Crime stories have been a staple of television dating back to the beginnings of the medium. Composers continue to seek new ways to depict murder, chaos, investigations, and convictions, as evidenced by last year’s series such as “Murder in Only the Building,” “The Thing About Pam,” “Leaker,” and “Gazlit.”
Siddhartha Khosla (“This Is Us”) created one of the hottest themes of the year “Murder in the building only” Hulu is a mystery comedy starring Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez as amateur detectives solving a murder in their Manhattan apartment building.
“I read the script and heard something that sounded weird, mysterious, dramatic and emotional,” Khosla says. “She was back in the ’60s, like Donovan, and she started singing this tune on a chord change.”
But when producers asked Khosla to “make it more New York,” he began thinking of subway musicians and added a drummer playing on “Paint Buckets from Home Depot.”
For weekly scores, Khosla used a 40-piece orchestra including the bassoon, not realizing (initially) that the bassoon would not only be a character later in the season but actually play a pivotal role in the story. Episode 7, told without dialogue from a deaf person’s perspective, turned out to be his biggest challenge: “The outcome had to drive the emotional and dramatic rhythms of the entire episode,” Khosla says.
for NBC “The thing about bam,” With Renee Zellweger as a real-life housewife suspected of murdering her best friend, composers Sonia Belousova and Gina Ustinelli (“The Witcher”) searched for strange sounds.
“Pam troms across town as if it were larger than life,” Belousova explains. “She’s on a mission, she’s on to the beat of her drums, and nothing will get in the way. Her subject is a very short impulse with few notes combined with a predatory march.”
“Pam is not what it seems,” Belousova adds. “She seems to be a good friend, a loving daughter, a star witness, all these nice things, when in fact she is not. We thought, How do we take very simple tools and twist them so that they become something that is not?”
They took an English horn and played his wonderful sound down to “a very low, uncomfortable and threatening sound,” she said. They used an instrument piano, and put coins between the strings (“Because Pam is all about money”); And he turned the harmonica’s sound into something “terrifying and exhausting,” says Ostinelli.
London-based composer Anne Nikitin (“American Animals”) wrote her first online score for Hulu “disconnected” About the rise and fall of biotech company Theranos Foundation Elizabeth Holmes (Amanda Seyfried).
Nikitin originally considered people’s orchestral voices and sound synthesis to science scenes, but one of her early demos (“a comprehensive statement I wrote just for fun,” she says) impressed model Elizabeth Meriwether. “A simple bass line with a few bells happening above became the sound of the show.”
She soon realized that the sheet music could be created entirely in her studio – “music that was emotional, aggressive and sympathetic, using only activators. Elizabeth Holmes is a robotic character, almost like a machine, crushing people in its path. As the plot intensity increases, the result becomes more intense.” And the darker it gets,” Nikitin notes.
Finding the Right Tone for Starz’s Watergate “Jaslet” The challenge for Mac Quayle (“Mr. Robot”) was as the story constantly shifted from funny to serious. He quotes Patton Oswalt (who plays Charles Coulson) as saying, “The music finds the sweet spot between the absurdity and the terrifying anxiety of what was going on with all these people.”
Using only 10 musicians, while playing the piano and marimba himself, Quayle was able to create a dark orchestral piece that “speaks the whole story, and the grandeur of the scandal,” while also conveying the human story of Martha Mitchell (Julia Roberts), the outspoken wife of Attorney General John Mitchell (Sean Penn). who paid dearly for her role.
The series, he says, isn’t really about Watergate. “It’s more about people, John and Martha and John and Mo Dean,” he says. “Watergate is right there, and it ties it all together. It’s funny, sad, dramatic, sexy, weird, all of those things.”
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