international cast. He felt that he'd have a grand time coming up with his signature leitmotifs for all those characters. Spielberg had previously introduced Williams to his friend George Lucas and was nudging the composer toward doing a little movie called Star Wars.  Williams reportedly vacillated for a bit, then acquiesced to his old friend and said simply, "OK, I'll do Star Wars."“  And the rest is — well you know.

Williams once said in an interview that Yoda's theme was one of the most autobiographical pieces he's written. But then he adds that that's all he's willing to say. And he smiles.

Lucas, a notoriously noncommunicative individual, revealed little about the story, sequels and characters. Rather in the dark about it all, Williams set to work on his many leitmotifs for the characters, assuming Luke and Leia would be romantically involved, which is how he wrote the theme for them — a big, romantic, sweeping melody. Only later did he find out that they were siblings.

"Duel of the Fates," the most downloaded piece of Star Wars music, is based on fragments of an old Welsh poem and sung in Sanskrit. It is perhaps the pinnacle of Williams' working with a full symphony orchestra and chorus.

Playlist

• A New Hope: Main Theme

• The Empire Strikes Back: “Yoda’s Theme”

• Return of the Jedi: “Luke and Leia”

• A New Hope: “Leia’s Theme”

• Return of the Jedi: “Parade of the Ewoks”

• The Empire Strikes Back: “Imperial March”

• A New Hope: “Throne Room and Finale”

• The Phantom Menace: “Duel of the Fates”

Ultimate John Williams Playlist: Other Films

Williams worked on Hitchcock's final film, Family Plot. He truly wanted to work with the famous director, although he wasn't particularly enamored with the script. Hitch didn't want anything "overly dramatic," William recalls. Hitch added, "Remember, murder can be fun!"

Director Richard Donner, on hearing the March from Superman for the first time asked Williams, "Are there lyrics here? That opening melody, I hear the word "Su-per-man! Ta da da-da daaahh?" 

Williams smiled a bit and said, "You are right. There are words."

Far and Away, a Ron Howard film, did not do well with critics mostly due to Tom Cruise getting less than stellar reviews, but it is considered by many to be one of Williams' best scores. Having the low strings create the opening of "The Donnybrook" is brilliant writing for double basses.

The Harry Potter franchise got original music by Williams in only the first three installments. But it was so powerful in its leitmotifs of Hogwarts, and especially “Hedwig's Theme,” that it is used over and over by the succeeding composers, Nicholas Hooper, Alexandre Desplat and Patrick Doyle. It's hard to top perfection.

Catch Me if You Can boasts a jazzy score, so much so that when saxophonist Brandon Marsalis saw the movie, he immediately contacted Williams’ office asking if he would arrange it as a saxophone concerto. He got a call back saying he'd have it in six weeks.

The Book Thief in 2013 was directed by Brian Percival and was Williams' first non-Spielberg-directed film since 2005. A box-office success, it earned Williams received yet another Oscar nomination for his score, which was recorded on the Alfred Newman Sound Stage at 20th Century Fox Studios.

Williams worked on Home Alone, giving it its Oscar-nominated score, and the song "Somewhere in My Memory," with lyrics by Leslie Bricusse, also was nominated. The composer says the track "Holiday Flight" was inspired by “Trepak” from Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker.  It's OK to admit your were inspired by others!

Playlist

• Cinderella Liberty: “Nice to Be Around”

• Family Plot: Finale

• Far and Away: Suite

• Dracula: “Night Journeys”

• Memoirs of a Geisha: “Sayuri’s Theme”

• The Fury: Main Title

• The Accidental Tourist: Main Title

• The Book Thief: Main Title

• Home Alone: “Somewhere in My Memory” and “We Wish You a Merry Christmas/End Title”

• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone: “Hedwig’s Theme” and “Harry’s Wondrous World”

Ultimate John Williams Playlist: Concert Hall

Many of Williams' works for the concert hall are surprising, beautiful and unexpected. He has written chamber music, concerti and fanfares. 

His first wife, actress Barbara Ruick, died unexpectedly at 41 while on location for a film in Nevada. Williams was devastated and left to be the single father of three teenagers. He stopped writing music almost entirely for two years. He felt he was finished. 

Then he reported feeling as if Ruick was suddenly present with him, guiding him. He says he still feels her presence when he works.

He wrote his First Violin Concerto in her memory. Her father was a violinist, and she loved the instrument. He said he had never written anything for her while she was alive and so dedicated this gorgeous concerto "to BRW."

(Another example of show-business serendipity is that Williams was the piano sideman working for Alfred Newman on Carousel and his soon-to-be wife, Barbara, played Carrie in that film. They also were classmates and knew each other at North Hollywood High School but never dated then.)

Playlist

• Olympic Fanfare

• Elegy for Cello and Orchestra

• Violin Concerto: Third Movement

• Air and Simple Gifts

• Trumpet Concerto: Third Movement

Any movie buff knows composer John Williams is the usual choice for director Steven Spielberg. But for The Color Purple, which was released on today’s date in 1985, Spielberg turned to jazz great and master orchestrator Quincy Jones.

The Color Purple was based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Alice Walker that tells the story of Celie Harris, graphically depicting the trauma of a young African-American woman during the early 20th century. Spielberg cast Whoopi Goldberg — better-known then for stand-up comedy — in the intensely dramatic role of Celie.

For Spielberg, it was a movie without dazzling special effects or space aliens; for Jones, who had just finished producing Michael Jackson’s Thriller, working on The Color Purple was, as he put it, “An amazing experience … the biggest of my life.”

Whoopi Goldberg was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress — Quincy Jones, for both Best Original Score and Best Original Song. Neither Goldberg nor Jones won an Oscar, but Jones says he felt honored to participate in a project that, despite the many warnings of nay-sayers, he had absolute faith in, inspired by the passion of all those involved in its making.

Music Played in Today's Program

Quincy Jones (1933-2024): The Color Purple: Main Theme; Itzhak Perlman, violin; Pittsburgh Symphony; John Williams, conductor; Sony 63005

On Saturday Cinema, I mentioned in passing that my sons, Peter and Joshua, and I had a list of Christmas films we watched in a certain order, a list established by the time they were in middle school. New ones were added over the years and a couple of honorable mentions, but back when the kids lived at home this film fest started Thanksgiving night and ran through Christmas Eve. Movies were big at our house, as you might imagine. (PJs, hot chocolate and cookies required.)

In response to the many listener requests I’ve received, here’s our list, in order:

• Miracle on 34th Street (the original black and white!)

• It's a Wonderful Life

• A Charlie Brown Christmas

• White Christmas

• The Bishop's Wife

• The Preacher's Wife

• The Santa Clause

• How the Grinch Stole Christmas (the animated TV version, with Boris Karloff)

• Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas (the Ron Howard version with the irrepressible Jim Carrey)

• Scrooged

• Elf

• Home Alone

• A Christmas Story

• Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol

• Christmas Carol (1951 Alastair Sim version)

• Christmas Carol (1999 Patrick Stewart version)

• Christmas Carol (1984 George C. Scott version)

• The Polar Express

The last two are always viewed on Christmas Eve!

• Scrooge (1970 musical with Albert Finney)

• A Muppet Christmas Carol

New in the lineup are two discoveries that the kids introduced to me for recent Christmases:

• The Man Who Invented Christmas (2017)

• Klaus (a 2019 Netflix film)

And these three I introduced to the kids this year:

• Remember the Night

• It Happened on 5th Avenue

• The Shop Around the Corner

Ridley Scott’s highly anticipated film Gladiator II opens Nov. 22, but for many fans the acid test of the film will come Nov. 15, when the soundtrack is released.

That soundtrack was composed not by Hans Zimmer — who wrote the Oscar-nominated score for Gladiator, with notable contributions from Lisa Gerrard — but by Zimmer protégé Harry Gregson-Williams, whose résumé includes the music for Shrek and The Chronicles of Narnia.

Zimmer’s score for the 2000 film, by turns sweeping, noble and emotional, is widely beloved. He declined to write for the new movie, saying he didn’t want to repeat himself.

“It’s really very simple. I’ve done that world. And I think I did it well,” he said in an interview with the movie website Curzon. “It wouldn’t have mattered if I had written the most amazing score [for the sequel], because the music in the first movie sticks in people’s hearts.”

But he’s given his successor a vote of confidence.

“Harry is family for me. He’s a phenomenal composer,” Zimmer said. “That film is in really good hands. Trust me.

“Harry and I have spoken about it. He feels the old score barking at his heels a little bit. So he’s on his A game.”

Why the angst among music fans? When the first trailer for Gladiator II was released in July, it featured the rap song “No Church in the Wild,” by Jay-Z and Kanye West, setting some fans’ teeth on edge. Some wondered why there was no callback to memorable themes such as “Now We Are Free,” featuring Gerrard’s iconic “wailing woman.”

The most recent trailer has a more conventionally epic musical background, but as with all trailers, the final music might not be reflected.

Perhaps it’s inevitable that the music has been updated. The sequel concentrates on the next generation, with its central focus on Lucius (Paul Mescal), the son of Russell Crowe’s Maximus.

“I thought, what if I could create a theme for Lucius that becomes Hans’ theme from the first movie?” Gregson-Williams says in this behind-the-scenes video.

“I love it that he took it and just expanded it, making something that is so extraordinary,” Zimmer adds.

“Music is a statement. It’s a sound statement,” Scott says, adding hopefully, “I think they’re going to love it.”

Indeed, will fans be entertained, or have their vengeance? Stay tuned.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of Hamilton, and playwright Eisa Davis, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, have created a new Broadway musical — which is not actually on Broadway.

Instead, it's a concept album, meant to be listened to in one sitting. That idea came about because Miranda wanted to write something about The Warriors, the 1979 cult-classic movie about members of a Coney Island street gang who are trying to get back home to Brooklyn after they're accused of assassinating a leader advocating for peace.

It's one of his favorite movies. And he couldn't stop thinking about how he could do his own love letter to it. Then he brought Davis on board — and they started thinking about the 1970s.

"We were inspired by the concept albums from the '70s that we love," Miranda said, "where you would sit on your living room floor and read the liner notes to your vinyl. And we wanted to create that feeling."

The album tells the Warriors' story by using music that crosses genres, including hip-hop, rock, ska and salsa; it's sung by a cast that includes everyone from artists like Lauryn Hill, Nas, Ghostface Killah and Billy Porter to Broadway stars Phillipa Soo, Jasmine Cephas Jones and Amber Gray.

"We just got this dream team" of musical artists, Miranda said. "So it was very freeing, always full of joy."

Mixing it up

Miranda and Davis flipped the gender of the Warriors so that, in their version, the gang is all women. This means a central romance is one between women, as well.

"The gender flipping allowed us to angle in on the sexism and homophobia in the film and make sure that we left that in '79," Davis said. "We're in 2024 here."

Miranda and Davis say they have no plans for Warriors to come to Broadway, but that "We'd love to see a stage adaptation of this down the road."

There likely won't be a movie version, though, because, as Miranda says, "That already exists."

Ciera Crawford edited the audio and digital versions of this story. Chloee Weiner mixed the audio.

Copyright 2025, NPR

Hans Zimmer has written some of the most iconic and memorable movie scores of all time. He’s both prolific and award-winning, with two Oscars and four Grammys on his shelf. Here are his 10 best scores (plus a few extras we couldn’t leave out).

Oscar winners

The Lion King (1994): Sure, you know “Circle of Life” and “Hakuna Matata.” But Zimmer’s score for this animated juggernaut incorporated those Elton John/Tim Rice earworms into an immersive aural landscape that won him his first Oscar. He’s also responsible for recruiting South African musician Lebo M, who voices the spine-tingling Zulu chant that opens the movie (below). Zimmer said later that he almost turned the gig down (“I did everything not to get the job,” he says) but took it to impress his then-6-year-old daughter.

Oscar-worthy bonus: The Lion King was the award-winner, but don’t overlook Zimmer’s other animated standout, The Prince of Egypt (1998), in which his Oscar-nominated score supported songs by Stephen Schwartz. He expressed anxiety about adapting the religious story; “The Burning Bush” was particularly troublesome, but he said later, “I think I pulled it off.” See if you agree.

Dune: Part One (2021): For Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi classic, Zimmer avoided watching David Lynch’s 1984 version so as not to be influenced by its Toto/Brian Eno soundtrack. He instead spent time in the desert, the better to incorporate its sounds into his score. He used female voices, percussion, and acoustic and wind instruments — including hybrid instruments that were produced to create otherworldly sounds. This innovation, which did as much for the film’s world-building as cinematographer Greig Fraser’s visuals, helped win Zimmer his second Oscar. Here’s the hypnotic “Paul’s Dream.”

Zimmer followed up with the score to Dune: Part Two in 2024; he composed about 90 minutes of music before the script was even written to help inspire Villeneuve.

