Elliot Goldenthal

Elliot Goldenthal

Elliott Goldenthal in 2006
Born May 2, 1954
Brooklyn, New York
Years active 1984-present

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. 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.

Style

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, Danny Elfman, 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 either hear melody or I hear sonority".[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. ”

—Goldenthal (March 2003), on Richard Martinez[19]

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 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 Goldenthal's 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]

Lists of works

Film works

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.[21]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Interviu în exclusivitate cu Elliot Goldenthal" (in Romanian). TVR.ro. 2011-10-08. Retrieved 2011-11-24.
  2. ↑ Elliot Goldenthal - Family and Companions - Yahoo! Singapore Movies
  3. ↑ Elliot Goldenthal at Hollywood.com
  4. ↑ Dan Goldwasser "The Sweet Revenge of Elliot Goldenthal". SoundtrackNet Interview (January 21, 2000).
  5. ↑ Filmtracks: Elliot Goldenthal
  6. ↑ "Julie Taymor and Elliot Goldenthal: United in Their Love of the Outsider," by Don Shewey
  7. ↑ Elliot Goldenthal Concert & Stage: Juan Darien - A Carnival Mass (1996)
  8. ↑ 2007 Pulitzer Prize Winners - PRIZE IN MUSIC, Citation
  9. ↑ Page Title
  10. ↑ Upcoming Film Scores: Elliot Goldenthal: Public Enemies
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 Elliot Goldenthal
  12. ↑ "Goldenthal: Demolition Man". Movie-wave.net. Retrieved 2012-02-18.
  13. ↑ "Demolition Man (Elliot Goldenthal)". Filmtracks. 1993-11-23. Retrieved 2010-08-31.
  14. ↑ "Elliot Goldenthal". Filmtracks. Retrieved 2010-08-31.
  15. ↑ "Elliot Goldenthal". Soundonsound.com. Retrieved 2010-08-31.
  16. ↑ "In Dreams (Elliot Goldenthal)". Filmtracks. 1999-10-12. Retrieved 2010-08-31.
  17. ↑ "Batman Forever". Moviemusicuk.us. Retrieved 2010-08-31.
  18. ↑ "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (Elliot Goldenthal)". Filmtracks. 2001-07-03. Retrieved 2010-08-31.
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 19.2 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.
  20. ↑ "3/3/98: Sphere of Influence (Goldenthal)". Filmscoremonthly.com. Retrieved 2010-08-31.
  21. ↑ Michael Collins - The Filmmakers

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Elliot Goldenthal.