{"id":2159,"date":"2021-06-15T12:00:54","date_gmt":"2021-06-15T12:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2021\/06\/15\/a-profile-of-a-film-score-composer-that-soars-like-his-music\/"},"modified":"2024-03-07T17:21:54","modified_gmt":"2024-03-07T17:21:54","slug":"a-profile-of-a-film-score-composer-that-soars-like-his-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2021\/06\/15\/a-profile-of-a-film-score-composer-that-soars-like-his-music\/","title":{"rendered":"A profile of a film-score composer that soars like his music"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
\n
\n N<\/span>icholas Britell\u2019s music has infused a lot of film and TV shows recently, from the rich aural landscape of HBO\u2019s \u201cThe Underground Railroad\u201d to the unexpected banger that is the \u201cSuccession\u201d theme.<\/a>

So when Jamie Fisher<\/a> got the opportunity to profile the composer for The New York Times Magazine, she wasn\u2019t content to report at arm\u2019s length. She attended sessions with Britell and \u201cThe Underground Railroad\u201d director Barry Jenkins and captured a loose-limbed and often funny creative process between two acclaimed artists. “The Composer at the Frontier of Movie Music,”<\/a> published this past May, takes readers into Britell’s home studio, where they are surrounded by movie posters, empty seltzer bottles, and sounds being cajoled moment by moment into music.

Maybe more importantly, Fisher is able to convey the urgency and originality of Britell\u2019s approach for readers who wouldn\u2019t know an octave from octuplets. There are musical terms throughout \u2014 arpeggios and double fugues appear \u2014 but Fisher is careful to describe how the music feels,<\/em> such as the opening<\/a> of Adam McKay\u2019s irreverent Dick Cheney biopic \u201cVice,\u201d which she says \u201csounds like \u2018Peter and the Wolf,\u2019 if Peter were also the Wolf.\u201d She notes Britell\u2019s score for \u201cBattle of the Sexes\u201c includes \u201cBobby Riggs\u2019s sleazy upright piano competing with Billy Jean King\u2019s majestic concert grand,\u201d and describes an in-progress piano sequence \u201conly a few bars long, circling the drain of a few dissonant notes.\u201d

Fisher, who said she was given valuable help by fact-checker Alex Carp, writes a range of pieces as a freelancer while working as a researcher for the Times magazine and a Chinese translator. Her study of Britell is an insightful profile of the composer himself, with such revelatory moments as his being \u201cwalloped\u201d by a track<\/a> from A Tribe Called Quest\u2019s album \u201cThe Low End Theory.\u201d Or, as Fisher writes:
It was like learning, as a teenager, that there were more letters to the alphabet than he\u2019d been taught.<\/blockquote>
But the profile of the man wouldn\u2019t land as definitively if it didn\u2019t also profile his music, and help readers hear the notes buzzing insistently behind the words.

Nieman Storyboard interviewed Fisher about how she reported and wrote the story, and translated layers of music into the flat dimensions of print. Her answers have been edited for length and clarity, and are followed by an annotation of the story. To fully appreciate the profile, we encourage you to take time to listen to some of the music in the links.

T<\/span>ell me how this story came about, and describe the reporting and writing of it.
<\/strong>Essentially the story happened because I hit critical mass. I realized that the music for \u201cMoonlight,\u201d \u201cBeale Street,\u201d \u201cVice,\u201d and even one of my favorite podcasts<\/a> came from Nicholas Britell. Watching the first season of \u201cSuccession,\u201d and seeing his name pop up again, I knew I wanted to try pitching a profile.

To be honest, I felt out of my depth. I played viola for years, growing up, but apart from some experience with piano and guitar, that\u2019s really it. I listen pretty widely (Baroque chamber music, Elliott Smith, Alice in Chains) and I know when something\u2019s out of tune. It\u2019s fascinating how many readers have told me \u201cyou know so much about music\u201d or \u201cyou know so much about movies.\u201d I\u2019m just a curious person who asked questions.

Nick (Britell) was very busy when the pitch was first accepted, in early 2019, so our first meeting didn\u2019t happen until that fall. We spoke at a cafe, at his studio, and then at his session with Barry (Jenkins) in February of the next year; I would listen to the soundtrack to \u201cMoonlight\u201d or \u201cBeale Street\u201d as I took the train up from Brooklyn to Nick\u2019s place. I did the secondary interviews on weekends and a couple lunch breaks.

\"Nicholas<\/a>
Nicholas Britell<\/figcaption><\/figure>

The story describes a visit with Britell and Barry Jenkins as early as February of 2020. How did the COVID pandemic affect the story’s timeline?
<\/strong>After the February 2020 session, I honestly thought we were ready to go. \u201cThe Underground Railroad\u201d didn\u2019t have a release date, but I had a follow-up call with Nick in May that made me think the piece might not need a peg; his descriptions of how the pandemic had affected his work seemed like peg enough. (I loved his somewhat subdued but good-natured strategizing about how they might be able to record the score over FaceTime. He said he\u2019d told Barry, \u201cYou know, we may not be able to record with a 90-piece orchestra like we had been thinking,\u201d and laughed.)

