Elliot Goldenthal

Elliot Goldenthal

Elliott Goldenthal in 2006
Born (1954-05-02) May 2, 1954
Brooklyn, New York, United States
Occupation Composer
Years active 1984–present
Partner(s) Julie Taymor

Elliot Goldenthal (born May 2, 1954) is an American composer of contemporary classical music. He was a student of Aaron Copland and John Corigliano, and is best known for his distinctive style and ability to blend various musical styles and techniques in original and inventive ways. He is also a film-music composer, and won the Academy Award for Best Original Score in 2002 for his score to the motion picture Frida, directed by his long-time partner Julie Taymor.

Life and career

Goldenthal was born on May 2, 1954, as the youngest son of a Jewish housepainter father and a Catholic seamstress mother in Brooklyn, New York City, where he was influenced from an early age by music from all cultures and genres. Both pairs of Goldenthal's grandparents emigrated to the United States from Bucharest and Iași, Romania.[1] Goldenthal lived in a multi-cultural part of town, and this is reflected in his works.[2] He attended John Dewey High School in Brooklyn where, at the age of 14, he had his very first ballet Variations on Early Glimpses performed; he continued to display his eclectic musical range, performing with rock bands in the seventies.[3] He then studied music full-time at the prestigious Manhattan School of Music, where he studied with composer John Corigliano (whom he greatly admired), to earn his Bachelor of Music degree (1977) and Master of Music (1979) in musical composition.[4][5] He lives in New York City "happily unmarried", as he once put it,[6] with his partner Julie Taymor, whom he met in 1980 through a mutual acquaintance, who told him, "I know a person whose work is just as grotesque as yours"; they have an office/apartment where they both live and work.[7] Goldenthal has written works for concert hall, theater, dance and film. His work includes music for films such as Alien 3, Michael Collins, Batman Forever, Heat and the Academy Award-winning score for Julie Taymor's Frida, a movie in which Goldenthal had a small acting part as a "Newsreel Reporter". Incidentally he also had a small part in the stage show Juan Darièn as a "Circus Barker / Streetsinger".[8]

The Tony-Award winning Juan Darién: A Carnival Mass (1988/'96) and The Green Bird (1999), based on a story by Carlo Gozzi, are a few of the composer's theatre works. In 2006, Goldenthal completed his original three-act opera with Taymor entitled Grendel an adaptation of the John Gardner novel which told the story of Beowulf from the monster's point of view. It had its world premiere in early June 2006 at the Los Angeles Opera, the role of Grendel performed by Eric Owens, with an audience that included John Williams and Emmy Rossum; the opus was added to the Los Angeles Opera's permanent repertoire and earned Goldenthal a nomination in April 2007 for the Pulitzer Prize for Music.[9][10] In 2008 Goldenthal reunited with Michael Mann to score 1930s gangster movie Public Enemies and in 2009 he scored another Julie Taymor Shakespeare adaptation, The Tempest.[11] He cites Japanese composer Tōru Takemitsu as an influence and someone he styles his own career on; Goldenthal has said that the lines between traditional concert music and orchestral film score have become more blurred which is the way he thinks it should be.[12] He has also collaborated four times with Irish director Neil Jordan, scoring movies like Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles and In Dreams.

Style

Elliot Goldenthal has been called the "thinking man's composer" by film-music collectors and a generally more cerebral choice for film makers and lovers of film music.[13][14] He is known for his experimentation, nuances and willingness to try unconventional techniques (For two good examples of this, see Alien 3 (soundtrack) and Titus (soundtrack)). He has scored films in almost every genre from horror to action to Shakespeare adaptations.[15] He has not yet scored comedy, but he has composed comedic motifs for several films such as Demolition Man and the Batman series. His eclectic output has gained him a great deal of respect in the music and film communities and with fans. He is widely appreciated for his musical abilities and distinctive style, although some find his work to be too experimental or inaccessible.[16][17][18][19] His action music is brutal and atonal. Sometimes, in underscore, he uses very fast French horn passages with bending tones and whining. Goldenthal has said that he doesn't "hear" atonal and tonal, rather, "I either hear melody or I hear sonority".[12]