Action movies

Gladiator (2000): The soundtrack to Ridley Scott’s Oscar-winning epic, which Zimmer wrote with Australian singer/composer Lisa Gerrard, borrowed from Richard Wagner and Gustav Holst. (Indeed, he settled with the Holst estate on claims that he borrowed too liberally.) It is a masterful showcase of Zimmer’s powerhouse style, exemplified by “The Battle,” written in a frenetic waltz time. Are you not entertained?

Black Hawk Down (2001): Zimmer, teaming up again with Scott, said he avoided more traditional composition in favor of an experimental approach. “I wanted to do it like the way the movie was,” he said. To that end, he sent an assistant to scout instruments and sounds native to the African desert to help inform the score. He also incorporated vocals from Senegal’s Baaba Maal and France’s Denez Prigent, plus his Gladiator collaborator Gerrard. Feast on “Hunger,” featuring Maal’s haunting voice.

Pirates of the Caribbean series (2003-2011): Zimmer wrote or collaborated on the scores for the first four of the five-film franchise; after delegating the lion’s share of the first installment (The Curse of the Black Pearl) to Klaus Badelt, he put his stamp on the series in the second, Dead Man’s Chest. For “The Kraken,” the theme for Jack Sparrow’s nemesis, Davy Jones, he fed organ music through a guitar amp to create music he calls “very Lemmy from Motörhead.”

Swashbuckling bonus: This wasn’t Zimmer’s first voyage on the high seas. A decade earlier, he crafted the unforgettable music for Muppet Treasure Island (1996), building an adventurous score around songs by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil.

The Last Samurai (2003): This story of a Civil War soldier embroiled in a clash between Japan’s Imperial army and its samurai culture gave Zimmer an opportunity to fuse Western orchestral elements with traditional Japanese instruments, including the taiko drum for action sequences and the bamboo flute and the zither-like koto for pastoral passages. Hear examples of each in this soundtrack sampler.

The Dark Knight trilogy (2005-2012): Zimmer began a fruitful collaboration with Christopher Nolan in this three-film series that was launched with Batman Begins, continuing through The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises. The composer, who worked with James Newton-Howard on the first two scores, says he saw an “endless heroic theme” in the superhero origin story. Through talking with Nolan about the duality of the Batman/Bruce Wayne character, he developed the signature two-note motif that’s carried through the trilogy. Listen for the hint of flapping bat wings that open “Vespertilio” from Batman Begins before that distinctive theme enters.

Sci-fi standouts

Inception (2010): Zimmer said of his score for Nolan’s mindbender, “I’m nearly resentful of the way people are describing this music as being smart and intellectual. What I was writing was nostalgia and sadness. This character [Dom Cobb] carries this sadness all the time that he cannot express.” He upped the nostalgia by working snippets of Edith Piaf’s poignant “Non, Je ne Regrette Rien” into the score to serve as cues for the dream sequences. Zimmer also enlisted former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr to contribute to the score, vowing there would be no guitar unless Marr agreed. Here’s the result of that alliance.

Interstellar (2014): Nolan provided no script for his dystopian drama to Zimmer, giving him only a brief description of a father leaving his child because of an important job. In one night, Zimmer wrote a four-minute piano-and-organ piece that in his mind represented fatherhood. He protested that his piece was too “tiny and fragile” once he realized the scope of the story, but Nolan reassured him that it provided the heart of the film. The two also decided that the 1926 four-keyboard organ of London’s Temple Church would become the score’s signature instrument. Listen to the majesty it supplies to “First Step.”

Quiet dramas

Driving Miss Daisy (1989): The race-relations story is dated but Zimmer’s Southern-inflected, gently jazzy music holds up, contrasting nicely with his more bombastic scores to come. He performed the music entirely by himself electronically, using samplers and synthesizers; there are no live instruments to be heard. Here’s the main theme, “Driving.” You might swear you hear a clarinet, but it’s all Zimmer.

Debut bonus: Another in the quieter vein is Zimmer’s first major score, for Rain Man (1988). He used synthesizers and steel drums to conjure what he called the “jangly” feel of a road movie, nabbing an Oscar nomination and announcing that he was a musical force to be reckoned with. Here’s the main theme.

When you hear Michael Giacchino’s name, you think of all of his terrific movie music — the Oscar-winning Up, Coco, The Incredibles, Ratatouille and the rebooted Star Trek film franchise. You might even know that he started his compositional career working with Steven Spielberg on — wait for it — video games!

But you probably don’t think of him as a filmmaker or director, and yet that is precisely Giacchino’s background, his first love. That’s how he ended up directing — and composing the music for — the Marvel movie Werewolf by Night, which will be screened with a live performance of his score by the Minnesota Orchestra on Wednesday, Oct. 4, at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis.

Giacchino studied filmmaking at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and, as his mother, Josephine, says, “He went to Julliard in his spare time.” The concept of Julliard as a side gig is amazing, but the Giacchino family seems to take everything in their South Jersey stride without a lot of fuss or fanfare. Talking with Giacchino is no different. He’s approachable, friendly, funny, warm and down to earth. 

Making Werewolf by Night was a return to childhood for Giacchino. He was the geeky kid with his movie nerd buddies, watching Creature Double Feature on TV by night, and by day making Super 8 movies all over his hometown, proud of their special effects — which included dueling with real swords, throwing real knives, taping firecrackers to each other for the effect of being shot and clambering on suburban rooftops.

Werewolf by Night was one of his favorite comic books, especially because it was an outlier in the Marvel Universe. He loved the character, his flaws, persecutions and tribulations, feeling it was the stuff of a good film. It was an easy choice.

Giacchino also wrote the music for Werewolf by Night, although he’s most assuredly right at home in the director’s chair, bringing his effusive and contagious love of films and filmmaking to cast, crew and audience. 

Listen to his interview above, or read below, in advance of the Minnesota Orchestra’s Oct. 4 performance of Werewolf by Night.

What are the challenges of directing and being responsible for a crew, as compared with the relatively isolated job of scoring a film?

“Growing up wanting to be a director and wanting to make movies, it absolutely informed how I wrote music for films. I always approached it from the mind of a filmmaker, and it was all about storytelling. Over the years, I've met a lot of people that write music for films, and some of them really are just interested in the music and others are also interested in the story. And for me, if you're not interested in the story, just go write concert music. That's fine, because we need that, too. But a lot of people look at this career and say, ‘Oh, it's like a good job. I could write music for a living.’ But I really feel like to do this correctly, you have to love movies.

“You have to love telling stories, and you have to love sharing this excitement of an unfolding parable in front of you with an audience, with a bunch of people, with millions of people, hopefully. For me, so much of what I do today is really rooted in my childhood love of movies, and it all comes out of that. It's not a music-first thing for me, which seems to surprise people.”

Well, you win an Oscar for film composing and people begin to guess. 

“Well, that's the funny thing. They think, ‘Oh, wait, you can actually can do something different, too?’ And that's the other thing about this town is, like, the second you do one thing fairly well, then that's all you're allowed to do for the rest of your life. And trying to break that mold or break that paradigm that is sort of instilled in this entire industry is very difficult.”

Now that you're behind the camera and you’re running the show, how did it feel? How was it different for you than what you could do when you're composing?

“When I'm writing music for a film, I'm home in my office. I work 9 to 5. I'm pretty much in control of my whole world. But when I’m directing, I’m at the mercy of God knows what. Anything could go wrong. The schedule doesn't work, whether it’s happening or you go over time; there's all kinds of things that could go terribly wrong while you're directing. But I loved it. When I first got on set for Werewolf by Night, I honestly felt more at home there than I ever have writing music for movies, because I felt like I was getting back to the roots of what I wanted to do when I was growing up.

“My whole life I grew up making movies as a kid, that's all I ever did. I never really wrote music while I was growing up. I took piano lessons and I loved music, I listened to film scores and I was incredibly nerdy about all of that. But at the same time, I was also incredibly nerdy about blowing up miniatures and filming them and doing stop-motion films or using my friends to make these crazy science-fiction sort of Twilight Zone-ish-type things.

“My real love was all of that. And I ended up in this sort of path where it became a specialized thing as opposed to when I was a kid, when I could do everything, and I really missed that. I missed this idea that I didn't have to do just one thing. I can do all of this. I want to try all of it! So that was a great joy on the set. I could say, ‘Hey, I want to try that crane,’ and they would let me move the crane. Or, ‘I want to move the dolly,’ and they'd be like, ‘Great! Move the dolly.’ I was, like, I want to do all of it, because I have such respect and love for everyone that works on a film set. It's an incredibly hard job. And when everyone is in sync and when it's all working together, it's one of the most fun experiences you could ever have. I just love it.” 

In your brother Anthony’s documentary, Director by Night, you talk about loving horror films and how they're an allegory of humanity, of the things we go through as human beings. Could you talk a little bit about that?

“As a kid watching monster movies, my brother and I, we would watch Creature Double Feature out of Philadelphia every single Saturday. That was our church; that's the way we worshiped, by watching these old movies from the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s. And it was filled with all kinds of things, whether it was King Kong or Vincent Price movies, or whether it was The Mummy, all of those classic horror films. And the one thing I remember in watching them was that I always felt so bad for the monster, because in almost every case this monster was here accidentally or was created accidentally, or landed here from another planet, at no fault of its own. And they're just being themselves, and the rest of the world is like, ‘Oh, there's a thing that's different. Let's kill it.’ And it was always so sad to me. I always felt bad for Frankenstein's monster.

“And I never forgot the idea of the ‘other’ being treated in a terrible way. It made me feel bad. So when we went to go make Werewolf by Night, I wanted to make sure that this was a story about somebody who had a problem they can't handle and they need help. They don't need persecution, they need understanding and empathy. They don't need violence against them.

“And that's something that you could look at across the board in our society, which is just one of the biggest problems that we have, is this lack of understanding for anything that is different from you or what you know. And there tends to be a reactionary thing that happens where people just lash out and want to destroy whatever isn't something that they feel is right. So for me it was important to lean into that because I couldn't get away from it. Every time I think of those movies, that's what I think about, my sadness for these creatures.” 

While watching Werewolf by Night, I was very interested in the actors, like Gael García Bernal and the fabulous villain, Harriet Sansom Harris.

“Harriet is the greatest; she was amazing. You don't know how it's going to be on set with certain people. You're hoping it's all going to work out and everyone's going to get along. And I have to say, we got so lucky with everyone. Harriet, Laura [Donnelly] and Gael set a tone that was both professional but also fun and also incredibly flexible. Harriet, for example, would come in, say her line, and she’d kill it right off the bat. And then you'd say, ‘Oh, but what if at the end you actually held it for a moment before you say that last word?’ And she goes, ‘I know exactly what you're talking about; yes, let's do it again.’ She was just so game to jump in and be a part of the creative process.

“And I love when there's a sense that the person you're working with is as excited about what you're doing as you are, that just makes all the difference in the world. It didn't feel like anyone was there because it was a job. This was a weird Marvel project, right? This was the weirdest Marvel project on the planet. And I think that because it was so weird and so different, everyone just wanted to be a part of it. And I was so lucky to have so many great people involved.

“But, yeah, the cast! Gael is sort of like the Buster Keaton of our times. He can do the smallest look and give you everything you need. He can be hilarious without almost doing anything. He's just a brilliant actor. And Laura Donnelly, how do you get better than her? What I was amazed at was that you could change a whole page of dialogue with her and she would remember it instantly. You didn't have to worry about it. She was so impressive and so amazing. They were all such a huge lift to the entire project. I was lucky to have them.”

I was noticing when you were directing Gael you giving him directions according to how the music would play out in the scene. Not many directors do that. What came first in this project, the music or the filming?

“It was sort of a concurrent thing. I would be working on the story with Heather Quinn, who was the writer. We had so much fun building this story together, and while we were doing that, I would write down themes and things that would indicate the tone of the scene. It's one thing when you read it on paper because everyone has a different interpretation in their head of how a scene is going to play out and what it's meant to say. But I'm the one that has to have the final word on that.

“So what I would do is write the music and I could play it for the actors, and it would instantly put them in the right mood. They would know the tone, they would understand it, and there were no questions about it. And if there was a question about it, we could discuss it. The music tells you everything that you need emotionally from a scene. And so it was just a great way to get everyone on the same page very quickly, as opposed to going in there and saying, ‘Just trust me,’ which is hard.”

Is there a moment in the score that you really want the audience members to listen for?

“I want them to just be engrossed in the experience the way that I was as a kid. Watching a movie, you're just lost in this story, and the fun thing is that you're sort of getting a tutorial on how movies are made, in a way. When you get to go to see a symphony perform a score, take a moment and actually look down from the movie screen and look at those people playing the instruments. You don't get to do that unless you have practiced for years and years to get good at what you do. That is not an easy job to do on that stage.