So I put the story together in June of 2020, on a vacation week, while listening to Toumani Diabat\u00e9. The final version is shorter (whether I\u2019m reporting or writing criticism, I tend to write twice as much as I need, for some masochistic reason), with a little rearranging and updating, but it\u2019s essentially the same. A couple days in, my aunt called to tell me her cancer was back. I tried everything I could to get the piece published while she was still with us, because I knew how much it would mean to her. In the end, the decision was that we needed a peg, so we waited for a release date for \u201cUnderground.\u201d I gave her an early draft and she was so excited. She passed in January of this year.

You describe Britell’s music creatively throughout; I particularly liked a description of one passage “circling the drain of a few dissonant notes.” How much did you consider readers, and how much they might \u2014 or might not \u2014 know about music?
<\/strong>I was interested in bringing readers in. Anything classically-orchestrated can feel forbidding, and it\u2019s one of Nick\u2019s talents that his work doesn\u2019t, even though it\u2019s very deeply informed by music theory. I don\u2019t think the \u201cSuccession\u201d theme would have gone viral otherwise.

Some of it comes down to my own interest in how the world works. For most readers, I don\u2019t think it\u2019s helpful to explain that there\u2019s a harmonic progression here or a diminished triad there; that\u2019s like translating an instruction manual from Finnish to Basque. So I talked about what the music feels like, at least for one listener, and what it evokes. One of the reasons I was drawn to writing about Nick was the concrete way he often talks about how his scores start \u2014 as the idea of a poem for violin and piano, as an arrhythmia, or as a way to embody \u201cshouting to the sky.\u201d I think even if you\u2019ve never heard \u201cBeale Street\u201d you can imagine what brass shouting to the sky might sound like.

How did your experience as a critic inform this piece, if at all?
<\/strong>The criticism I admire most \u2014 with the caveat that everyone enjoys a good takedown <\/a>\u2014 is writing that teaches you how to love what the critic is so excited about. Michael Wood<\/a>, for example, does this beautifully well in his film criticism, but really it happens with everything he touches. He doesn\u2019t dumb anything down, but invites you in. I like criticism that feels like an invitation.

What did you learn from reporting and writing this story that may be helpful to you, or to other journalists?
<\/strong>Most of what I learned was pretty specific to this story. But I keep thinking about what Nick told me about the creative process. \u201cIt\u2019s hard,\u201d he told me a few months into the pandemic, \u201cbut it\u2019s never not hard.\u201d You feel at sea, but eventually you\u2019ll hit land.

What are you reading for inspiration?
<\/strong>Ooooh. I just finished Patricia Highsmith\u2019s \u201cThe Price of Salt\u201d<\/a> and have returned now to my perennial state of hunting for my next novel. I don\u2019t know how common this is \u2014 I thought it was reasonable but people seem surprised when I mention it \u2014 but I enjoy trawling back through the archives of great magazines (the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Times Magazine, etc.) for older features. I\u2019d recommend that for any writer for reasons that are probably obvious, but it\u2019s also a fascinating archeological exercise. Sometimes it feels like visiting a different world. The way we used to talk about gay marriage, or trans women, for example, has changed utterly even in the past five years, very much for the better. Even the way we describe mental illness has shifted markedly over the past decade.

***

ANNOTATION:<\/strong> Storyboard’s questions are in red; Fisher’s answers in blue. To read the story without the annotations, hit the HIDE ANNOTATIONS button, which can be found on the right-hand menu of your desktop or laptop, or at the top of your mobile screen.<\/em>

\"Composer<\/a>
Nicholas Britell<\/figcaption><\/figure>

 

The Composer at the Frontier of Movie Music<\/strong><\/h1>
<\/div>
 

Nicholas Britell\u2019s scores \u2014 for \u201cSuccession,\u201d \u201cMoonlight\u201d and \u201cThe Underground Railroad,\u201d among others \u2014 suggest whole new ways of writing for film and television.<\/em><\/p>
By Jamie Fisher

May 6, 2021

 

T<\/span>he first time I understood what it is that the composer Nicholas Britell does for a film \u2014 understood with my whole body \u2014 I was in his studio, listening to a mistake he had made and the way he had fixed it. <\/a>Was this moment always the lede, or did it change during writing or editing?<\/span>It was always the lede.<\/span><\/span> Earlier, in a cafe off Lincoln Center, I had asked him about the process of making\u00a0\u201cMoonlight,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0the Oscar-winning coming-of-age story he scored for Barry Jenkins. Britell told me about a scene, early in the film, in which the protagonist\u2019s mentor\u00a0teaches him to swim<\/a>. \u201cI was looking at the sequence like, \u2018Oh, Juan and Little swim,\u2019\u201d Britell said. \u201cIt\u2019s a beautiful moment. This will be something special he can carry with him.\u201d So Britell wrote a sweet piece in F major, an orchestral swell with a clarinet singing a variation on Little\u2019s theme on top. He played it for Jenkins. The response was a visceral \u201cnope.\u201d

