Music for a 15th-century genius, a 20th-century actor, a modern-day chef and the natural beauty of both Asia and the Americas: this year’s Emmy nominees in the documentary-score category are as diverse and compelling as ever.
This year’s nominees include a Pulitzer Prize winner and a composer whose house was destroyed in the California fires as he was finishing a score about a famous chef, whose nonprofit subsequently arrived to feed fire victims including his family.
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Caroline Shaw was the youngest recipient of the Pulitzer in music when, at the age of 30, she won for her “Partita for Eight Voices” in 2013. Veteran PBS documentary filmmaker Ken Burns and his producing partners Sarah Burns and David McMahon commissioned her to compose the score for their four-part “Leonardo da Vinci” series.
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“They were really excited about doing something that was all original and felt as inventive as Leonardo was,” Shaw tells Variety. “Rather than tethering ourselves to the original time period, making something that is inspired by that but moves forward in a way.”
The producers wanted to “find the humanity and humor in Leonardo, this character who has always been portrayed as the grand old man with the beard,” she says. “What goes on in Leonardo’s head?”
Shaw chose three ensembles, all “deeply versed in the music of the Renaissance, Baroque, Classical and Romantic periods,” she says: the Attacca string quartet, the eight-person vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, and the So Percussion quartet.
Shaw began “with a broad brush of thinking about emotions versus mechanics, thinking a lot about texture and colorful,” and came up with “roughly 20 different two-minute bits of music” based primarily on reading the script. These were sent to the producers, who began placing them in the film, although she adds that “every single sequence ended up being meticulously shaped.”
She spent more than a year working on music for “Leonardo.”
Composers Duncan Thum and David Bertok composed music for the “Chef’s Table” profile of innovative Spanish-American chef José Andrés, who helped popularize the small-plates dining concept and whose World Central Kitchen has provided meals for millions in the wake of many natural disasters since 2010.
“He’s such an eclectic, very colorful personality,” Bertok says, “a mad-scientist chef, a humanitarian and very generous, going to all these disaster zones.” They chose mostly traditional instruments: a string orchestra, classical piano, nylon-string guitar (for Andrés’ Spanish roots) but also modular synthesizers and a human voice.
“As he is taking a familiar dish and reinventing it, we wanted to have something unexpected in the music,” says Thum. “For us, the voice was a lovely way to do that, to have one foot in the avant-garde and one in something that’s very familiar.”
They had received approval for their demos of the score and were preparing to record when Thum learned that his house was destroyed in the Altadena fire. “So it was very emotional to record the strings for that episode,” he says. “I had to put my headphones down and just went into tears at one point.”
During the aftermath, Andrés’ World Central Kitchen came to Altadena “and fed my family and many of my dear friends and neighbors.” He met the superstar chef weeks later at a Netflix event in New York and was able to thank him personally.
For “Super / Man: The Christopher Reeve Story,” the challenge for London composer Ilan Eshkeri was “trying to capture a very honest emotional picture of what [the actor] meant and what he continues to mean to people who are trying to recover from, or come to terms with, spinal cord injuries.”
Documentary scoring, he says, “is one of the hardest disciplines for a composer, because in fiction you can really push the boundaries. But with documentary, if musically you push it too far, the audience feels manipulated, they lose faith and they don’t believe in the honesty of it.”
The filmmakers’ use of John Williams’ iconic “Superman” theme (for Reeves’ most famous role) meant that Eshkeri needed to incorporate “the French horns and the strings, the Hollywood sound” for a musical consistency. Beyond that, he wrote a theme for Reeve; another for his two great loves, Gae Exton and Dana Morosini, the latter of whom he married; and a third, a theme of “inspiration,” for Reeves’ heroic battle to stay alive and inspire others to keep going in the face of insurmountable odds.
He employed 40 musicians from the London Metropolitan Orchestra and added electronics “for the medical-science element” of the story.
Music for the two nominated natural-world documentaries was scored by Hans Zimmer’s Bleeding Fingers collective. For NBC’s 10-part “The Americas,” Zimmer composed the grand-scale theme but the scores were written by Kara Talve and Anže Rozman.
he direction from their producers was different than the usual nature doc: “This is more like a Pixar film than it is natural history,” Talve reports, “because each animal has its own little cinematic movie, and it’s scored like animation would be, with a lot of sync points and references to other cinema.”
“The target was families,” Rozman adds, “interesting for the parents but not scary for the kids. That’s why it’s also a bit comedic.” What was required, Talve says, was “a lot of detailed orchestral writing,” with unique instruments for almost every destination.
“We used many different ensembles and soloists from all around the world,” she adds. Some of their regional choices were an Aztec double flute for the Mexico episode, the cactus-based gaita from Colombia, Andean flutes for the nominated “Andes” episode, and a 140-year-old zither for a lonely coyote for the “Wild West” installment.
“Because every scene was a short movie, there were a lot of emotions and they needed to change very fast,” Rozman says. “This was very challenging because you would switch from romantic to a really intense battle scene,” Talve adds. They wrote more than nine hours of music in five and a half months.
“Asia,” latest in the BBC’s “Planet Earth” series, was a collaboration between Bleeding Fingers composers Jacob Shea and Indonesian-born Laurentia Editha (they previously worked together on “Planet Earth III”). Their main theme for the seven-hour series incorporates traditional Chinese instruments including the two-stringed erhu and the ancient woodwind sheng.
They used fewer electronic elements than usual, Shea says. They overdubbed the strings of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales with many different sounds (many of them wind instruments from across Asia) and Editha’s own vocals. “I made up a language that sounds like it’s from the Coral Triangle,” she explains.
Japanese gagaku ensembles scored dancing cranes, and Borneo’s traditional lute-like sapé, the Indonesian gamelan, a bowed string instrument from Kazakhstan called kobyz, were among other exotic sounds showcased. “I’ve always felt that Asia is a very metallic continent,” notes Editha. “Look at the gamelan, the singing bowls from Bhutan, Tibetan bells…”
Says Shea: “The syntax and language of the region, even if it wasn’t directly applied to the instruments, informed our work. We’d use those flavors with the Western orchestra.” And, he adds, “remaining a bit impartial in these nature documentaries is an important element, not to force an audience to have an emotion, but rather just kind of reveal the storytelling.”
They wrote more than five hours of music over an eight-month period.