Elliot Goldenthal

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Elliot Goldenthal, 2014

Elliot Bruce Goldenthal (born May 2, 1954 in Brooklyn , New York ) is an American composer of concert , chamber , film and theater music . His grandparents are Jewish-Romanian immigrants from Bucharest and Iași .

Goldenthal studied with the composers Aaron Copland and John Corigliano and studied at the Manhattan School of Music a . a. Studied trumpet and composition . Goldenthal also plays the piano and sings in the baritone . He has both a bachelor's and master's degree in composition.

Goldenthal was already very interested in the medium of film when he was still a student , so he enrolled at NYU's School of Film and Television in 1973 parallel to his main studies , where he learned to direct as the basis for his later work as a film composer. As a result, Goldenthal began to compose music for student films and dance groups with little or no fees. The two successful plays The King Stag (1983) and Juan Darièn, A Carnival Mass (1988) finally drew the attention of some film directors to his work.

The New Yorker became known to a wider public in the 1990s for numerous extraordinary film scores and is now one of the most renowned composers in this field due to the technical and conceptual diversity of his work.

Composition techniques

Looking at Goldenthal's previous work, there is a clear pluralism - the composer uses techniques and techniques alongside one another. a. classical modern, late romantic , Polish avant-garde , minimal music and jazz . It is just as easy for him to integrate specifically ethnic or popular musical parameters and instrumentation into a whole.

The music to Julie Taylor's Shakespeare adaptation Titus (1999) is exemplary - here the composer lets techniques of different times and spaces interact and collide under the integral of his personal style . Analogous to Taylor's film concept: By colliding architectures, fashions and furnishing details from various epochs and cultures on a single filmic level, while maintaining Shakespeare's promise, an attempt is made to break the drama out of a specific timeframe and thereby the claim of the plot of revenge for general validity for the highlight human nature .

Goldenthal's music for The Good Thief (2003) is mainly inspired by North African percussion and American jazz . For Alien 3 (1992) Goldenthal composed partly aleatoric music. For the first movement of his brass quintet No. 2 (1980), Quinque , he used controlled improvisation based on a serialistic series of five tones.

Style features

Despite the variety of compositional techniques and means of creation, Elliot Goldenthal's music can usually be clearly assigned to his pen. Typical stylistic features in Goldenthal's music are asymmetrical rhythms , chromatic harmonies , brass clusters and, mostly in the horn part , the rapid alternation between a note and its slight inflection, the so-called pitch bending . Melodic elements, often played by solo instruments in the orchestra, are often contrasted with complex, dissonant sound textures.

The orchestral and ensemble music by Elliot Goldenthal is always characterized by filigree and often unusual orchestrations and instrumentations. In addition to the well-known instruments of the modern symphony orchestra , marginal instruments such as glass harmonica , theremin , didjeridu and the steel cello invented by Robert Rutman can also be found in Goldenthal's orchestral work. Electric guitar and saxophone are also regularly used .

Typical of his film work is the occasional ironic or tragic breakdown of certain techniques by exaggerating and increasing them into the grotesque. In Batman Forever (1995), for example, he parodies Wagner's drama, which is also reflected in the title of the play Bätterdämmerung .

Experiments

Goldenthal worked for his music for Drugstore Cowboy (1989, for five musicians) with self-programmed keyboards and in the track Heist and Hat used samples of the human breath as the only sound source besides a tenor saxophone and percussion .

The composer often looks for new ways to play well-known instruments (experiments with trumpet mouthpieces; singing through the instrument) and uses instruments in unusual functions - for example, he used a saxophone as a rhythm instrument in his thriller film score In Dreams (1998) .

For Alien 3 (1992) he created digital sound textures during the composing phase, which were then later imitated by the symphony orchestra during the recording . Furthermore, Goldenthal used scissors and a taut piano rope as a sound generator in this work. Self-made instruments can also be heard in The Good Thief : plastic knives, spoons and forks that are made to sound using sound boxes . To implement his electronic music, which is always in the context of an acoustic ensemble, the composer relies on the jazz musician and sound designer Richard Martinez for almost all of his works .

Film music

After several independent productions, Goldenthal worked on his first major film project in 1989: Mary Lambert's Friedhof der Kuscheltiere , a novel based on Stephen King . The music for this for chamber orchestra , choir and soprano is extremely avant-garde and is reminiscent of Krysztof Penderecki's early orchestral compositions, for example De Natura Sonoris No. 1 (1967). For the first time a CD with the music of Elliot Goldenthal was released.

David Fincher's film Alien 3 (1992) was the first potential blockbuster in Goldenthal's filmography. Here he used various elements such as boy soprano, synthesizer , electric guitar as well as again (now larger) symphony orchestra and avant-garde sound effects and thus stood out clearly from previous Alien film music.

In the nineties the composer set about 15 other films to music and worked particularly often with the directors Neil Jordan , Joel Schumacher and Julie Taymor . Goldenthal was nominated for an Oscar for his symphonic scores for the Jordan films Interview with a Vampire (1994) and Michael Collins (1996) . In 1995 he composed the original music for Michael Mann's realistic action film Heat with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro , which was recorded by the Kronos Quartet , among other soloists and ensembles . The music recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra for the animated film Final Fantasy: The Powers in You (2001) for large orchestra and choir received very positive reviews from both the audience and critics and underlines Goldenthal's outstanding role in the film music scene.