Jenkins urged him to think of the scene as a spiritual baptism. This wasn\u2019t simple optimism or happiness. It was the first day of the rest of Little\u2019s life. “And I still get moved even just thinking about it,\u201d Britell said. \u201cBecause I immediately knew.\u201d On the spot, he began improvising something darker, in D minor, with the virtuosic feeling of a cadenza. \u201cI was playing it on my keyboard with a kind of fake violence,\u201d he said. \u201cBarry was directing me from the couch. And so right there, I just made it in front of him.\u201d

In his studio, Britell played me the scene. <\/a>Some writers are acutely self-conscious of acknowledging their presence in the story. How aware were you of mentioning yourself at points in this story?<\/span>The “I” is interesting, because it can read as grandiosity \u2014 telling you about myself, when you’re here to read about the composer \u2014 but I never saw it that way. To me it’s modesty: there isn’t an objective truth about the way Nick’s music affects you, so here’s how it affected me. I always wanted the piece to have that level of immediacy and intimacy. I\u2019m the reader\u2019s surrogate.<\/span><\/span>
First he cued up his original attempt, over footage from an early cut. It was tender, unambiguous movie music that could have scored any rite of passage; I pictured a high school football team triumphing against all odds. Then he cued up \u201cMiddle of the World,\u201d the music he made with Jenkins. The violin plays jolting waves of arpeggios, wild and exhilarating. Little vanishes into the ocean, Juan holding him but somehow not protecting him, only initiating him into a kind of violent abandon. <\/a>I was taken with this description, particularly when you wrote “initiating him into a kind of violent abandon.” Do you remember anything about how you developed this phrase? <\/span>I wrote the opening sequence on my phone, on the subway home from Nick’s apartment that afternoon. That phrase came right away \u2014 really all of it did. I\u2019d been talking with Nick, listening to him play his music right there for hours and I felt like there was so much I needed to get out, to translate what I was feeling. As the passage originally ended, I wrote that I felt “electrified and battered by the possibilities of the world.\u201d I had trouble sleeping that night because it had just been so exciting, in the sense that every part of me felt like it was at attention.<\/span><\/span> You watch with your heart in your throat: It\u2019s beautiful and also, somehow, terrifying.

The studio I was listening in \u2014 seated in the same spot Jenkins occupied as the music was written \u2014 is the size a New York realtor would market as a child\u2019s bedroom, in an apartment overlooking the Hudson. It\u2019s dark, the walls covered with gray acoustic foam, and Britell often works with the lights off. He shares the apartment with his wife, the cellist Caitlin Sullivan, who \u201cis constantly and correctly encouraging me to take walks.\u201d She also worries that he drinks too much Perrier. <\/a>This is one of several funny asides I enjoyed. Why did you include the Perrier detail?<\/span> Because I loved it. There were moments of repetition in the reporting process that felt like lines from a comedy routine coming back again. When I visited for the session with Nick and Barry later, Nick came to the door in checkered socks and said, \u201cCome on in! Perrier is on the way.\u201d I was like, of course it is. It was wonderful. Shake Shack, mentioned below, was like that too. Nick had told me something profound about the composer and director wandering through the wilderness together, and then he said, \u201cAnd then we order Shake Shack.\u201d<\/span><\/span> There are bookshelves and vintage movie posters on the walls \u2014 \u201cChariots of Fire\u201d greets you at the entrance \u2014 and a small sofa, the left side of which is Jenkins\u2019s territory. A huge monitor is mounted over Britell\u2019s keyboard, for projecting rough cuts. (With a movie-size screen, you make movie-size music, Britell has learned.) There\u2019s also a subwoofer the size of a washing machine; Britell\u2019s scores include tones so low that they feel less like something audible and more like approaching weather.

Last year, in February, Britell invited me back to the studio to watch him and Jenkins at work. It’s rare to get invitations to watch creativity like this first-hand. <\/a>Were you surprised you were invited to observe?<\/span>Originally I\u2019d been hoping to visit the set of “Underground,” down in Georgia, but that never came through. Sitting in with Barry and Nick was what I\u2019d hoped for, if coming to the set wasn\u2019t possible, and it was wonderful. I was so nervous at first, silently listening, like someone had handed me their newborn child and now I had to try not to destroy anything. I thought I might disturb the energy or something.<\/span>\u00a0<\/em><\/span> The two hadn\u2019t previously allowed anyone to sit in on their sessions, days-long confabs that involve near-clinical infusions of Shake Shack. They were still early in their work on \u201cThe Underground Railroad\u201d<\/a> \u2014 a 10-part series, based on the novel by Colson Whitehead, that debuts on Amazon this month. It is Britell\u2019s first television collaboration with Jenkins, and his compositions for it are less a single score than 10 intersecting, fully realized musical universes. <\/a>I was struck by the creative descriptions of music throughout. Do you have a musical background?<\/span>You\u2019re very kind! I played viola in middle and high school, and I don\u2019t have anything like a technical relationship with music, just a visceral one, which can sometimes be overwhelming. (As an example: I recommended Jason Molina to a good friend who plays in a jazz ensemble, and he complained that all Molina\u2019s work was in a minor key. Absolutely not on my radar.)\u00a0 One of the earliest memories I have of conceptualizing music in a more visceral way is listening to Soundgarden\u2019s \u201cBlow Up the Outside World\u201d and thinking it sounded like Chris Cornell was singing through a broken jaw.<\/span><\/span>