“It is so hard and I'm always so incredibly thankful to the players because without them, a score is literally just little black dots on a piece of paper. If I were to just show that to somebody, 99.9% of the people would not know what the heck that is. But until a player plays it and brings it out, suddenly they're spreading emotion all over the place with their performance.

“And I always tell audiences, just take a beat while you're watching. Yes. Enjoy the show, boo the villains, cheer the heroes, but also watch that orchestra. Because honestly, that night, they’re the biggest heroes of the experience and they're guiding you through this emotional journey that you're experiencing. So that's it for me, simply take a moment to look at them, see what they do, and appreciate the fact that they just spent 20 years of their life to get that good so they could do this for you. To me, that’s really cool.”

Find out more about the Minnesota Orchestra’s performance and screening of Werewolf by Night on its official website.

We asked listeners to tell us their favorite film scores. Dim the lights, grab some popcorn and read on for their top 25 selections in movie music.

1. ‘The Lord of the Rings’ series (Howard Shore, 2000-04)

Peter Jackson’s grand trilogy deserved an equally monumental score, and Shore delivered an operatic work that is notable for its sheer length, the variety of musical styles and multitude of themes. He spent nearly four years writing the music, about as long as it takes to watch the movies (we kid!). Here’s the “Shire” theme.

2. ‘Star Wars’ (John Williams, 1977)

The American Film Institute lists it as the world’s most recognizable film score of all time; and who doesn’t get chills from the opening fanfare? You might prefer the lushness of “Princess Leia’s Theme” or the goofiness of “Cantina Band,” but that main title might be among the most indelible music in all of movies.

3. ‘The Mission’ (Ennio Morricone, 1986)

Morricone used liturgical music, Spanish guitars and native drums to capture the varied cultures that figure in this 18th-century story. And, of course, there’s the woodwind of “Gabriel’s Oboe,” the score’s main theme.

4. ‘Schindler's List’ (John Williams, 1993)

The haunting, violin-powered “Theme from Schindler’s List” might be most well-known as the accompaniment for many a figure skating routine, an incongruous image to associate with Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust-themed film. Listen to Itzhak Perlman (who has been outspoken about the violin’s importance in the internment camps) play it.

5. ‘Dances With Wolves’ (John Barry, 1990)

The sweeping strings evoke the wide western plain where Lt. John Dunbar is posted after the Civil War. Barry, who persuaded director and star Kevin Costner that an intimate approach was needed, listened to Native American music for inspiration while composing — some of which made it into the score. And there are bagpipes! Listen to the “John Dunbar Theme.”

6. ‘Doctor Zhivago’ (Maurice Jarre, 1965)

Jarre avoided using Russian folk music for this score, opting instead for Russian “flavor” through the balalaika. As for that famous tune: Director David Lean allegedly rejected Jarre’s first few attempts at a love melody, finally ordering him to a mountain retreat with his girlfriend for romantic inspiration. Out of that interlude came “Lara’s Theme,” as achingly lovely as Julie Christie.

7. ‘Out of Africa’ (John Barry, 1985)

The film is long and some would say excessively navel-gazing, but the score is atypically short (about 35 minutes, including a Mozart clarinet concerto and a popular song from the period-appropriate 1910s). Even in its brevity it manages to convey the emotional breadth of the doomed romance. The soaring “Flying Over Africa” lifts the characters, and the listeners.

8. ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ (Maurice Jarre, 1962)

The producers reportedly considered a multitude of composers — including Malcolm Arnold, William Walton, Aram Khachaturian, Benjamin Britten and Richard Rodgers (whose early draft David Lean called “rubbish”) — before landing on the young Jarre, who already had been hired to orchestrate Rodgers’ score. Here’s the tune, “Theme from Lawrence of Arabia,” that sealed the deal.

9. ‘Harry Potter’ series (John Williams/Alexandre Desplat, 2001-11)

Williams composed the scores for only the first three films, but several of his melodies (including the main “Hedwig’s Theme,” heard in all eight movies) were incorporated throughout the franchise. Among Desplat’s contributions to the last two installments was a new theme for He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named. But who are we kidding, “Hedwig” is Harry Potter.

10. ‘Seven Years in Tibet’ (John Williams, 1997)

A showcase for cellist Yo-Yo Ma, the score includes a few Tibetan embellishments, but it’s mainly good, old Williams schmaltz. Ma’s exquisite performance in this main theme is enhanced by the delicate piano that introduces the melody and the horns that usher in the climax at 5:17.

11. ‘The Magnificent Seven’ (Elmer Bernstein, 1960)

Is there a more, um, magnificent theme for a western? You can almost smell the gun smoke and hear the horses in Bernstein’s masterful use of rousing strings and syncopated horns in the iconic main title. The propulsive score is a necessary tonic to the film’s slow-moving action, and indeed, Bernstein said, “I remember being very excited when I found that opening rhythm. It was like a surge of energy.”

12. ‘Chariots of Fire’ (Vangelis, 1981)

Director Hugh Hudson resolved not to use a traditional orchestral score for this 1924-set drama, instead choosing electronic composer Vangelis to lend the film a modern sensibility and exuberance. The resulting synthesizer-driven music is a fine complement to the ambient national anthems, Gilbert and Sullivan snippets and English hymns. Cue the slo-mo!

13. ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ (John Williams, 1981)

Williams offered Steven Spielberg two melodies for Indiana Jones’ main theme, which at the director’s behest he combined into the now-familiar trumpet fanfare with a strings-and-horn bridge. Notable too is the segue from the sublimely romantic “Marion’s Theme” to the screeching strings and ominous low horns of “The Crate,” evoking the villains of the 1930s serials the film emulates. Grab your whip for “The Raiders March.”

14. ‘Gone With the Wind’ (Max Steiner, 1939)

The grandeur of Steiner’s score instantly conjures the old South, for good or ill. Producer David O. Selznick insisted he incorporate contemporaneous music, including Stephen Foster tunes and “Dixie,” to anchor the film in the Civil War era. But it’s this romantic and magisterial melody that puts you on the lawn at Tara.

15. ‘South Pacific’ (Richard Rodgers, 1958)

The only musical on this list, it spawned the showtune classics “There Is Nothing Like a Dame,” “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair” and, perhaps most famously, “Some Enchanted Evening.” But the most enchanting of the bunch just might be “This Nearly Was Mine.” Listen to Giorgio Tozzi’s gorgeous bass, dubbing for actor Rossano Brazzi.

16. ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ series (Klaus Badelt/Hans Zimmer/Geoff Zanelli, 2003-17)

Products of Zimmer’s Remote Control film score company, these soundtracks sound like a sampler from any number of action movies. But they are fun! The bombastic anthems, rollicking chanteys and thundering choruses offer a pleasurable assault on the senses. Here’s Zimmer’s organ-infused “The Kraken” from Dead Man’s Chest.

17. ‘Jurassic Park’ (John Williams, 1993)

With the film’s signature theme, Williams sought to capture the “awesome beauty and sublimity of the dinosaurs in nature,” which he accomplished admirably. But as we know, things don’t stay pastoral for long in this world. For the most harrowing scenes (kids in the kitchen!) he borrowed his own technique from Jaws — the menacing four-note sequence that ups the intensity to 11. Let’s lower our stress level with that main theme.

18. ‘Pride and Prejudice’ (Dario Marianelli, 2005)

Beethoven’s early piano sonatas became “a point of reference” for this elegant score, Marianelli has said, and the gentle, romantic tone is in good hands with pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet. Before filming began, Marianelli composed several pieces for the actors to play onscreen, which helped inform the rest of the music. “Dawn” opens the film.

19. ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’ (Erich Korngold, 1938)

Korngold originally turned down this project because, as an opera composer, he thought it had too much action! But the Nazis’ invasion of his home country of Austria compelled him to remain in the United States and stick to it, with fortuitous results. The swashbuckling score, with its Wagnerian flourishes and regal splendor, propelled Korngold to the top ranks of movie composers. “March of the Merry Men” puts a fine sword point on it.

20. ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ (Elmer Bernstein, 1962)

The Magnificent Seven composer took a far different approach to this tender story, grounding it in “the magic of a child’s world” with the high registers of the piano, flute, bells and harp. That nostalgic music-box quality, contrasted with this dark and foreboding “Ewell’s Hatred,” perfectly expresses the tensions of the 1930s South.

21. ‘Breakfast at Tiffany's’ (Henry Mancini, 1961)

You had us at “Moon River,” Henry. Legend has it that star Audrey Hepburn saved this classic from being cut by the producers, who called it “dead weight.” The melody (in infinite variations) weaves itself in and out of Mancini’s jazzy, lounge-inflected score, providing a poignant counterpart. Here is Hepburn’s version.

22. ‘Apollo 13’ (James Horner, 1995)

The patriotic drum cadence and trumpet fanfare that open the main title give way to a more reverent melody that speaks to the lofty goals of space exploration, before “Master Alarm” ratchets up the anxiety with heart-pounding drums and horn crescendos. You can see the sweat on Tom Hanks’ brow! Breathe a sigh of relief with the triumphant “Re-Entry and Splashdown.”

23. ‘Ben Hur’ (Miklos Rozsa, 1959)

In this massive score (befitting a 212-minute epic), Rosza carved out distinct themes for each group — Roman (strident and percussive), Macedonian (sinister and disquieting), Jewish (melancholy and minor key) and Christian (stirring and major key). The classic chariot race has no musical accompaniment, but listen to the triumphant “Parade of the Charioteers.”

24. ‘Last of the Mohicans’ (Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman, 1992)

Director Michael Mann changed his mind on the music so many times that original composer Jones’ electronic score had to be refashioned for traditional orchestra at the 11th hour, with Edelman brought in to augment minor scenes. Mann was so besotted with Scottish folkie Dougie MacLean’s “The Gael” that he requested it be adapted into the main theme, “Promentory.” His instincts were right, as its hypnotic fiddle befits the Gaelic influence on early American music.

25. ‘North by Northwest’ (Bernard Herrmann, 1959)

You’ll never look at Mount Rushmore again without hearing Herrmann’s distinctly nonmelodic but dynamic score, one of seven he composed for Alfred Hitchcock. He used the Spanish fandango with its heavy reliance on percussion (castanets and even hand-clapping) for the clashing rhythms that set the tone for the chaos thrust upon unwitting adman Roger Thornhill.

While movie music buffs can debate whether John Williams' Star Wars score is truly the greatest film score of all time, the composer has certainly created the most recognizable musical universe ever to accompany a motion picture. The familiarity and resonance of the score has grown with each new installment of the series, and Williams has continued to develop new themes for the expanding cast of characters having adventures a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

In this exploration of the musical world of Star Wars, we're tracing Williams' classical influences.

A trend-setting throwback

One of the reasons Star Wars made such an impact was that in a decade marked by stark, intellectually ambitious science fiction films—including George Lucas's own THX-1138 (1971)—Star Wars was a shamelessly sweeping throwback to space operas in the Buck Rogers mode.

Part and parcel of Lucas's approach was to commission a grand symphonic score, rather than an experimental electronic soundtrack. In his mid-40s, Williams was already an experienced film composer. Juilliard-trained, he'd worked with such legends as Bernard Herrmann and won two Academy Awards—including one for his still-iconic score for Steven Spielberg's Jaws, the movie that's credited for establishing the summer blockbuster genre.

It wasn't Williams's job, then, to break new aesthetic ground. In fact, it was precisely in the nature of his assignment that he produce a score harking back to the swashbuckling classics Lucas grew up with. His triumph, with Star Wars, was to deploy that musical vocabulary with an unprecedented power and sweep—a sweep that grew with each of the film's two sequels, and then with the three prequels Lucas directed 20 years later.

Wagner: The original franchise king

The ultimate influence on Williams's vision for Star Wars was Richard Wagner, whose Ring cycle combines a wealth of musical ideas that would inform Williams's work. Daringly dissonant and boldly dramatic for its time, Wagner's four-opera cycle was the original "cinematic" composition, its lurid Romantic vocabulary providing the basic toolbox for a century's worth of film composers.

The idea Williams is best-known for copping from Wagner—via many other opera and film composers—is the device of the leitmotif: a distinctive musical "voice" for each major character, a melody and arrangement that can be adapted in various ways to complement the evolving story.

Where the ordinary filmgoer most conspicuously hears Wagner in Star Wars, is in the brass-laden theme for Darth Vader and his evil Empire—which is distinctively reminiscent of Wagner's music for his majestic Valkyries.

Tchaikovsky: Instrumental color

You don't necessarily think Nutcracker Suite when you think Star Wars—but it's more appropriate than you might realize that The Force Awakens was released during the Christmas season. Tchaikovsky was a master of orchestral color, and when you listen to his score for the "coffee" interlude next to Williams's Jawa theme, you're reminded that Clara's magical sojourn was the original trip to a galaxy far, far away.