“ Every project we do requires a different approach, but one thing that's always consistent is the framework that Rick provides. In essence, he's giving me all these new instruments to work with. He keeps coming up with surprising combinations of sounds. ”
— Goldenthal (March 2003), on Richard Martinez[20]

Goldenthal often works with a team he assembled after the soundtrack for Drugstore Cowboy: Teese Gohl as supervising producer, Robert Elhai as orchestrator, Joel Iwataki and Steve McLaughlin as sound engineers and Richard Martinez as electronic music producer.[20] According to Martinez, "a lot of composers want to focus on writing their music, and that's what [his] team allows Elliot to do."[20] At the website filmscoremonthly.com, a former classmate of Goldenthal's commented on an article on the Sphere score from 1998 which stated that when he and Elliot were both studying at the Manhattan School of Music in the '70s, Elliot was already experimenting with unusual techniques. Once, when studying trumpet, Elliot had asked him to "buzz into the wrong end of the mouthpiece and sing into it as well". He thought he was crazy but, looking back after a decade or so of Goldenthal's film and concert music, he "was just way ahead of the rest of us," he said.[21]

Lists of works

Film and television works

Year Title Director(s) Studio(s) Notes
1979 Cocaine Cowboys Ulli Lommel International Harmony N/A
1980 Blank Generation Ulli Lommel International Harmony N/A
1989 Drugstore Cowboy Gus Van Sant Avenue Pictures Soundtrack released by Novus with 21 minutes of score.
Pet Sematary Mary Lambert Paramount Pictures Performed by the Orchestra of St. Luke's.
Soundtrack released by Varèse Sarabande
Expanded soundtrack released by La-La Land Records
1990 Criminal Justice Andy Wolk Home Box Office Television film.
1991 Grand Isle Mary Lambert Turner Pictures N/A
1992 Fool's Fire Julie Taymor Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) Television film.
Alien 3 David Fincher Brandywine Productions
20th Century Fox		 Soundtrack released by MCA
1993 Demolition Man Marco Brambilla Silver Pictures
Warner Bros.		 Soundtrack released by Varèse Sarabande.
Golden Gate John Madden The Samuel Goldwyn Company Soundtrack released by Varèse Sarabande.
1994 Roswell Jeremy Kagan Citadel Entertainment Television film.
Interview with the Vampire Neil Jordan Geffen Pictures
Warner Bros.		 Soundtrack released by Geffen Records.
Nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe.
Cobb Ron Shelton Regency Enterprises
Alcor Films
Warner Bros.		 Soundtrack released by Sony Classical.
1995 Batman Forever Joel Schumacher PolyGram Filmed Entertainment
Warner Bros.		 Soundtrack released by Atlantic.
Expanded soundtrack released by La-La Land Records.
Nominated for a Grammy Award.
Heat Michael Mann Regency Enterprises
Warner Bros.		 Soundtrack released by Warner Bros. Records with about 30 minutes of score.
1996 Michael Collins Neil Jordan Geffen Pictures
Warner Bros.		 Soundtrack released by Atlantic.
Nominated for an Academy Award.
A Time to Kill Joel Schumacher Regency Enterprises
Warner Bros.		 Soundtrack released by Atlantic.
1997 The Butcher Boy Neil Jordan Geffen Pictures
Warner Bros.		 Soundtrack
Batman & Robin Joel Schumacher PolyGram Filmed Entertainment
Warner Bros.		 Score never commercially released.
1998 Sphere Barry Levinson Baltimore Pictures
Warner Bros.		 Soundtrack released by Varèse Sarabande.
1999 In Dreams Neil Jordan Amblin Entertainment
DreamWorks Pictures		 Performed by the London Metropolitan Orchestra.
Soundtrack released by Varèse Sarabande.
Titus Julie Taymor Overseas Film Group
Clear Blue Sky Productions
Fox Searchlight Pictures		 Performed by the London Metropolitan Orchestra.
Soundtrack released by Sony Classical.
2001 Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within Hironobu Sakaguchi Square Pictures
Columbia Pictures		 Performed by the London Symphony Orchestra.
Soundtrack released by Sony Classical.
2002 Frida Julie Taymor Ventanarosa
Lions Gate Films
Miramax Films		 Soundtrack released by Universal.
Won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe.
The Good Thief Neil Jordan Alliance Atlantis
Fox Searchlight Pictures		 Performed by the London Metropolitan Orchestra and the Irish Film Orchestra.
Soundtrack released by Island Records.
2003 S.W.A.T. Clark Johnson Original Film
Columbia Pictures		 Soundtrack released by Varèse Sarabande.
2007 Across the Universe Julie Taymor Revolution Studios
Columbia Pictures		 Score never commercially released.
2009 Public Enemies Michael Mann Relativity Media
Universal Pictures		 Soundtrack released by Decca with 13 minutes of original score.
2010 The Tempest Julie Taymor Touchstone Pictures
Miramax Films		 Soundtrack released by Zarathustra Music
2015 A Midsummer Night's Dream Julie Taymor Londinium Films Upcoming.