The first piece he played me at the session was something the two men made hours before: a dark, inquisitive piano sequence only a few bars long, circling the drain of a few dissonant notes. \u201cOne of the things we keep discovering is, for some reason, pianos,\u201d he said. \u201cReally specific pianos, like slightly warped.\u201d He played another sequence to demonstrate. \u201cIt\u2019s felted\u201d \u2014 the piano\u2019s hammers are padded with extra cloth \u2014 \u201cso it\u2019s really muffled. But it\u2019s always like, piano\u00a0works<\/em>.\u201d <\/a>What prompted you to include the definition of “felted” as soon as the word appeared?<\/span>Ah, an easy one! My editor (Nitsuh Abebe).<\/span><\/span>

Jenkins sauntered in after finishing his burger in the kitchen. All he had on hand were a few unedited shots, he explained, \u201cbut I like to have some kind of picture while we\u2019re working. If it works with the picture, it feels like you can tell if it\u2019s part of the world.\u201d He had been shooting in Georgia since August and flew up to spend the weekend with Britell before heading back to the set. By this point, his voice sounded felted, too. \u201cNinety-two days, 24 to go,\u201d he said, rubbing his face. \u201cWe don\u2019t normally work like this until we\u2019re done. But, yeah, no choice.\u201d In hindsight, this wasn\u2019t quite true; only weeks later, the pandemic would shutter production for months, leaving them to finish their work in a sun-drenched quarantine pod in Los Angeles. Still, by the end of the session, Jenkins had slid down until he was sitting on the floor, slumped against the couch with his hoodie tugged over his face. \u201cYou can\u2019t make a meal of how tired I am when you write this,\u201d he warned.

I was more struck by how comfortable the two men seemed together. Britell\u2019s voice even sounded different when he was with Jenkins, half an octave down, words running together easily. <\/a>This is an insightful moment; how much time did you spend with Jenkins in order to pick up on not only his behavior, but a change in his behavior?<\/span> This is actually a reference to Nick\u2019s voice, not Barry\u2019s. I\u2019d met with Nick twice then, in long afternoon sessions, but that\u2019s long enough to notice when someone is speaking differently. I wonder now if it was only because he was so relaxed or if it might have been that he was on a mind-meld with Barry, slipping into his deeper register.<\/span><\/span> \u201cYou have to understand,\u201d Jenkins said, \u201cwhen we did \u2018Moonlight,\u2019 I didn\u2019t really know Nick at that point.\u201d This is the origin of the Jenkins-Britell partnership, the filmmaking equivalent of buying a house unseen. The producer Jeremy Kleiner had arranged an afternoon coffee between the men, which turned into evening drinks, the two of them talking for hours, mostly not about music. \u201cThey just vibed the whole time,\u201d Sullivan told me. \u201cAnd Barry hired him. He hired him never having heard any samples of Nick\u2019s music of any kind.\u201d

\u201cWe had one meeting,\u201d Jenkins said. \u201cWe went off and shot the film, and then it was like, \u2018Oh, just come to New York.\u2019 And so I walk into\u00a0this<\/em>\u00a0place,\u201d he said, giving considerable side-eye to the premises. \u201c\u2009\u2018We\u2019re gonna work in your bedroom? How\u2019s\u00a0that<\/em> gonna work?\u2019 But he made all this wonderful music. So, yeah, now it\u2019s like a little home away from home.\u201d <\/a>I like how specifically both men’s voices are captured throughout this piece. How did you go about recording them (note-taking, tape, etc.)? How much did you end up using, and how much was discarded?<\/span> Tape, always. My recorder failed me only once, on a secondary call, but I kept looking at it anxiously through every session. For one, I\u2019m a professional fact-checker in my day-job, so I\u2019m fully disillusioned on the limits and flexibility of human memory. But I also wanted to capture the way they actually talked, because that\u2019s one of my interests and pet causes (my background is in linguistics and East Asian studies). There\u2019s a tendency to clean up the way people speak, when the way people really speak is so much more rich and interesting. I also think quote-cleaning can be dangerous when we don\u2019t examine our biases. If you want to make a politician sound dumb, for example, there\u2019s no easier way than not cleaning up his or her quotes.

I would estimate we only ended up using a third of that session. There was so much I wanted to include! I loved their rapport, and Barry kept cracking me up. At one point Nick was explaining that the run of arpeggios Barry wanted the violinist to play \u2014 very high, frail, and spidery \u2014 was probably outside the limits of human ability, and Barry pulled out his phone. \u201cTim Fain can do it,\u201d he said, and started recording. \u201cTim Fain, I have faith. You can do it. Nick! Tell Tim Fain he can do it. Jamie is our witness! Tim, you can do it, bro.\u201d He stopped the video and looked at us solemnly. \u201cHe\u2019s going to do it, Nick.\u201d<\/span><\/span>

\u201cIt\u2019s a little mystical,\u201d Britell said, deflecting credit to the tiny studio. \u201cI think a lot of it is just feeling like it\u2019s a safe space where you can kind of zone off and go on these little journeys.\u201d He sat back and smiled, happy to vanish into the acoustic foam.