The grandly Romantic theme from Swan Lake is also echoed in Williams's love theme for Han and Leia, from The Empire Strikes Back. Whether or not Williams was explicitly thinking about a dying swan as he penned this elegiac music, he was certainly going for that feeling that a curtain (of stars?) is about to fall.

Holst: Journey into space

Other than the composers shot into orbit by Stanley Kubrick in 2001 (Ligeti, Khachaturian, both of the Strausses)—and the composers literally shot into orbit on Voyager II (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven)—there's no composer in the classical repertoire who's more closely associated with outer space than Gustav Holst. The Planets has been mined for any number of sci-fi spectaculars, and Mars in particular has been a favorite of film composers including Williams, whose stormtroopers march to a distinctly Martian beat.

Korngold: Movie master

Of all Williams's borrowings, there's none more notorious than his nod to Erich Korngold—right out of the gate, no less. As many listeners have noted, the main Star Wars theme (technically, Luke Skywalker's theme) bears more than a passing resemblance to Korngold's theme for Kings Row (1942).

Whether you'd go so far as to call this a "cinematic swipe," it's no shocker that Williams looked to channel Korngold, whose music for classic films like The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and The Sea Hawk (1940) is clearly the immediate template from which Williams was working with Star Wars and his other best-known film scores.

Kings Row, ironically, is a hard-edged drama about dark secrets in a small town. One of its stars was none other than Ronald Reagan, who would go on as President to appropriate the terms "Star Wars" (for his proposed missile defense system) and "evil empire" (for the Soviet Union).

Stravinsky: Uncanny Rite

Stravinsky's influence on Star Wars might have come by way of Fantasia, where his instantly infamous Rite of Spring was used to soundtrack a desiccated landscape where dinosaurs marched to their deaths. As C-3PO and R2-D2 survey the barren sands of Tatooine, classical music fans must have wondered when a young Twi'lek was going to dance herself to death.

Orff: Sing a song of Sith

Believe it or not, when it came time to score the Star Wars prequels, there was one classical monster hit that just about every film composer except for Williams had plundered. That's Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, whose O Fortuna choir has been cribbed for seemingly every movie that culminates in a supernatural apocalypse. When it came time for Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi to duel to the death with Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace, Williams knew who to call.

Elgar: A New Hope and Glory

The theme that soundtracks the Throne Room procession (sorry for the spoiler) in the original Star Wars movie is a perfect example of Williams's special talent for creating music that's simultaneously new and old. Thanks to Williams's gift for melody and tone, you probably don't think about your high school graduation when Luke and Han are walking down the aisle—but listening to Williams's music for this scene next to Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance march makes clear that Williams knew whose arrangement to crib when he wanted to evoke the feeling of a formal award ceremony.

An original alchemy

Although Williams owes debts to all these composers—and many more—every composer stands on the shoulders of giants. Williams's homages may have been a bit more direct than some other composers', but the bottom line is that his mastery of melody and deftness of tone make the Star Wars scores a signal achievement in the history of cinema. Just as Lucas knew to hit the books (specifically, Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces), so did Williams; together, the two reinvigorated ancient tropes with freshness and verve.

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Composer Chanda Dancy has been scoring film music for more than 20 years. Starting her career working on independent films and video games, she now has transitioned to larger studios, including the recent Korean War film Devotion, and works on her multimedia label, CYD Music.

How did you get into and navigate the film industry? 

“My start in the film industry started with the USC film scoring program. I decided in undergrad that I would give this a go. I've always been a classical musician since I was a kid. I started composing in middle school. Playing the violin in orchestra and composing has always been a part of my life.

“I wouldn't necessarily say that doing smaller independent films was my calling. It was just where I found myself. It was the natural progression of things because at USC, I was fortunate to create an incredible community as I found my creative career foundation. I've made friends with many filmmakers from the USC Cinema School, as well as the UCLA program and CalPERS community. In school, we're taught that you need to go out and network and hand out your business card. I never did that. It wasn't necessarily because I didn't think I should. I couldn't because I'm such an introvert.

“I just worked on my communities’ projects. Then the project's editor would ask me to do my first film. Then that person's editor or producer would do the same. All my work for 15 years straight was just like through the community and my neighborhood. Then all of a sudden, the studio people saw my work and now I'm in the studio world. I had a twisting, winding road map to get where I am.”

Do you like working in the studio?

”Yes, I am open to beautiful, meaningful projects. So far in the studio world, that's what I've been getting into. It's been fantastic, but I would still work on an independent film. It's what allows my soul to sing essentially.” 

How did you get involved with the recent film Devotion, and what was it like to create music for it?

“I know the director, J.D. Dillard, was looking for a fresh sound. Now, I couldn't tell you whether that explicitly was a Black American composer or a woman composer or anything different. But I do know he wanted a different kind of sound. That's what brought his attention to me. I got on his radar because my agent is pretty good friends with the producers at Black Label Media. He's had experience with them because he also represented Jóhann Jóhannsson. He said, ‘Hey, I have this composer, Chanda. She's different.’

“Dillard said that he listened to my soundtrack to After We Leave. I guess I had the sound he was looking for because, from what I heard, quite a few composers were up for the job. Some were composers of color, as well. I wasn't the only one. I had such an easy working relationship with him. One big reason why he chose me is that he liked how I let my music sing.” 

How did you come about that sound, and how do you let it sing?

”I just be me. I know that sounds cliché, but it’s not. I was purposefully trying to craft my sound a certain way. I was bringing various components of my own life experience into my music. 

“In my experience, I have a classical music foundation. The orchestra is the foundation of my musical life. But then I worked for a sound design company, so I did a lot of sound processing in my scores. I also played in a rock band. There's a whole part of me that plays my bass guitar and creates awesome crumbling textures and sounds. That’s in addition to me playing the violin, viola and cello.

“So when I create things, I sing them. They feel more connected to me emotionally, and I feel like I can bring that out in the music better when I sing it.” 

What is your project CYD Music?

“It is a side thing. It's not my main focus but allows me to be as creative as possible with sound. The film After We Leave was a perfect project for that. I said I worked for a sound design company right out of USC. Sound editing and design have always been a part of me since. This was an excellent opportunity to create an entire place for soundscape music, sound design, editing and making sound art. … It's an art experience. 

”I've had a few pieces commissioned by Anthony Parker, the conductor of the San Bernardino Symphony. I was playing in the Southeast Symphony as a violinist under his tutelage. He commissioned a piece from me in 2016 for the Southeast Symphony and then another piece in 2021 for the San Bernardino Symphony.”

The Star Wars franchise has been an iconic sci-fi series for more than 40 years. It has grown from a simple three-movie saga into a bigger movie saga, TV series, spin-offs, video games and even theme-park attractions. But the most recognizable part is the music. Nothing is more satisfying than listening to the opening credits at the beginning of each movie.

John Williams has been the composer behind most of the music, and it is common knowledge that inspiration for the music came from other composers, such as Igor Stravinsky, Wolfgang Mozart and Richard Wagner. If you like these popular musical selections from the Star Wars films, you’ll probably enjoy our recommendations for similarly styled classical works.

"The Throne Room" from A New Hope

After the rebels blow up the Death Star, our heroes Luke, Han and Chewie are greeted by Leia with a warriors’ welcome. At the big ceremony, you hear this triumphant melody.

John Williams — “Throne Room and Finale” from Star Wars

Originally part of the four-act opera Mlada, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov arranged “Procession of the Nobles” as a symphonic piece. It uses an opening brass fanfare to signal the entry of nobles, kings and sultans.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov —  “Procession of the Nobles”

"Duel of the Fates" from The Phantom Menace

While not the most popular film of the franchise, The Phantom Menace gave us one of the most exciting lightsaber fight scenes of all time. While Darth Maul battles both Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi, the massive choral piece gives the audience shivers to accompany the exhilarating visuals.

John Williams — “Duel of the Fates”

“O Fortuna” from Carmina Burana might already be a familiar work because it has been used in many films, including Natural Born Killers, Excalibur and The Hunt for Red October. The work gives a sense of an epic battle waging before you.

Carl Orff — “O Fortuna” from Carmina Burana

“Main Title” from Star Wars

This is the tune everyone knows, even people who have never seen Star Wars. (Do they exist?) It is accompanied by the unforgettable golden-lettered scroll that begins every movie.

John Williams — "Main Title" from A New Hope

We know that Williams got inspiration from classical and romantic composers. But what many don’t realize is that he also drew material from early American film composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Some of the films Korngold scored included The Adventures of Robin Hood and Kings Row, whose triplet-driven main theme many cite as a direct influence on Williams. But Korngold’s music should resonate with many Star Wars fans, including his main title for The Sea Hawk.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold — “Main Title” from The Sea Hawk

“Cantina Band” from A New Hope

The ditty heard in the alien-crowded cantina is one of the most iconic works from Star Wars, setting the tone of the spaceport Mos Eisley, a “wretched hive of scum and villainy.” But did you know that the work and the band have a name? In the fictional world of Star Wars, the song is “Mad About Me” and is performed by Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes.

John Williams — “Cantina Band”

Klezmer is a musical tradition that was created by Ashkenazi Jews. Used primarily for social functions, like weddings, there is a large performance scene in Eastern Europe. After the Holocaust, Klezmer music was introduced to the United States and influenced popular and classical music — and offers a cantina vibe for our purposes.

Barcelona Gipsy balKan Orchestra — “Od Ebra do Dunava“

“Princess Leia's Theme” from A New Hope

“Princess Leia’s Theme” is one of the most obvious uses of Wagner’s concept of leitmotifs. Often when Leia is on screen, we hear her theme.

John Williams — “Princess Leia's Theme”

With its soft, beautiful background accompaniment and lush but sensitive horn, Maurice Ravel’s Pavane for a Dead Princess has the same style and feel to its Star Wars counterpart.

Maurice Ravel — Pavane for a Dead Princess

“The Imperial March” from The Empire Strikes Back

“The Imperial March” is meant to strike fear into viewers. When you first hear it in The Empire Strikes Back, you know that Darth Vader is a formidable enemy of the rebellion.

John Williams — “The Imperial March” (“Darth Vader's Theme”)

Another power yet menacing march, any lover of Darth Vader is sure to enjoy in the 2nd Movement of Dmitri Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony.

Dmitri Shostakovich — Symphony No. 10, Mvt. 2

“Luke and Leia” from Return of the Jedi

This piece captures the essence of Luke and Leia perfectly. A cautious, yet wondrous melody is supported by a heartwarming orchestra portraying the complicated past and future of the siblings.

John Williams — “Luke and Leia”

Peter Tchaikovsky’s horn solo in the 2nd Movement of his Fifth Symphony displays more complexity and passion than heard in Luke and Leia’s theme. A master of emotion, Tchaikovsky should be a favorite for all fans of the Star Wars franchise.

Peter Tchaikovsky — Fifth Symphony No. 5, Mvt. 2

NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with actor Kelvin Harrison Jr. about starring in the 2022 movie Chevalier, which tells the forgotten story of Joseph Bologne, a Black composer and violinist of the 1700s.

Transcript

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

The new movie "Chevalier" opens with a concert in Paris conducted by Mozart himself. Mid-performance, a young Black man strides forward and asks...

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "CHEVALIER")

KELVIN HARRISON: (As Joseph Bologne) May I play with you, monsieur?

JOSEPH PROWEN: (As Mozart) All right, fine. Come up here. I assume you know this piece.

HARRISON: (As Joseph Bologne) Yes, monsieur.

PROWEN: (As Mozart) Well, I hope this won't be embarrassing for you.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

KELLY: The two take turns playing.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

KELLY: Far from being embarrassed, he captivates the audience.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "CHEVALIER")

PROWEN: (As Mozart) Who the hell is that?

KELLY: That was Joseph Bologne, also known as the Chevalier de Saint-Georges. The son of a French plantation owner and an enslaved Senegalese woman, he was a celebrated composer and violinist in 1700s Paris. His concerts were frequently attended by Queen Marie Antoinette. But if the name Joseph Bologne is not ringing a bell, you're not alone.

HARRISON: My dad's a classical music teacher, and he never knew about Joseph. And all we did growing up was listen to classical music.

KELLY: That's Kelvin Harrison Jr., who plays Joseph Bologne. He says after he got the part, he went to tell his dad about it.

HARRISON: He was just like, what? How'd I never hear about this cat? You know, we started listening to the music, and he was blown away. He was like, this guy.

(SOUNDBITE OF LONDON CONTEMPORARY ORCHESTRA'S "VIOLIN CONCERTO IN G MAJOR, OP. 8, NO. 2: I. ALLEGRO (FROM "CHEVALIER")")

HARRISON: You know, my dad really had a field day with him.

KELLY: The new movie "Chevalier" hopes to introduce a wider audience to Joseph Bologne, a man that some have dubbed the Black Mozart. When we spoke the other day, I asked Kelvin Harrison Jr. for his thoughts on that nickname.

