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.
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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. 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.[3][4]
He lives in New York City "happily unmarried", as he once put it,[5] 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.[6]
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".[7] See below for links to individual score pages; some with audio samples.
The Tony-Award winning carnival mass Juan Darièn (1988/'96) and The Green Bird (1999), based on a story by Carlo Gozzi, are a few of the composer's theater 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 containing the likes of 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.[8][9]
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.[10]
He cites acclaimed 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.[11] He has also collaborated four times with Irish director Neil Jordan, scoring movies like Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles and In Dreams.
Elliot Goldenthal has been called by film-music collectors the "thinking man's composer" and a generally more cerebral choice for film makers and fans of film music alike.[12][13] He is known for his often intense experimentation, intelligent nuances and willingness to try new and unconventional techniques and processes (For two good examples of this, see Alien 3 (soundtrack) and Titus (soundtrack)). This experimental approach has led him to score movies in almost every genre from horror to action to Shakespeare adaptations;[14] the only type of film he has not yet scored is comedy, but at the same time he has composed comedic motifs for several films such as Demolition Man and the more colorful Batman sequels, which are considered tongue-in-cheek types of movies in the first place. It is this openness to try his hand at anything which has gained him a lot of respect in the music and film communities and with fans. He is not as well known, or popular, as other film composers such as the "household names" John Williams or Hans Zimmer but he is widely appreciated among film score fans for his sheer musical abilities and distinctive style; a style, which though artistically appreciated among film music enthusiasts, some have said can be too experimental or inaccessible to the mainstream listener because of Goldenthals passion for defying the norms of contemporary classical music.[15][16][17][18]
Atonal and brutal in his action music, sometimes in underscore and tends to use very fast French horn bending tones/whining; although Goldenthal himself has said that he doesn't "hear" atonal and tonal, rather "...I don't have any differentiation in my head between tonal and atonal, I either hear melody or I hear sonority — I don't hear atonal or tonal so much."[11]
| “ | 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. | ” |
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—Goldenthal (March 2003), on Richard Martinez[19] |
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Goldenthal often works with a team he assembled after the soundtrack for Drugstore Cowboy: Teese Gohl as supervising producer, Robert Ehlai as orchestrator, Joel Iwataki as sound engineer and Richard Martinez as electronic music producer.[19] According to Martinez, "a lot of composers want to focus on writing their music, and that's what [his] team allows Elliot to do."[19]
At the website filmscoremonthly.com a former classmate of Goldenthals replied to a piece on the Sphere score from 1998 saying that when he and Elliot were both studying at the Manhattan School of Music in the '70s Elliot was already experimenting with unusual techniques and when studying trumpet once, Elliot 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 Goldenthals film and concert music he said that he "...was just way ahead of the rest of us."[20]
Respected cultural historian and critic Piero Scaruffi found fit to mention Goldenthal in lists of honour and general overview of film music on his website,[21] placing three of Goldenthal's theatre works in a "Brief history of music through its milestone compositions"[22] and putting his score for "Drugstore Cowboy" at number 27 in a list of "Best musicals of all time".[23]
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.[24]
| “ | "Copland would sit down at the piano and play through his scores very slowly, stopping to explain any harmonic or rhythmic changes I inquired about. I had the good fortune to be with John, who was my `formal' instructor, at a time he was developing into a major composer." -- on studying under Copland & Corigliano.[25] | ” |
| “ | "I love working with English musicians, especially the strings. They don't play with excessive vibrato. Strings use too much vibrato in the States" -- 1997, on recording in London. | ” |
| “ | "I think every film score that I do is the best film score that I've ever composed. I will say that in terms of strong film scores that I've composed that Cobb, Michael Collins, The Butcher Boy, Drugstore Cowboy, Alien 3, and Titus are the ones that stand out." -- 1999, on his own perception of his best score.[5] | ” |
| “ | "I say we've spent 20 years being happily unmarried. Julie's late father used to refer to me as his 'son-out-law.' Actually, I think of us as Ozzie and Harriet." -- 2002, on his marriage after collaborating with Taymor on Frida.[5] | ” |
| “ | "Bring Fellini back from the dead, and let me work with him!" -- 2000, expressing his love of Federico Fellini.[4][5] | ” |
A number of Goldenthal's cues (as is common with a lot of composers) have been used for trailer music, below is a list of known uses up to 2004.[26]
Interview with the Vampire (1994) was used in:
Alien III (1992) was used in:
Batman Forever (1995) was used in:
Demolition Man (1993) was used in:
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001) was used in:
Heat: (1995) was used in:
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