Y<\/span>ou have almost<\/strong> certainly heard Nicholas Britell\u2019s music, even if you don\u2019t know his name. <\/a>You address the reader directly at several points … how much consideration was given whether to do that or not?<\/span>I hadn\u2019t thought about this consciously. I think it\u2019s something I have a tendency to do, because why pretend this isn\u2019t how an article works, right? There\u2019s a reader here and I\u2019m talking to them.<\/span><\/span> He is one of the hardest-working film composers of the past decade, despite having spent its early years wrapping up a career at a hedge fund. More than any other contemporary composer, he appears to have the whole of music history at his command, shifting easily between vocabularies, often in the same film. You may have seen \u201cThe Big Short\u201d (2015), the manic, Oscar-winning story of the 2008 financial crash, whose score tried to musically embody subprime mortgages. Or maybe \u201cMoonlight\u201d (2016), narrated by a violin-and-piano theme that matures with the protagonist, tugged lower and richer by techniques borrowed from Southern hip-hop. Maybe you remember Bobby Riggs\u2019s sleazy upright piano competing with Billy Jean King\u2019s majestic concert grand in \u201cBattle of the Sexes\u201d (2017), the vinyl-soft crackle of \u201cIf Beale Street Could Talk\u201d (2018) or the alluringly deranged sweep of \u201cVice\u201d (2018).

Britell also scored HBO\u2019s\u00a0\u201cSuccession,\u201d whose title sequence<\/a>\u00a0would become the most unexpected hit of 2019 that wasn\u2019t \u201cOld Town Road\u201d \u2014 a piece initially indistinguishable from the period music for froufrou costume dramas, except that in the background, maids are carrying value packs of Bounty and wealthy sociopaths are making penis jokes. The theme is dementedly catchy, classical phrases capped with an industrial fizz that sounds like a can of La Croix popping open, or a cash register. <\/a>I love this piece of description, particularly the specificity of “La Croix.” Was that always part of this particular description, or did it evolve?<\/span> Ahhh, the La Croix. This description was actually part of my pitch. I wrote it listening to \u201cSuccession,\u201d probably in late 2018. This is when La Croix was having its somewhat-unreasonable Moment in pop culture (Schweppes is better, IMHO) and it felt natural to reach for it, both as a sound and as a signifier of luxe quality. Personally I love the sound of a cold can of seltzer cracking open.<\/span><\/span> \u00a0<\/em>\u201cWhy is the \u2018Succession\u2019 theme so meme-able?\u201d<\/a>\u00a0the website Vulture asked, on the same day the rapper\u00a0Pusha T put out a remix<\/a>\u00a0with Britell\u2019s enthusiastic collaboration.

\u201cNick Britell,\u201d the film-music historian Jon Burlingame told me, \u201cis a fascinating example of where film music has gone.\u201d Consider what movies sounded like in their earliest years: the swashbucklers that Erich Korngold scored in the 1930s, or Max Steiner\u2019s lush \u201cCasablanca,\u201d or the sweeping historical epics, like \u201cBen-Hur,\u201d that Miklos Rozsa wrote for in the \u201950s. These composers had been classically taught and turned out symphonic, romantic scores. By the \u201960s, film composers like Henry Mancini and Quincy Jones were coming up through a different musical education, rooted in jazz and pop. The next few decades featured competing visions of what film music could do \u2014 Vangelis\u2019s triumphal synths, but also John Williams, whose blockbuster orchestrations wouldn\u2019t have been unfamiliar to Korngold. Hans Zimmer managed to do both, inflecting his classical scores with a menacing buzz. <\/a>I enjoyed this brief history of film scores, not only because it allows me to shoehorn in a plug for Mancini’s score for “Experiment in Terror.” How much consideration did you put into how concise or expansive to make this portion?<\/span>Ha, glad to give you the chance. I was open to making it long or short, but ultimately the size of the rest of the piece dictated that the section had to be on the shorter side. I read a couple books on film composing while I was waiting for Nick\u2019s schedule to open up, in 2019, so I could be ready for anything. Or at least ready not to say something dumb.<\/span><\/span> \u201cAnd then,\u201d Burlingame says, \u201cyou get to Nick Britell.\u201d His classical training gives him \u201ca fairly large toolbox from which to draw,\u201d including the traditional orchestra, like the 90-piece ensemble in \u201cVice.\u201d \u201cBut his age and experience have also informed him in terms of much more contemporary musical forms,\u201d Burlingame points out. <\/a>Burlingame makes insightful points. How did you find him?<\/span>I searched university websites for academics who focused on film and television composing, and I knew that in addition to his books on the subject, Jon wrote for Variety. That made me think he would be a wonderful interviewee. But really he was even kinder and more engaging than I\u2019d hoped, and a huge fan of Nick\u2019s. He tipped me off to the dueling pianos in \u201cBattle of the Sexes.\u201d<\/span><\/span> From hip-hop, especially, Britell learned how to make sounds speak by ripping them open, warping notes to convey an affecting emotional arc rarely heard in cinema.