HARRISON: I think it's fascinating that everybody wants to compare simply because Mozart was the notable composer that we all know of. But arguably, Joseph kind of came first. You can see certain lines from Joseph's work that Mozart actually took and just raised it up two, three whole steps. You hear the same melodies and some of the inspiration, and he had so much flavor. But Mozart was the acceptable guy to listen to at the time. He was the one we could look at as the hotshot, the celebrity of the moment. And...

KELLY: Yeah.

HARRISON: Joseph was still just a man who was lucky enough to be even knighted as a chevalier at the time.

KELLY: Is that actually you playing, like, the amazing finger work, what we see on camera?

HARRISON: Yep. And it was me doing all those finger works, all those bow strokes.

KELLY: Did you play violin before this film?

HARRISON: So my first instrument was the violin. I got into a program in elementary school, and I guess I caught on to it fairly quickly. And then Katrina happened, and I lost the violin. It was damaged. And I just - I changed instruments, and I started playing piano and trumpet because my dad was like, if you're going to live in my house, you're going to play an instrument because he's a music teacher. So when I got the job, I knew I had enough of a grasp on the instrument because of my previous time that - I thought it was going to be movie magic to an extent. And then...

KELLY: Right.

HARRISON: Stephen Williams, our director, was like, no, absolutely not.

KELLY: The skill level you're playing at is obviously not elementary school. It's amazing.

HARRISON: Yeah, it took six months. I got the job when I was in Australia shooting "Elvis," and then immediately I was like, I have to get back home. And I went to my dad, and he got a violin. I got a violin. We started working on our dexterity because that was the biggest thing - making sure those fingers were mobile enough. He's a showman, Joseph. So it's tricky. But you know, you just - six hours a day, every day for six months and so...

KELLY: Oh, wow.

HARRISON: You hope for the best after that.

KELLY: This dude was so insanely talented. He also happened to be the best fencer in Paris. Really? Is that historically accurate? Do we know?

HARRISON: Well, you know, he was - he beat Poinsette (ph). I mean, Poinsette was actually documented to be the best fencer of the time. And it was documented that Joseph beat him in a bout. You know, there's a book called "Virtuoso Of The Sword And Bow" by Gabriel Banat. And he kind of chronicles his entire life from start to finish and really getting into the details of specifically La Boessiere's academy and some of the players that went through the academy and, you know, the envy they experience, how quick he was on his feet. They describe him as catlike. You know, it makes sense historically that he was just this incredible feline of a fencer.

KELLY: So did you have to learn to fence to play this role, too?

HARRISON: Yes, I did. It was - that was - actually, I think it was a lot easier than the violin. But I think with the schedule of the violin, it became harder.

KELLY: Because you were doing, you just told me, six hours of violin a day. So where did fencing fit in?

HARRISON: Oh, my God. So the six hours started before we started shooting, and then we started shooting 10 hours a day. But then after that, I would have to go to fencing for an hour, and then I would do violin for another couple hours, and then I would start learning my lines for the next day.

KELLY: Oh, my goodness.

HARRISON: It was like school.

KELLY: Wow. The movie is a lot of fun to watch, as people may be gathering. It also has moments that are very uncomfortable to watch. I'm thinking of some of the scenes where Joseph is grappling with the racial politics of the era, the racist politics of the era. Were they hard to play?

HARRISON: You know, there are times. There are times when things become very heavy on your heart. And, you know, we shot in Prague, which isn't Paris, but there's still a lot of history. And one of the theaters we shot in was where Mozart premiered "Don Giovanni."

KELLY: Yeah.

HARRISON: You can go through the halls of that theater, and you can still see photos of plays like "Othello" done in blackface. Digesting some of the fact that it's not fully removed, we're not fully out of it in some respects and it was even worse at the time can be heavy on your heart. But I also like to keep in the mindset that at the end of the day, it's a privilege to tell the story. But it's not lost on me in some of those moments, you know?

KELLY: Yeah. There is a line that struck me.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "CHEVALIER")

JIM HIGH: (As George Bologne) Do not give anyone any reason to tear you down. No one may tear down an excellent Frenchman.

KELLY: It made me wonder - as I watched you on screen, wonder if you've ever felt this way. Did that resonate for you?

HARRISON: Oh, 100%. I mean, I think I made a whole career out of that kind of quote.

(LAUGHTER)

KELLY: Being a Frenchman aside. Yeah.

HARRISON: Being a Frenchman aside, yeah, other than on Frenchmen Street in New Orleans (laughter). You know, my dad is such a tough competitor, and I want to say competitive because he moves, as a musician, like an athlete. And the way he taught us to have discipline, the way he taught us to practice, the way he taught us to just move through life was so specific. And so - it's so much resilience. And that movie "Waves" - the line where I was like, you have to work 10 times harder as a Black man to be great - you know, what was so fascinating for me with this movie was seeing how that line just hops from generation to generation to generation to make up for the lost time and the lack of opportunity and the disregard for who we were as people of color. I definitely felt that.

KELLY: Well, Kelvin Harrison, this has been a total pleasure. Thank you for talking to us about this new movie.

HARRISON: Oh, thank you for watching, and thank you for wanting to talk about it. It means a lot to Joseph, I'm sure, and to me. So thank you.

KELLY: Kelvin Harrison - he is the star of the new movie "Chevalier."

(SOUNDBITE OF TAKASHI NISHIZAKI PERFORMANCE OF BACH'S "I. ALLEGRO")

Copyright © 2023 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

Ferde Grofe's Grand Canyon Suite doesn't seem like music for Christmas, at least not on its own, but then it was used in a crucial part of the 1983 movie "A Christmas Story." Join us today to hear iconic holiday movies: A Christmas Story, Home Alone, and Miracle on 34th Street.

Episode Playlist

Hour 1

John Wiliams: Home Alone: We Wish You a Merry Christmas/End Title
Studio Orchestra | John Williams, conductor
Album: Home Alone Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
Sony 46595

Cyril Mockridge: Miracle on 34th Street: Suite
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra | David Newman, conductor
Album: It's A Wonderful Life, Miracle On 34th St. & A Christmas Carol
Telarc 88801

John Williams: Home Alone: Somewhere in My Memory
Studio Orchestra | John Williams, conductor
Album: Home Alone Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
Sony 46595

John Williams: Home Alone: Holiday Flight
Boston Pops Orchestra | John Williams, conductor
Album: Joy to the World
Sony 48232

John Williams: Home Alone: Star of Bethlehem
Boston Pops Orchestra | John Williams, conductor
Album: Joy to the World
Sony 48232

Ferde Grofe: Grand Canyon Suite
The Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra | JoAnn Falletta, conductor
The Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, Kleinhans Music Hall, Buffalo, NY

Hour 2

Kenneth Jennings: Noel: Christmas Eve
St. Olaf Choir
Album: My Soul's Been Anchored in the Lord
St. Olaf 2396

Traditional, arr. Dan Forrest: See Amid the Winters Snow
BYU Combined Choirs and Philharmonic | Andrew Crane, conductor
Brigham Young University, De Jong Concert Hall, Provo, UT

Wynton Marsalis: Violin Concerto in D: Mvts 2-4
Nicola Benedetti, violin | The Philadelphia Orchestra | Cristian Macelaru, conductor
Album: Wynton Marsalis Violin Concerto, Fiddle Dance Suite
Decca 30521

Mel Torme & Robert Wells, arr. Giovanni De Chiaro: The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)
Giovanni De Chiaro, guitar
Album: The Sounds Of Christmas On Guitar
Centaur 2262

Traditional, arr. John Rutter: Past Three O'Clock
Judy Mason, piano | Spivey Hall Tour Choir | Martha Shaw, conductor
Spivey Hall, Clayton State University, Morrow, GA
Music: 01:25

The new opera The Hours is based on a film directed by Stephen Daldry and a novel by Michael Cunningham, which itself is based on a book (Mrs. Dalloway) by Virginia Woolf.

But it captures the material in a brand-new way.

"I knew the book. I knew the film," said Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, Kevin Puts. "I knew that what you can do on an opera stage, and through music and through harmony...that simultaneity...is something that works. I could imagine, you know, duets and trios that would eventually involve the three ladies who live in these different time periods in the 20th century, in different places. And that was compelling, just from a musical standpoint."

Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a look at an eventful day in the lives of three women, and how their experiences intersect. Evoking Virginia Woolf's writing techniques, he entwines three characters' stories: the British novelist herself, struggling to create Mrs. Dalloway in 1923; an unhappy 1940s housewife in Los Angeles who is reading the book; and a New York editor in the late 1990s preparing a party for her friend and former lover, who's dying of AIDS.

Now those three women are being played by a powerhouse trio of divas at the Metropolitan Opera: Renée Fleming, Joyce DiDonato and Kelli O'Hara. It will be broadcast in HD at movie theaters around the world on Saturday.

The opera came about because Puts collaborated with opera superstar Fleming on a song cycle called The Brightness of Light – a setting of letters between Georgia O'Keefe and Alfred Stieglitz. Puts approached Fleming at a party after the cycle's premiere, asking if she'd like to work on an opera together.

"And I said, 'Absolutely. You know, I would love it,'" said Fleming. "And that's how the conversation started."

When someone in Fleming's office suggested The Hours, they both thought it was a perfect idea - as did the Metropolitan Opera and Philadelphia Orchestra, which co-commissioned the piece.

Greg Pierce, a playwright who has written the scripts for a couple of musicals with John Kander and the libretto for the opera Fellow Travelers was enlisted to do the libretto.

"The Met is a very big space," Pierce said. "It's got a massive chorus, a big orchestra. Why not make use of all of that? You could do an Hours that's really intimate, a chamber piece. That's not what we wanted to do."

Much of the book's narration is interior, and Puts and Pierce decided to use the chorus to express some of the inner voices of the three main characters.

"We didn't want the chorus to be townspeople, you know? And nothing against townspeople. You know, I love Brigadoon, but we needed them to do something else for The Hours," said Pierce. "And the idea that they could potentially go in and out of the minds of these main characters and argue with them, they could be in inner argument – it was really exciting to us."

In Phelim McDermott's staging and Annie-B Parson's choreography, the chorus and dancers are constantly onstage, helping to underline the central characters' emotional states.

Having three lead roles in three different time frames led composer Puts to come up with three different "musics," as he put it. Clarissa, the 1990s character – who shares the same first name as the protagonist in Mrs. Dalloway – has "a kind of American quality to the harmony, and a certain kind of minimalist pulse," Puts said.

The character of Laura Brown, the depressed, suicidal 1940s housewife, played by Kelli O'Hara, is based, in part, on Michael Cunningham's own mother. Puts wrote music in the scenes with her family that "have a kind of Lawrence Welk/ Leave It to Beaver/Henry Mancini sort of quality. But it's not really her. It's really her family," he said.

Virginia Woolf is also suicidal - in the opera and in real life – but filled with abundant creativity. For mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, Puts composed music that's dark, with surprising harmonies and moments that sometimes have "a kind of baroque quality to some of the ornamentation," said Puts. He said he was naturally thinking of Joyce DiDonato's vocal quality, especially the way she sounds while singing baroque repertoire.

The process of creating the opera was intensely collaborative with all three singers, who were free to make suggestions about their vocal lines.

"I tell you it has truly been one of the great experiences of my artistic life," said the multi-Grammy Award-winning DiDonato. "I said, 'If I do this, I can achieve something a little bit more magical or whatever.' And he said, 'The only constraint is I can't change the orchestra, but everything else was open for discussion.' And I think we found some really wonderful things."

While there have been inevitable changes in the transfer from page and screenplay to stage, the themes of Michael Cunningham's novel are still there – the issues of mental health and suicidal ideation, how past and present are constantly in conversation with one another, queerness, how all three women are filled with regrets and loneliness.

Yet novelist Cunningham left the creators to their own devices. He didn't see the opera until opening night at the Met. "It was fantastic," he said. "It's a strange experience. as it would be. It was a strange experience seeing the movie all those years ago."

"I genuinely don't have this thing about the 'sacred text," Cunningham said. "If anything, I feel like it is a life sign in a novel, that it can be adapted; that it has enough space to be able to take on other forms."

If there is one moment in the opera that deviates most from Cunningham's original, it's the ending, said librettist Pierce.

"We knew that we needed these three incredible singers to sing together," he said. "When you're telling these three stories and you're in an opera, people are going to be waiting for that. And I was waiting for that. And it was really scary writing that because we wanted to do it right."

What he and Puts did was create a trio that's kind of afterHours – the narrative is wrapped up, the relationship between all three characters is made clear and the three women sing to one another out of time and space.

"I feel like that's where opera solved the problem of needing to really connect these three souls," said O'Hara. "These three entities, hour after hour over the years. At some point, you had to break these walls and bring these three women together."