Concert music works

Theatre works

Awards and nominations

Among others including the Arturo Toscanini Award, the New Music for Young Ensembles composition prize, the Stephen Sondheim Award in Music Theater and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship.[22]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Interviu în exclusivitate cu Elliot Goldenthal" (in Romanian). TVR.ro. 2011-10-08. Archived from the original on October 19, 2011. Retrieved 2011-11-24.
  2. ↑ Elliot Goldenthal - Family and Companions - Yahoo! Singapore Movies Archived September 19, 2007, at the Wayback Machine.
  3. ↑ "Elliot Goldenthal". Hollywood.com. Retrieved 2016-03-30.
  4. ↑ Dan Goldwasser "The Sweet Revenge of Elliot Goldenthal". SoundtrackNet Interview (January 21, 2000).
  5. ↑ Macdonald, Lawrence E. (2013-05-02). The Invisible Art of Film Music: A Comprehensive History. Scarecrow Press. p. 395. ISBN 978-0-8108-8398-7.
  6. ↑ Filmtracks: Elliot Goldenthal
  7. ↑ "Julie Taymor and Elliot Goldenthal: United in Their Love of the Outsider," by Don Shewey
  8. ↑ Elliot Goldenthal Concert & Stage: Juan Darien - A Carnival Mass (1996)
  9. ↑ 2007 Pulitzer Prize Winners - PRIZE IN MUSIC, Citation
  10. ↑ Page Title Archived July 21, 2011, at the Wayback Machine.
  11. ↑ "Upcoming Film Scores: Elliot Goldenthal: Public Enemies". Archived from the original on May 28, 2008.
  12. 1 2 "Elliot Goldenthal" (March 2003) Sound on Sound
  13. ↑ "Goldenthal: Demolition Man". Movie-wave.net. 2006. Retrieved 2012-02-18.
  14. ↑ "Demolition Man (Elliot Goldenthal)". Filmtracks. 1993-11-23. Retrieved 2010-08-31.
  15. ↑ "Elliot Goldenthal". Filmtracks. June 17, 2009. Retrieved 2010-08-31.
  16. ↑ "Elliot Goldenthal". Soundonsound.com. Retrieved 2010-08-31.
  17. ↑ "In Dreams (Elliot Goldenthal)". Filmtracks. 1999-10-12. Retrieved 2010-08-31.
  18. ↑ "Batman Forever". Moviemusicuk.us. Archived from the original on January 12, 2010. Retrieved 2010-08-31.
  19. ↑ "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (Elliot Goldenthal)". Filmtracks. 2001-07-03. Retrieved 2010-08-31.
  20. 1 2 3 Thomas Staudter (March 23, 2003). "...and the Music for 'Frida,' Produced in a Scarsdale Basement". The New York Times. Retrieved 2011-01-30. Bigger film projects then were offered to Mr. Goldenthal, and to meet the demands he assembled a four-person team that included Teese Gohl as supervising producer, Robert Ehlai as orchestrator, Joel Iwataki as sound engineer and Mr." Martinez, who is known as Rick, as electronic music producer.
  21. ↑ "3/3/98: Sphere of Influence (Goldenthal)". Filmscoremonthly.com. Retrieved 2010-08-31.
  22. ↑ Michael Collins - The Filmmakers Archived December 30, 2007, at the Wayback Machine.
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