The composers and filmmakers I spoke to about Britell emphasized the poetic intelligence he brings to his work. But his emotional reach is equally important. Part of his job is helping directors and producers feel things they can\u2019t explain but know they want to feel. As Jesse Armstrong, the showrunner for \u201cSuccession,\u201d told me: \u201cI\u2019m a musical Neanderthal, really. Nick speaks Neander.\u201d Dede Gardner, who produced \u201cThe Big Short\u201d and \u201cBeale Street\u201d and is an executive producer for \u201cThe Underground Railroad,\u201d told me that when you introduce Britell to someone, \u201cit\u2019s like the air starts to vibrate and hum.\u201d He is, she says, \u201cthe perfect person. He\u2019s so expansive.\u201d

The director Adam McKay, who worked closely with Britell on \u201cThe Big Short\u201d and \u201cVice,\u201d likes to joke that \u201cyou can\u2019t talk about Britell in factual terms, because all you\u2019ll do is gush about him.\u201d Britell\u2019s only flaw that he can think of, he says, is that the composer doesn\u2019t have true perfect pitch \u2014 \u201che has\u00a0relative<\/em>\u00a0perfect pitch.\u201d McKay delights in reciting Britell\u2019s C.V., which reads like a setup for one of his comedies: a Harvard-educated, world-class pianist who studied psychology and once played keys in a moderately successful hip-hop band. \u201cAnd then he graduates, and you think, Oh, he\u2019s going to go into music.\u00a0No<\/em>.\u201d Instead, McKay says, Britell winds up managing portfolios at \u201cone of the biggest currency-trading hedge funds on Wall Street. And then he goes and starts scoring movies. And within five years, he\u2019s nominated for Academy Awards.\u201d You could practically hear McKay shaking his head through the phone. \u201cBrutal.\u201d <\/a>You get some heavy hitters from the entertainment world to weigh in on Britell. How did you arrange those interviews?<\/span>Many of them share the same agent! Paula Woods connected me with almost everyone, and most came through because people wanted to talk about how much they loved Nick. It was really heartwarming, honestly, working on a story like this when the news was so grim.<\/span><\/span>

B<\/span>ritell, who is 40<\/strong>, grew up mostly in Manhattan, in a home with the kind of devout enthusiasm for the arts characteristic of many Upper West Side Jewish families. His father, a lawyer, had a layman\u2019s love of music, and Britell remembers figuring out the distinction between Bach and Mozart as his dad toggled between classical stations on the car radio. His mother was a musical-comedy actress before becoming a teacher \u2014 in the 1940s, in West Palm Beach, Fla., she was a child star on a local television program called something like \u201cAunt Lollipop\u2019s Story Hour\u201d \u2014 and the apartment was filled with old books of Rodgers and Hart show tunes.

Britell learned to play on a broken player piano that his grandmother picked up from a neighbor; he began tinkering with it when he was 5, driven by an overwhelming desire to figure out \u201cChariots of Fire.\u201d Slowly he started writing his own boyish pieces \u2014 he and his younger brother each fondly remember a repetitive number called \u201cThe Train Symphony\u201d \u2014 and then, as an adolescent, imaginary scores. <\/a>This is the only direct mention of Britell’s brother; how long did you talk to him for details on their childhood?<\/span>I got about 15 minutes with Alex. There was more I wanted to include, and I checked his memories against Nick\u2019s. He was an important resource because I was told that Nick\u2019s parents, who are older, wouldn\u2019t be available for interviews.<\/span><\/span> \u201cI would write fake TV themes for myself all the time,\u201d he says. \u201cThis is a fall drama on ABC<\/em>, or\u00a0this is a family comedy<\/em>, or\u00a0this is a detective story<\/em>.\u201d

He went to private school in New York City until he was 13, when the family moved to Westport, Conn. On weekends, he commuted into the city for the Juilliard precollege program, where he trained as a pianist. He commuted too between musical worlds. It was the early \u201990s, and Britell was transfixed by the hip-hop swallowing the city: the lyrics, and the beats you could feel in your chest, and the mystery of early samples, recordings of recordings that gradually morphed, leaving a fossil record of every person who touched them. He thought of hip-hop as otherworldly in the same way that he found Bach otherworldly. He remembers being walloped by the opening of A Tribe Called Quest\u2019s \u201cExcursions\u201d: the almost-muddy double-bass sample, the way Q-Tip drops in, the drum break adding some final alchemical element. It was like learning, as a teenager, that there were more letters to the alphabet than he\u2019d been taught. <\/a>This is a striking analogy. Do you remember how you came up with it?<\/span>I remember coming up with it during closing week, but it came fully formed. It crystallized something I had been thinking about for a long time, the way hip-hop introduced Nick to new ways of thinking about what music could do. By this point he was already a very accomplished pianist, and he would pore over scores in the backseat on family road trips, but hip-hop grabbed him. These artists were doing something you couldn\u2019t learn at Juilliard.<\/span><\/span>

He arrived for his freshman year at Harvard loving everything \u2014 math and history, Brahms and Gang Starr \u2014 and was abruptly confronted by the necessity of choice. Lost and unsure, he left. For a year he tried to see if he was meant to become a concert pianist, living with his parents and scraping up work around the tristate area: cocktail gigs, the Jewish organist at the Episcopal church. The loneliness was sharper than he had anticipated. After a year, he went back to Harvard with the same sense of indecision, only now with the understanding that he couldn\u2019t work alone.