DiDonato said she has a hard time getting through the finale without crying. "This moment, these three titanic divas sitting down and saying, 'You're not alone.' That is deeply comforting, especially in 2022."

Copyright 2025, NPR

Violin prodigy and inspiration for Mozart, Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges was an illegitimate son of an African slave and a French plantation owner. He rose to heights in French society as a composer and swordsman before an ill-fated love affair.

You won't believe how much Bradley Cooper looks like Leonard Bernstein in an upcoming Netflix film, Maestro.

The film is said to focus on the relationship between Bernstein and his wife, Felicia Montealegre. Their relationship was complex, to say the least. While they did love each other and had three children together, it is rumored that because of the conservative nature of orchestras during that time, Bernstein had to conceal his homosexuality. Eventually, he could no longer hide and left Montealegre in 1976. A year later, she was diagnosed with lung cancer and Bernstein moved back to care for her until her death in 1978.

Take a sneak peek at photos from Netflix’s Twitter feed of Cooper’s transformation into Bernstein. With Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg as producers, expectations for the film are high. The film is planned for release in 2023.

There is a strange instrument that was once believed to have magical powers. Join host Liz Lyon as we learn a little about the history of the glass armonica and listen to music composed for this unique instrument.

Episode 80 Glass Armonica

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Adagio for Glass Armonica — In the last year of Mozart’s life, he composed this piece for the glass armonica, which has been referred to as one of unearthly beauty.

LISTEN — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Adagio for Glass Armonica

Johann Abraham Peter Schulz: Largo — There were many rumors surrounding the glass armonica. In Germany, some towns actually banned the instrument. Here is a piece written for it by German composer Johann Abraham Peter Schulz.

LISTEN — Johann Abraham Peter Schulz: Largo

James Horner: Spock — The glass armonica also is sometimes referred to as the bowl organ. It produces ethereal sounds and when paired with the harp, composer James Horner thought it created the perfect theme for Spock in the Star Trek movie The Wrath of Khan.

LISTEN — James Horner: Spock

Carter Burwell: The Glass Armonica — Carter Burwell is best known for his work as a film composer. He wrote this piece for the glass armonica to accompany the movie Mr. Holmes, which portrays the famous literary detective Sherlock Holmes in his old age.

LISTEN — Carter Burwell: The Glass Armonica

You can now search and listen to YourClassical Adventures where podcasts are found.

Explore more from YourClassical Adventures!

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Monday is the 100th birthday anniversary of Elmer Bernstein, Oscar-winning composer for The Ten Commandments, The Great Escape, and The Magnificent Seven.  Epic scores all, yet for me his most affecting music is his gorgeous score for To Kill a Mockingbird.  Does any other music capture childhood, fragility and innocence more beautifully?

Thursday brings the next chapter in the annual Twin Cities Hitchcock Film Festival. This year it includes the 1942 rarity Saboteur,  and – just a few days after Doris Day’s 100th birthday anniversary – The Man Who Knew Too Much, in which music becomes a pivotal plot device, not only Doris Day’s heart-wrenchingly suspenseful take on “Que Sera, Sera,” but also in Arthur Benjamin’s Storm Cloud Cantata, the perfect musical coverup for an assassin’s bullet?

Saturday, the La Crosse Symphony plays “The Best of British Movie Scores,” including a visit from the fabulous pianist Alessio Bax performing Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.

The weekend also brings the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra’s new orchestral arrangement of Bach’s keyboard classic, the Goldberg Variations.  Although not originally movie music, its gentle theme has been used in many movies — including, to terrifying effect, in The Silence of the Lambs!

Jonny Greenwood was known primarily as a guitarist and keyboardist for the rock band Radiohead at the time that filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson reached out about Greenwood writing the score for his 2007 movie, There Will Be Blood.

"My reaction when Paul asked me was excitement," Greenwood tells Fresh Air. "I thought, 'This is going to be a bit like being in a band with somebody — except I'm in a band with Paul and the people who are making this film.' "

Greenwood went on to write the music for three more of Anderson's films — The Master, Phantom Thread and most recently Licorice Pizza — as well as scores for The Power of the Dog and Spencer, both released last year.

Greenwood was eventually recognized for his inventive, organic film compositions, receiving an Academy Award nomination in 2018 for Phantom Thread, as well as a Golden Globe nomination for The Power of the Dog. (Oscar nominations for 2021 will be announced on Tues., Feb. 8).

Scoring movies gave Greenwood a chance to more deeply explore his interest in baroque and avant-garde music, which he traces back to childhood. In elementary school, a teacher encouraged his class to try to make a different noise with their instruments — in response, Greenwood remembers, he put the bow of his violin under the strings, playing the bottom string and top string at the same time.

"That really stuck with me," he says, "just realizing that there were really no rules. ... The variety of color that one player can make with a string instrument is quite mind blowing."

You can read highlights from this interview below, or listen to the broadcast version via the audio player at the top of this page.

Pretending to play keyboards when he first joined Radiohead

Thom [Yorke]'s band had a keyboard player — [whom] I think they didn't get on with because he played his keyboard so loud. And so when I got the chance to play with them, the first thing I did was make sure my keyboard was turned off ... I must have done months of rehearsals with them with this keyboard, and they didn't know that I'd already turned it off.

They made quite a racket, quite a noise. It was all guitars and distortion — and so I would pretend to play for weeks on end and Thom would say, "I can't quite hear what you're doing, but I think you're adding a really interesting texture, because I can tell when you're not playing." And I'm thinking, "No, you can't, because I'm really not playing." And I'd go home in the evening and work out how to actually play chords and cautiously over the next few months, I would start turning this keyboard up. And that's how I started in with Radiohead.

Why he prefers working with real instruments

I think the danger with writing music not-on-paper and relying on computers and demos is that you start to get used to how some strings sound, and then just look to replicate that. Whereas the variety of color that one player can make with a string instrument, it's quite mind-blowing. And just the combination of a whole ensemble and all the directions it can go, it's really exciting and daunting, and it's easily my favorite day of the year when the string players turn up for an afternoon.

I always found acoustic instruments, certainly orchestral instruments, to be capable of much more variety and strangeness and complexity than nearly all of the software I've used in the past. And I think that's maybe why, to me, music by people like [Krzysztof] Penderecki and [Gyorgy] Ligeti ... still sounds very strange and contemporary, and they still sound like the music of the future to me. Whereas lots of the electronic stuff that was done in the '60s and '70s, you hear it now, and it's just of its time.

The strange sound of his "Phantom Thread II" theme

There's a roll of felt laid between the hammers and the strings, which is why it sounds like that. And it's a little bit out of tune — just because I'm a bit lazy with my booking the piano tuner, I'm afraid.

[Violinist] Daniel [Pioro] is a very physical player indeed, and is interested in every possible color and texture. I also love a recording where you can hear the physicality of what's happening, whether it's the breathing of the player or just the effort involved in making the music. I know it drives some people crazy, but things like Glenn Gould singing along and all of that remind that there's all this muscle ... behind the making of the music. It just makes it more exciting to me. I think that stuff is, quite often, clinically stripped out in most people's consumption of music. Especially classical music.

On the more baroque version of that theme, "Phantom Thread III"

I'm a big fan of these historically very inaccurate recordings of baroque music that were done in the '60s, '70s, '80s even, before the authenticity police stepped in and made everyone play with the right size of orchestra and the right kind of violins. Because it's sort of glorious hearing this baroque music done with big romantic orchestras — it would never have sounded like that. So that was a reference I sent to Paul [Thomas Anderson], and he was also talking about that [Stanley] Kubrick film, Barry Lyndon, that has some big baroque orchestral things in it. It was, on one level, another excuse to get in a room with an orchestra and just revel in that beautiful big sound they make.

Fitting the music to a film's story

There's a few cues in Phantom Thread that were written specifically for the scene they're in, but they're the minority. It's usually more a case of writing music about the characters, or the scenery, or the story itself. Like in There Will Be Blood, I remember being really taken with the story of H.W. and this sort of abandoned boy being taken — I enjoyed writing quite a lot of, I suppose, quite sentimental music for that. I enjoyed that easily as much as writing the more atonal and relatively stranger orchestrations and things.

I try to avoid things like click tracks, so quite often the players are just being asked to play two or three minutes of music and I and Paul, the editor or director, have to just put up with something that might not fit a picture, or even move the picture around so it fits the music. But this is partly from just trying to avoid computers as being the arbiter in how music is played and how tempos are conducted.

Working off of early footage, before a film has even wrapped

Usually, a lot of it gets written when I see the first test footage. Like with Jane Campion's film [The Power of the Dog], it was seeing all of the footage of New Zealand that was standing in [for] Montana, and just seeing the colors of the film and understanding the script and the characters. That's already lots of really fertile ground to start writing music — and I'd rather write twice as much music as needed and just keep going, rather than panic about dropping the level of the music at the right place so a line of dialogue can be fitted in exactly in the right second. And so I'm very indulged in that way, and I'm allowed to start at work very early while films are being shot. Or even before.

Heidi Saman and Seth Kelley produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz and Molly Seavy-Nesper adapted it for the web.

Copyright 2025, Fresh Air, NPR

Join host Lynne Warfel for a special Valentine's Day program and offshoot of the weekly national program Saturday Cinema. Love at the Movies is an hour of classic movie scores from romantic films, rom-coms, animated love stories and more.

Program

• Rota: “Romeo and Juliet” - Love Theme

• Doyle: “Much Ado About Nothing” - Overture

• Jarre: “Doctor Zhivago” - Lara’s Theme

• Newman: “Wuthering Heights” - Cathy's Theme

• Brown: “Singin' in the Rain” - Main Theme

• Bernstein: “West Side Story” - Somewhere

• Chaplin: “City Lights” - Suite

• Rogers: Where or When

• Waxman: “Philadelphia Story” - Suite

• Warren: An Affair to Remember

• Lai: “Love Story” - Theme

• Santaoalalla: Selections from “Brokeback Mountain”

• Steiner: “Casablanca” - Suite

Scott Simon talks to radio host and author Martin Goldsmith about ‘Winter Journey,’ a film about his parents, who were musicians in a Jewish orchestra during Nazi Germany.

Transcript

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Thursday, the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra will perform Carl Nielsen's Symphony No. 4 and show a film, "Winter Journey." The film's a mix of memoir, documentary and re-creation to show the story of two musicians who played in a Jewish Kulturbund orchestra. The film stars Bruno Ganz in his last performance. He plays a member of that orchestra recollecting those times.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "WINTER JOURNEY")

BRUNO GANZ: (As George Goldsmith) I'm George Goldsmith. I'm a boring, old man.

MARTIN GOLDSMITH: Who used to be a musician.

GANZ: (As George Goldsmith) ...Who used to be a musician.

GOLDSMITH: And who used to be Gunther Goldschmidt.

GANZ: (As George Goldsmith) Uh-huh.

GOLDSMITH: That's what I'd like to talk about.

SIMON: And the voice of the son trying to bring out his family's story is Martin Goldsmith. The true story is taken from his book "The Inextinguishable Symphony." And Martin Goldsmith, a host on Sirius XM, who was once our colleague here at NPR, joins us now. Marty, thanks so much for being with us.

GOLDSMITH: Thank you for having me, Scott.

SIMON: First, tell us about this extraordinary orchestra that included your parents, the Jewish orchestra in Nazi Germany.

GOLDSMITH: These were artists who, after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933, were summarily booted out of their positions with German opera companies, orchestras and theater companies. And in the late spring and early summer of 1933, these now-displaced Jewish artists came together to create this Kulturbund, this cultural association, reasoning that if they could no longer make art for their fellow Germans, they could make art for their fellow German Jews. Dr. Joseph Goebbels at the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, as it was called, quickly realized that he could use this organization, this Kulturbund as a propaganda tool. When other countries around the world began to object to stories of the way the Jews were treated in Germany, Goebbels could feign surprise and say, look, the Jews have their own orchestra. They have their own opera company. Surely, all of these stories you are hearing are fake.

SIMON: And this was happening at the same time that other Jews were already beginning to disappear.

GOLDSMITH: Certainly, that was the case towards the end of the 1930s. But during all of this, the Kulturbund continued to perform heroically.

SIMON: Marty, when you were growing up, what were you told about what had happened to your grandparents and relatives in Germany?

GOLDSMITH: Not a thing. But my older brother Peter and I were obviously aware that at Thanksgiving, we had no grandmothers or grandfathers or aunts or uncles. It was a subject that just didn't come up at the dinner table. There was no reason for it to. My brother once summoned the courage to ask my father, where are our aunts and uncles and grandparents? And my father replied, they died in the war. That was the extent of the explanation when the actual truth was so much more horrific than that.

SIMON: You spent some time in this film playing you, questioning and sometimes being upset with your father, who died in 2009. Was that difficult?