In 2003 Goldenthal was awarded an Oscar for his music for Julie Taymors film Frida (2002; about the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo ) .

Filmography

Awards

  • Golden Globe Nominations: Interview with a Vampire ; Michael Collins
  • Golden Globe: Frida
  • World Soundtrack Award nominations: Final Fantasy ; Burn It Blue from Frida (movie song)
  • World Soundtrack Awards: "Film Composer of the Year 2002"; Frida
  • Los Angeles Film Critics Award: The Butcher Boy
  • Chicago Film Critics Award: The Butcher Boy
  • Grammy nominations for “Outstanding Composition for Film”: Batman Forever ; Defile and Lament from Die Jury

Theater music

While Goldenthal composed mainly for film in the 1990s , he concentrated heavily on theater productions and musicals in the 1980s . Also and especially here the composer worked with the director Julie Taymor. His most successful piece of this genre is arguably The King Stag , which is still often performed today. The King Stag , like the other Gozzi adaptations, is a hybrid of theater and musical.

So far, only two theater productions have been released on CD. On the one hand, the work Juan Darièn - A Carnival Mass (1988, edited 1996), where the excessive lightheartedness of the Latin American carnival and the sacred devotion of a mass confront each other and collide in the final sequence Dies Irae . The libretto of the piece is based on a short story by Horacio Quiroga and the Requiem liturgy.

On the other hand, The Green Bird (1996) is available on CD, the third Goldenthal musical based on Carlo Gozzi - Fables , a moody and cheerful conglomerate of orchestral comedy and tragedy, jazz and opera.

directory

Concert and chamber music, ballet, opera

Concert music

In 1988 Goldenthal was commissioned by the ASCAP to compose a piece on the occasion of Leonard Bernstein's 70th birthday ; Shadow Play Scherzo for orchestra was premiered by the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra in New York's Town Hall . The beginning and end of the lively piece are reminiscent of Indonesian gamelan music; within this exotic framework, Goldenthal makes use of various western techniques. In 1990 he composed another commissioned work entitled Pastime Variations for the Haydn-Mozart Chamber Orchestra . His Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra , composed for Wynton Marsalis , made its debut in autumn 1997.

ballet

In 1998, Goldenthal was the first American composer ever to receive a commission for a full-length ballet based on a story . In the three acts of his piece Othello for orchestra (as well as additional percussion, alto saxophone , glass harmonica and synthesizer ), Goldenthal depicts the Shakespeare tragedy of the same name to a modern choreography by Lar Lubovitch . At the center of the three-act act is a fourteen- minute tarantella , which the Accompanied development of Iago's plan against Othello . In 2003 a performance of the San Francisco Ballet was released on DVD, and a seventy-minute suite of the ballet is also available on CD from the Varèse Sarabande label.

Oratorio

In 1993 Elliot Goldenthal was commissioned by the Pacific Symphony Orchestra to compose an oratorio that reflected the experiences of the Vietnam War . In addition to the music, Goldenthal is also responsible for the text selection. The three-movement work of around 65 minutes is entitled Fire Water Paper - A Vietnam Oratorio and is written for soprano, baritone, choir, children's choir and large orchestra. It was in 1995, d. H. premiered twenty years after the official end of the war. Seiji Ozawa performed the oratorio in April 1996 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall . In the same year a CD with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the Pacific Symphony Orchestra under Carl St. Clair was released by Sony Classical .

Opera

On June 8, 2006, Goldenthal's first opera, Grendel, Transcendence of the Great Big Bad, premiered in Los Angeles after years of composition and preparation. The libretto by Julie Taymor and JD McClatchy is based on the novel of the same name by John Gardner and the English Beowulf saga. Julie Taymor directed and Steven Sloane conducted the orchestra. After three more performances in Los Angeles, the first of a total of four performances took place in Goldenthal's hometown New York on July 11, 2006 as part of the Lincoln Center Festival .

directory

  • 1974: Three Pieces for Piano
  • 1977: Sonata for Double Bass and Piano
  • 1980: Brass Quintet No. 2
  • 1981: Jabberwocky (for oboe, Bb clarinet, bassoon, horn and bass-baritone; based on a text by Lewis Carroll )
  • 1988: Shadow Play Scherzo
  • 1988: Pastime Variations (for chamber orchestra)
  • 1995: Fire Water Paper, A Vietnam Oratorio
  • 1997: Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra ( dedicated to Wynton Marsalis )
  • 1997: Othello ( ballet based on a choreography by Lar Lubovitch )
  • 2006: Grendel, Transcendence of the Great Big Bad ( opera )
  • 2013: The Stone Cutters ( string quartet )
  • 2013: Othello Symphony (symphonic version of the ballet music of the same name)
  • 2014: Symphony in G-sharp minor
  • 2019: October Light: Adagio for Orchestra

Web links

Interviews

items

Multimedia and miscellaneous

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ BWW News Desk: Elliot Goldenthal's New Work Will Have World Premiere. Retrieved June 9, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Goldenthal, Elliot
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Goldenthal, Elliot Bruce
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American composer
DATE OF BIRTH May 2, 1954
PLACE OF BIRTH New York , USA