At a party soon after he returned to campus, he approached two guys rapping along with a D.J. and drums and asked if they needed keys. The group they formed, the Witness Protection Program, consumed his next three years. At its height, the group toured the Northeastern college and club circuits and opened for acts like Blackalicious and Jurassic 5. At the same time, Britell became close with another classmate, Nick Louvel, who was working on a film and invited Britell to write the score. They spent hours together watching films John Williams worked on, pausing often to interrogate the music. Britell thinks about Louvel often; he died in 2015, in a car accident, just as Britell\u2019s musical career was taking off. He was the first person to ask Britell to write a score, and the question proved transformative. \u201cWe were always working on this movie, and I was always with the band, and those experiences really defined my life,\u201d Britell says.<\/p>

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But the band broke up after college, and the film he\u2019d done with Louvel wasn\u2019t headed to theaters anytime soon. A classmate who worked at Bear Stearns suggested that Britell consider interviewing. He got an offer and took it. \u201cI was thinking to myself, Oh, in six months, I\u2019ll probably go,\u201d Britell recalls. Louvel\u2019s film would break out; people would snap up the beats he was sending around; someone would hire him to produce. Except none of that happened, for years.<\/div>
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Caitlin Sullivan, Britell\u2019s wife, has played on nearly all his scores, including a melody symbolizing love in \u201cBeale Street.\u201d She is also the reason Britell is not currently researching emerging-market currencies in a Midtown office. The two first met when they were 18, studying music at a summer program in Aspen, Colo. \u2014 this despite years attending the same Juilliard program. They reunited after college, when Sullivan was embarking on her career as a professional cellist. She took Britell out for a birthday dinner in 2005, and they have been together ever since. <\/a>It was a difficult balancing act, figuring out how much of Caitlin to include. She\u2019s an extraordinary musician in her own right, and even if the profile is supposed to be about Nick, I didn\u2019t want Caitlin to come off as \u201cand here\u2019s his supportive wife.\u201d She also had a deeply poetic way of talking about Nick\u2019s music, and up until the piece closed I was still trying to sneak that in\u2026 She would tell me about the \u201cshimmer\u201d of vibrato in one passage, or how the opening of \u201cBeale Street\u201d has \u201ca touch of pain.\u201d\u00a0 I\u2019d asked her about how she got into the mindset for playing, literally, love in \u201cBeale Street,\u201d and she talked about the way the music itself helped her do that \u2014 large intervals she has to jump across again and again, almost like a trust-fall. It reminded me of the way an actor in a costume drama might get the sense of the role once they put on a Regency dress.<\/span><\/span>

By that point, Britell had been in finance for about a year, traveling to interview central bankers and people in finance ministries in Europe and East Asia. He thought he was happy. If you\u2019re a curious person, Sullivan observes, a hypercompetent person, \u201cit\u2019s sometimes hard to actually parse out your true feelings.\u201d For years she watched him come home and play the piano, or improvise beats on his old keyboard. \u201cHe\u2019d be up, in a suit, gone around 7:30 a.m. every day and home around dinnertime,\u201d she says. \u201cBut he would need to\u00a0touch<\/em>\u00a0the piano.\u201d He scrounged time for projects with friends, including short films for a former classmate, Natalie Portman. (In one of her films, he made a cameo as a cocktail pianist, tucked discreetly behind Lauren Bacall.)<\/p>

In 2008, on a vacation, Sullivan watched the heavy way Britell would pull out his BlackBerry to check the markets. For months, he had been so depressed that it felt like vertigo, but until Sullivan told him he was unhappy, he hadn\u2019t fully known it. The markets, meanwhile, had guttered, Bear Stearns had folded in front of his eyes and, terrifyingly, the smartest people he knew had no idea what was going on. \u201cPeople were traumatized,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was scary to see that end to what I knew about the way that the world\u2019s economy worked.\u201d The demolished instrumentals leading up to the market\u2019s implosion in \u201cThe Big Short\u201d are the closest Britell gets to a vocabulary for what it was like to watch the world crash down.<\/p>

In 2010, Britell proposed to Sullivan; a month later, he gave notice. By the time they married, he had started to make trips to Los Angeles, a two-year odyssey of \u201cbouncing couches\u201d and trying to arrange coffee dates with directors and producers. \u201cI was down to do anything,\u201d he says. \u201cI wrote telephone hold music for free. For\u00a0free<\/em>.\u201d One evening, Jeremy Kleiner, an executive at Plan B Entertainment, attended a party and noticed someone playing Gershwin in the corner of the room. \u201cWe had just gotten a green light for the script of \u201812 Years a Slave\u2019 and hadn\u2019t really gotten into the question of composers,\u201d Kleiner says, \u201cand here\u2019s this guy playing on a grand piano at a cocktail party.\u201d Kleiner introduced Britell to the film\u2019s director, Steve McQueen. Then Plan B introduced him to McKay, and then to Jenkins, and within five years, Britell was being nominated for Oscars.<\/p>