GOLDSMITH: It was, and it wasn't. I mean, my father, when he found out, when he first saw these grisly newsreels coming out of Germany and he realized that his whole family had been murdered in the camps, he, in my opinion, decided to do penance by giving up music, giving up the thing he loved. And that made him unhappy with his life. And there is a scene in the film in which my frustration with my father having thrown away the art that he so loved and which was so much a part of his life, that frustration and pity and sorrow and anger sort of boiled over.

SIMON: I got to tell you, Marty, it's hard to see that scene. You know that you love your father, and yet, you know, you can see the wounds in his heart almost opening in front of you when you say that.

GOLDSMITH: Yes. As I say, it was both not so hard and very hard to do - not so hard because I could summon these feelings which are still smoldering, I suppose, somewhere within me. But I simultaneously have so much pity and love and respect for this man, who was able to live the next 50, 60 years of his life knowing that he had put music aside.

SIMON: I don't have to tell you that there are still anti-Semitic attacks or displays in America of one kind or another almost every week. And just this week, Whoopi Goldberg, a beloved American media figure, said, quote, "the Holocaust isn't about race. This is white people doing it to white people." She immediately apologized. What haven't we learned? Or what did we learn and forget?

GOLDSMITH: It pains me to say this, but in many ways, we've learned nothing. In many ways, we've learned nothing when it comes to racism. Also, in this week's news, we see a number of United States senators saying, in effect, that the only way a Black woman could be appointed to the Supreme Court is if she were the beneficiary of some kind of affirmative action, a more blatant expression of racism I really can't imagine. Many things have been prettied up and beautified, and many rules of social conduct have been established. And we see that beneath the decorations and the polite expressions - beneath all of that, the same ancient prejudices and hatreds remain, whether the objects are Jews or African Americans. We have learned a lot, and yet we have learned nothing.

SIMON: Tell us about the Nielsen Symphony No. 4 that the Buffalo Philharmonic's going to play.

GOLDSMITH: It's an extraordinary piece, Scott. It was composed in 1916 at the height of the grand folly known as World War I. Carl Nielsen, living up in Denmark, was appalled by what he heard and read about the carnage of the first world war. But as horrified and as appalled as Nielsen was, he was ultimately an optimistic man and, at the head of the score, wrote that even if somehow the human race managed to destroy itself through warfare, life would eventually return to the Earth, perhaps in the form of plant life or bird life or animal life. Nielsen wrote, music is life and, like life, inextinguishable.

The Kulturbund orchestra in Berlin in the spring of 1941, just before my parents managed to escape, rehearsed the Nielsen Fourth for a performance in the coming autumn season. Of course, the autumn season never arrived because on September 11, 1941, the Kulturbund was dissolved. And everybody who had not made it out by then were sent to the camps.

But the title "Inextinguishable Symphony" speaks to the courage and valor of the members of the Kulturbund, who continued doing their best to provide some kind of solace to their fellow Jews from 1933 all the way up until 1941. Hearing this glorious, glorious music, the story of those brave, indistinguishable artists in their minds - I'm very much looking forward to this first multimedia presentation.

SIMON: Martin Goldsmith is the voice of the film "Winter Journey," which will be shown this Thursday as part of a performance with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. Marty, thanks so much for being with us.

GOLDSMITH: It's been a great pleasure, Scott. Thank you.

(SOUNDBITE OF CARL NIELSEN'S "SYMPHONY NO. 4, OP. 29, FS 76 THE INEXTINGUISHABLE")

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“Here rests in honored glory an American soldier known but to God.” - Tomb of the Unknown Soldier

One hundred years ago this Veterans Day, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was erected at Arlington National Cemetery. Originally constructed to provide the final resting place for unidentified American service members of World War I, the tomb serves that purpose for all unknown military members from all conflicts. To commemorate the tomb’s centennial, the Virginia-based opera company UrbanArias is presenting its new musical film, Unknown, which features the title work that it commissioned from composer Shawn Okpebholo and librettist Marcus Amaker.

Honor our veterans and enjoy this new video adventure that implores the audience to reflect on the ideas of war and honor and how they pertain to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The video is free to watch starting at midnight eastern time on Nov. 11, but viewers must register beforehand. Visit the Unknown website for more information.

Meanwhile, see what’s in store by watching the trailer below.

The silent films of a century ago were never really silent. Damsels were rescued from railroad tracks and the Keystone Cops chased the bad guys accompanied by a pianist or theater organist. Sitting in the dark with the rest of the crowd, they’d watch the film and improvise, heightening the onscreen action. 

At 1 p.m. Sunday, Philip Brunelle, the founder and mastermind of VocalEssence, will take the bench of the Mighty Wurlitzer organ at the Historic Heights Theater in Columbia Heights and accompany Safety Last, Harold Lloyd’s most famous film. You’ve probably seen the 1923 movie’s iconic image of Lloyd hanging onto a skyscraper’s clock high above the street.

Brunelle is a natural for this gig. In the 1980s and ‘90s, he accompanied dozens of silent films that the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis presented each summer. 

“It’s total improvisation the whole time,” he says. “The entire 60 minutes. No silence.”

For prep, Brunelle watches the film ahead of time to get a sense of key moments and overall pacing. But there’s no sheet music — he can’t even see his hands on the keys in the dark of the theater. For him, there’s a certain mystery to how this works. 

“I create improvisations on the hymns each week at Plymouth Congregational Church,” he says of the Minneapolis church where he’s organist and choirmaster, “and have a great love of all kinds of composers. That’s helpful for doing silent films. Still, my wife has said many times, ‘I have no idea how you do that.’ I don’t either!”

Tickets for Sunday’s show are available at the Heights Theater website. The venue is at 3951 Central Ave. NE in Columbia Heights. This is a benefit for Groveland Food Shelf; cash donations and nonperishable food items will be accepted at the event. 

Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones) is in her last year of high school. She doesn't have much of a plan beyond graduation, because she assumes she's going to continue as she has been, working with her father and brother on the family fishing boat out of Gloucester, Mass. Ruby loves music and loves to sing, but the idea of actually trying to study or explore music seems like an impossible idea, even after her choir teacher (Eugenio Derbez) sees promise in her and encourages her to apply to Berklee College of Music in Boston.

Deciding whether to work in the family business or strike out on your own is always tough, but for Ruby, it has an added wrinkle: her parents (Marlee Matlin and Troy Kotsur) and her brother (Daniel Durant) are deaf. Ruby herself is not; she is what's called a CODA: a Child of Deaf Adults.

Directed and written by Sian Heder, CODA is closely based on a 2014 French film called La Famille Bélier, but this version has one important quality that the French film didn't: The deaf characters are played by deaf actors. Matlin is probably the most famous deaf actor in the United States, but CODA also has hugely appealing turns from Kotsur and Durant, both of whom have worked with the Deaf West Theatre in Los Angeles, including on its lauded production of Spring Awakening. Matlin has worked there, too.

The fundamental conflict for Ruby is the disruption it would cause in her family for her to leave. She's been her parents' interpreter since she was a child, and she feels responsible for things like making sure her father isn't cheated when he sells his fish at the end of every day.

Her parents — especially her mother — wonder what they would do without her to act as a bridge to the local community, which seems to have made no effort at all, either socially or in business terms, to communicate with the Rossis. This weighs on her parents, and it weighs on Ruby. It cannot go on like this forever, but what, her mother wonders, is the alternative?

CODA is a cheerfully conventional story in many respects: a kid discovers what she loves and has to figure out what she's willing to give up to follow her dream. She has an inspirational teacher who believes in her. She's met a boy, and that relationship is also making her think about life beyond the family she defends fiercely and sometimes resents. It's a predictable piece in structure that's sharp in execution, and that's so inventive and fresh in some of its particulars that it almost disguises the most conventional story beats.

Widely released films rarely embrace ASL as much as CODA does, even for deaf characters: here, rather than speech being prioritized for hearing audiences, the actors sign and are subtitled, and the language is allowed to breathe in a way that's moving, often funny, and very effective. (According to Variety, the French film didn't subtitle the signing; hearing audiences only understood it through the daughter repeating or responding to it.)

There is no question that Ruby's awakening about music can be vigorously corny — but the thing is ... so are a lot of real high school awakenings about art. I myself went to a summer music camp as a teenager where lots of people were very serious musicians headed for conservatories. We learned the song "I Sing The Body Electric" from Fame — from actual, literal Fame, for heaven's sake! — and believe me, at 15 I was deeply moved by singing lines like "I'll look back on Venus, look back on Mars/and I'll burn with the fire of ten million stars." It was extremely corny and it meant the world to me. What's more, our choral director believed everyone should know how to learn parts by ear, so she taught us that one without sheet music, just standing around together, which made it feel even more like a thing that would ... you know, happen in a movie.

So while Ruby's path is audience-ready and feels engineered to cause tears, sometimes music and theater kids are exactly that swept up in what they're doing. It might be cheesy, but if you're going to go for this kind of grand emotion, this actually might be the right setting for it.

And in the meantime, you get a much more subtle story alongside that about the ways in which this family dynamic both hurts and serves everyone in it. Ruby feels like she's sacrificed a great deal for her family; her brother senses that she gets something from being the only person she thinks can communicate with the rest of the world effectively. This gentle study of patterns in families, where everybody can love each other while still being stuck in habits they need to break, doesn't have the bombast of the musical sequences, but it has its own resonance.

Did CODA deserve to crowd out everything else to the degree that it did when Sundance handed out its awards? Probably not. But there is a place for the crowd-pleaser, the tear-jerker, the movie that wants to manipulate your emotions and make you cry — particularly if it manages to bring something new to an old formula. The performances here, especially from Kotsur and Durant, neither of whom were actors I had seen much of, are excellent. And if it feels silly to cry while people sing, then, well, as we all learn in time, there are worse reasons for tears.

Copyright 2025, NPR

If you’re a fan of composer Benjamin Britten – or even if you only know him from kiddie concert performances of his Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra – you’re not alone. Filmmaker Wes Anderson’s Britten-filled quirky cupcake Moonrise Kingdom evoked the comic, angsty mysteries of childhood through several Britten scores, including Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. And, Britten’s children’s opera Noye’s Floode (Noah’s Flood) becomes a central plot point of Anderson’s movie.

Moonrise Kingdom is one of five Wes Anderson classics (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic, Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel) featured in the Heights Theater’s retrospective Wes Anderson’s Kingdom, which starts this week and runs through August.

Meanwhile, relax and watch every Wes Anderson movie ever made, in seven minutes.

Rob King is a playwright, a screen writer, and an actor. His latest project is a film titled "Haunting Clara." The film explores the relationship of 19th century musical "power couple" Robert and Clara Schumann, and how that relationship evolves when the young Johannes Brahms enters their lives.

The film was produced by The Haylofters, a community theater in Burlington, Wisconsin. After its premiere at 7 p.m. on Jan. 14, the film will be available on YouTube. Enjoy highlights from Steve Staruch's conversation with Rob King using the audio player above.

Mansell churned out a whole batch of disparate musical ideas after reading the script for the film, which director Darren Aronofsky co-adapted with Hubert Selby Jr. from the 1978 novel of the same name, about four characters succumbing to addiction. The sketch that became the score's central theme, Mansell remembers, was track 17 out of 20 on a demo CD he'd made, and sounded like kind of a hip-hop slow jam: "It even had sort of an 808 beat under it," he says. It didn't yet have the stabbing melody line that would become its hallmark; for now it was just three sad, descending chords.

Aronofsky had originally asked Mansell to write a hip-hop score for the story, since that was the music of the Brooklyn director's youth, but Mansell kept getting stuck. He was on the verge of quitting when Aronofsky flew to New Orleans — where Mansell was living in an apartment owned by and adjacent to Trent Reznor — for a desperate session of just throwing ideas from the CD against scenes in the film. They randomly tried the theme track under a scene where the character Marion (Jennifer Connelly), who has just slept with her therapist for drug money, stumbles out into a violent thunderstorm and vomits. "And it was just like, oh my God, what's this?" Mansell says. "It was one of those magical moments where image plus music creates this third element."

He developed that seedling into a piece called "Lux Aeterna," and it became the core idea of the score, an addictive uroboros of despair that was further elevated by the artistry of Kronos Quartet, who performed it for the recording. "It's not just the chords, it's not just the melody," Mansell says of the track's essential power, "it's the life that [Kronos] breathed into it." The theme plays in slightly different variations throughout the film — during the speed-fueled montage of Sara (Ellen Burstyn) cleaning her apartment, or when Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) flees a drug dealer's limo after a violent shootout — and it crescendos in the finale as the four main characters each curl up into a fetal position. "Darren had said, 'It's like a horror movie, really. Every time that the addiction wins, that's a win for the monster,' " Mansell recalls. " 'Lux Aeterna' is basically a monster theme."

Requiem was only the composer's second film score, and he says he felt way out of his depth. A self-taught guitar player from the industrial town of Stourbridge, 100 miles north of London, Mansell formed the band Pop Will Eat Itself when he was 19. The group's sample-heavy style — a mashup of post-punk, rock and hip-hop — was dubbed "grebo." They didn't garner any big hits, but "like the best music of that time, you felt like you were in a club," Reznor says. "If you saw other people at that rack in the record store, or wearing a t-shirt, you shared some common insight and secret society vibe. [The band] felt like a refreshing breath of truth. It wasn't concerned about political correctness or anything else. It just felt like an interesting collage of music and presentation. It just felt alive."

Reznor liked PWEI so much that he signed the band to his label, Nothing Records. He says that in his New Orleans base of operations at the time, "We had a big studio with a lot of rooms for people to hang out, and it also had two separate apartments attached to the building. At some point, after we had toured together and Clint and I had become friends and drinking buddies and kind of comrades, I vaguely remember he was in some form of crisis in his life, and was living in New York and needed to get away. And I said, 'Well, there's an apartment here. Anytime, you know — indefinitely — if you want to stay there, there's nobody living there.' "

Mansell was transitioning out of PWEI, and had just written an electronic score for Aronofsky's first feature, Pi. He moved into one of the apartments, and Reznor bought him his first Apple computer and Pro Tools setup. "I remember him working super hard, and my recollection is it taking quite a bit of time, and just hearing peripherally about the frustrations and the learning curve — but a real excitement," he says. "And to my amazement, this incredible film pops out, with this incredible soundtrack. I was really happy for him. And suddenly he's a big film composer."

Though Reznor says Mansell didn't directly inspire his own evolution into a film composer 10 years later with The Social Network, he adds: "Clint would have given me the confidence to feel like it could be done. You know, it's not an impossible thing. He's proven you can do that, without 20 years of university studies and degrees."

Requiem for a Dream premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2000, and was released in theaters that December. Burstyn received an Oscar nomination for her performance as an aging woman in unglamorous descent, but the film — a relentlessly bleak, hallucinogenic trip that crescendos into a symphony of debasement — wasn't exactly a smash. Aronofsky chose to release it unrated to avoid an NC-17 rating, which all but relegated it to art houses.

Likewise, the "monster theme" for this controversial, indie downer should have faded into obscurity. Instead, it quietly became a monster hit — not on the radio, but relentlessly licensed in other media. Most of that can be traced to its usage in the theatrical trailer for The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers in 2002, where it was given an "epic" remix, goosed with a warlike choir and full orchestra, which was created specially for the trailer by Simone Benyacar, Daniel Nielsen and Veigar Margeirsson.

After that, the "Requiem for a Tower" remix kept getting used in movie trailers — including for The Da Vinci Code, I Am Legend and Sunshine — as well as for video games (Assassin's Creed), advertising campaigns (Canon cameras, Molson Canadiaan beer) and on TV shows (The Late Show with David Letterman, So You Think You Can Dance). Mansell wasn't paid much up front for the score, but he held onto the writing and publishing rights. Each licensing fee would have brought in somewhere between $35,000 and $100,000. "If I could do that every day, you know, fantastic," he says, laughing.

Mansell's film scoring career ignited after Requiem. He scored four more films for Aronofsky, including Noah, the Grammy-nominated Black Swan — where he applied a remix approach to the music of Tchaikovsky — and The Fountain, about a man whose wife is dying of cancer and his desperate quest for immortality. It had been discovering David Bowie that turned a young Mansell onto music in the 1970s; in 2009, Bowie's son Duncan Jones found himself using the scores from Requiem and The Fountain as reference tracks for his sci-fi thinker, Moon — so he asked Mansell to score it.

Moon and Requiem became favorites of another director, Ben Wheatley, leading him and Mansell to collaborate on 2015's High-Rise and, most recently, a new adaptation of the Daphne du Maurier classic Rebecca for Netflix. "The thing that I love about his music in general," Wheatley says, "is the sorrow, the sadness of things. As light and as romantic as it can sound, there is always that underscore, undertow, of sadness. And I definitely feel that is totally appropriate for [Rebecca,], because the story is sad about things."

In 2014, sorrow paid a personal visit to Mansell: His girlfriend, actress Heather Mottola, died of complications from pneumonia at just 29. The last thing they'd seen in a theater together was a concert film of Lou Reed performing his polarizing album Berlin.

"Obviously I was grieving, and in a lot of shock," Mansell says. "It was traumatic. I did therapy and grief counseling, and they all kind of pointed at the idea that, 'You should express yourself through music, and do something musical for her.' " He ultimately decided to make a track-for-track cover album of Berlin, which he released this summer.

Even though Reed's subject matter is grim — drugs, murder, doomed romance — Mansell and his collaborator, Clint Walsh, decided to make it in the glam punk style that Mottola loved. "The reinterpretation of the music actually became about us doing it, not what it represented," he says. "We had fun making that record. The original record is very downbeat, and it's bleak. I think we found some hope in our version."

Mansell's collaborators tend to say he's a pretty cheery and funny guy, who happens to be drawn to stories in the realm of requiems. "But I think it's more than that," Mansell says for his own part. "I think it's to do with the authenticity of those things, you know, and the stakes of them. They're just the ones that feel real to me, that musically bring something out of me. I want to spend the time with them you know? It feels important to me."

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit npr.org.

Join host Lynne Warfel for an hour of great movie music from films that celebrate school days. From Dead Poet's Society to Mr. Holland's Opus, there's music for students of all ages.

Playlist

• Richard Addinsell: Goodbye, Mr. Chips: Theme
• Malcolm Arnold: The Belles of St. Trinian's: Comedy Suite
• Richard Addinsell: Tom Brown's Schooldays: Overture
• Maurice Jarre: Dead Poet's Society: Keating's Triumph
• Alan Silvestri: Back to the Future
• Danny Elfman: Back to School: Excerpts
• John Williams: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone: Suite

When I was growing up, the film music of Ennio Morricone — who died Monday at 91 — was always playing in my family's home, blasting from a reel-to-reel tape on my father's massive console stereo system.

The music came via conductor Hugo Montenegro's pop-oriented arrangements of the Italian composer's work, on an album that topped the charts in the late 1960s. But while they weren't the originals, those often-cheesy recordings became my gateway to one of the greatest film composers in history and what I still feel is the best score ever written, Morricone's groundbreaking music for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Listen now to music from that 1966 film, along with some of Morricone's other memorable scores, including Once Upon a Time in America and The Mission. Oh, and these recordings are all the original — just like Morricone.

Playlist

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Main Title

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly “Il Tramonto” (“Sundown”)

The Mission: “On Earth as It Is in Heaven”

The Mission: “Gabriel’s Oboe”

A Fistful of Dollars: Main Title

For a Few Dollars More: Main Title

"Chi Mai" (used in several films, including Maddalena [1971] and Le Professionnel [1981])

Cinema Paradiso: Main Title

In the Line of Fire: Main Title

The Untouchables: End Title

Two Mules For Sister Sara: “Sister Sara’s Theme”

Once Upon a Time in the West: Main Title

Once Upon a Time in America: Main Title

Orca: Main Title

Days of Heaven: Main Title

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: “The Ecstasy of Gold”

When you hear the term "film score," perhaps the themes from your favorite movie come to mind — the suspenseful bass melody from Jaws or the magical Hedwig's Theme from Harry Potter. These incredibly complex pieces of music are what drive our emotional responses when we watch a film.

John Williams, who wrote those themes, as well as the scores for Star Wars, Jurassic Park and so many others, is often the first film composer to come to mind. There's also Hans Zimmer, who scored Inception, Interstellar and Dunkirk, and Alexandre Desplat, who won Oscars for The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Shape of Water.

However, the startling lack of diversity at the Oscars has become a topic of discussion in recent years. And while we are starting to make headway in some Oscar categories, the award for best original score does not seem to be one of them. Even though the academy has given film-score awards for 84 years, only nine women and 11 black composers have been nominated — with only five winning.

There are important and compelling composers we should recognize for their influence on the world of film scores. This list aims to recognize and introduce less-familiar voices that have innovated the tradition of scoring for film, as well as some who are pioneering new ideas and styles.

There are countless scores by composers not listed here that can and should remain your favorites — they will always have a special place in our hearts — but we can acknowledge the musical accomplishments of these fantastic composers, too, some of whom might not be as well known to you as others.

Shirley Walker

Shirley Walker, who died in 2006, was one of the first female film composers working in Hollywood and is considered a pioneer for women in the film industry. She worked as a conductor or orchestrator on several films with Danny Elfman, Tim Burton and Hans Zimmer. She was one of the first female composers to earn a solo score credit on a major Hollywood film — 1992's Memoirs of an Invisible Man — and always wrote her scores entirely by hand. Her gothic, choral-driven score for the 1993 animated movie Batman: Mask of the Phantasm is among the finest in the Batman musical canon. She worked extensively in creating opportunities for aspiring composers in the film industry. The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) created the Shirley Walker Award, which honors those whose achievements have contributed to diversity of film and TV music.

Angela Morley

Born in Yorkshire, England, Angela Morley was the first openly transgender person to be nominated for an Oscar. She was nominated in the 1970s for The Little Prince and The Slipper and the Rose. She also composed the score for the 1978 animated film Watership Down. She struggled to find feature film commissions, because most of her work was not high profile enough, but she worked in the music department on films such as E.T the Extra-Terrestrial, Home Alone and Schindler's List. She also composed for various TV series including the original Wonder Woman (1975-79). She died in 2009.

Quincy Jones

In 1969, Quincy Jones and his songwriting partner, Bob Russell, became the first African-Americans to be nominated for the Oscar for best original song. He composed the scores for many films, including In Cold Blood, The Italian Job and The Color Purple, which was nominated for best original score. In total, he has been nominated for seven Oscars. He also has been credited as a producer on more than 40 films, including Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Color Purple, and he worked with Michael Jackson, Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra as a music producer.

Rachel Portman

Rachel Portman is the first female composer to win the Oscar for best musical or comedy score, for 1996's Emma. She has written more than 100 scores for film and television, including The Manchurian Candidate, Because of Winn-Dixie and A Dog's Purpose. Her scores for Chocolat and The Cider House Rules were nominated for an Oscar. She also has written symphonic works and music for opera, including a commission for the BBC Proms in 2007.

Terence Blanchard

Considered to be "the most prolific jazz musician to ever compose for motion pictures," Terence Blanchard has consistently made powerful musical statements concerning painful and difficult American stories from the past and present. As a jazz trumpeter, he performs with his quintet, E-Collective, and uses his music to inspire young musicians and bring awareness to the staggering epidemic of gun violence in the United States. He composed scores for Their Eyes Were Watching God and Malcom X, and his score for BlacKkKlansman was nominated for best original score at the 2019 Oscars. He also scored the film Harriet, detailing the extraordinary story of Harriet Tubman, which comes out Nov. 1.

Kathryn Bostic

Kathryn Bostic is the first female African-American composer to be a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. She composed scores for Middle of Nowhere, Dear White People, Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am and Clemency, which comes out Dec. 27. She won the African-American Film Critics Association (AAFCA) award for best music, for Middle of Nowhere. She also has written for television, theater and orchestra. The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra premiered her work The August Wilson Symphony, inspired by poems and plays of the renowned playwright.

Hildur Guðnadóttir

Icelandic composer Hildur Guðnadóttir entered the major Hollywood scene by performing solo cello on scores for The Revenant and Arrival. She won an Oscar for her score for the 2019 film Joker, and composed the music for the 2022 films Tar and Women Talking. She worked with composer Johann Johannsson on Sicario and wrote the music for the sequel Sicario: Day of the Soldado. She She won an Emmy for her score for the limited TV series Chernobyl.

Ramin Djawadi

Iranian-German composer Ramin Djawadi is best known for writing the music for Game of Thrones, which won two Emmys. But his work in film scores goes back to the early 2000s, with collaborations with Hans Zimmer and Klaus Badelt, before his first solo outing in 2004, Blade: Trinity. He also scored the first Marvel series film Iron Man, as well as Pacific Rim, A Wrinkle in Time and the TV series Westworld.

Herbie Hancock

A jazz pianist known for his work with the Miles Davis Quintet and his work redefining the jazz rhythm section, Herbie Hancock also composed for films. He was the first black composer to win an Oscar, for the score to 1986's Round Midnight, and composed the score for Death Wish, which receievd a Grammy nomination.

Mica Levi

A more recent voice in film scores is that of Mica Levi. Her first major score was for Under the Skin, and she won the award for best composer at the 2014 European Film Awards, tied for best score at the 2014 Los Angeles Film Critics Awards, and was nominated for the 2015 BAFTA Award for best film music, all at 27. Her next major film score was for 2016's Jackie, which earned her an Oscar nomination.

Erika Malpass is an intern at Classical MPR. She recently graduated from St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn., with a bachelor's degree in music composition and film studies.