I<\/span>f there\u2019s a<\/strong>\u00a0through line across Britell\u2019s work, it may be his fascination with winding melodies that make harmonic missteps. The most ambitious example is \u201cVice,\u201d a kind of antiheroic symphony with an evil heartbeat at its center. It\u2019s a profound technical achievement \u2014 buzzing with double fugues and allusions to multiple styles and genres, gesturing toward big-band jazz before ducking away into solo piano or full orchestra. But it\u2019s also a statement about how much Adam McKay trusts Britell. \u201cI don\u2019t even know how to describe our working relationship,\u201d McKay told me. \u201cHe\u2019s almost like a producer, because I\u2019ll tell him the idea from the second I have the premise, and he and I will just start kicking it around.\u201d<\/p>
When McKay was beginning to think about a Dick Cheney mocku-biopic, Britell sent him a note about Mahler\u2019s Ninth. The symphony was the last Mahler completed \u2014 while working on it, he was slowly dying from a heart condition. Leonard Bernstein suggested that the symphony\u2019s skewed percussive opening was a reflection of Mahler\u2019s own uneven heartbeat. This seemed like an appropriate reference point for a movie about a man whose life has been framed by repeated heart attacks. McKay began listening to the Ninth constantly, writing the script to it, and when he finished, Britell wrote a twisted, magisterial, Ninth-like score. \u201cVice\u201d sounds like \u201cPeter and the Wolf,\u201d if Peter were also the Wolf. <\/a>This is my favorite piece of musical description. Do you remember when and how it came to you?<\/span> Ah, I\u2019m glad you love it too! I was worried it wouldn\u2019t make it in. It came to me right away, watching \u201cVice.\u201d Your hero is so menacing, and the score is almost arguing on his behalf with this crooked smile. Maybe there\u2019s something inherently wolfish about that.<\/span><\/span>

\u201cDick Cheney\u2019s heart is central to understanding his story,\u201d Britell told me in his studio. \u201cWhat is a malignant rhythm? How, rhythmically, could you play with it? And then I started doing that harmonically as well.\u201d He turned to his Triton keyboard, the same one he used in the Witness Protection Program, and played the theme slowly, landing hard on the dissonant chords and staring at me intently, as if he were channeling either Dick Cheney or the Phantom of the Opera. \u201cIt has the shape of something strong,\u201d he said, and yet it has a deadly flaw. You\u2019re reeled in, then repulsed.<\/p>

There are intriguing parallels between Britell and George Gershwin, another brilliant, energetic Jewish kid who infused the classical canon with the buoyant new genre he loved. Britell\u2019s most arresting scores tend to fuse both ends of his musical education. \u201cSuccession\u201d is 18th-century court music married to heart-pounding beats; \u201cMoonlight\u201d chops and screws a classical piano-and-violin duet as if it\u2019s a Three 6 Mafia track. \u201cWhat I\u2019ve found in the past,\u201d Jon Burlingame told me, \u201cis that people have found it impossible to incorporate such modern musical forms as hip-hop into dramatic underscore for films. When Nick did it in \u2018Moonlight,\u2019 I was frankly stunned. I didn\u2019t think it was possible.\u201d<\/p>

Hip-hop was Britell\u2019s initiation to the fragility of sound \u2014 how it could be sampled, stretched and broken and somehow, through the breaking, made more powerful. He loves hearing a story in the sounds around notes: the hiss of spun vinyl, or the musician\u2019s breathing. Britell\u2019s signature may be music that\u2019s been\u00a0through<\/em>\u00a0something: As Barry Jenkins puts it, a productive line of inquiry for the two of them has been:\u00a0How can we break this?<\/em><\/p>

Take the scene in \u201cBeale Street\u201d when Daniel struggles to tell Fonny what happened to him in prison \u2014 a rape, unmistakable in James Baldwin\u2019s novel, that the movie seems to allude to through Britell\u2019s music and Brian Tyree Henry\u2019s remarkable face. On the surface, Miles Davis plays coolly on a record player. But underneath, Britell has taken the cellos from \u201cEros,\u201d which scored an early romantic scene, and bent them. \u201cWe talked about it almost like we were harming them,\u201d he told me. \u201cHurting<\/em>\u00a0the sound, making it feel like the sound is damaged.\u201d You find similar damage in Britell\u2019s breakout score for \u201cThe Big Short.\u201d As the movie opens, in the 1970s, funky horns are the sound of irrational exuberance; later, when Steve Carell\u2019s character realizes the industry is built on 40 years of sand, they return as a faint whine, like a chastened mosquito. \u201cThat\u2019s what\u2019s happened to his understanding,\u201d Britell said. \u201cIt\u2019s been mangled and stretched out and transformed.\u201d<\/p>
The question of what hip-hop means for Britell may come together most concretely on \u201cSuccession.\u201d He had read the pilot script and visited the set with Adam McKay, who suggested him for the project. The show had to have gravitas, Jesse Armstrong told him, but it was also deeply absurd, and the music would have to say both these things at once. It wasn\u2019t clear how Britell could make that happen. Then he started thinking about Kendall Roy, one of the heirs apparent who anchor the show.

\u201cThe first thing you see,\u201d Britell said, \u201cis he\u2019s in the back of this car rapping to the Beastie Boys.\u201d It\u2019s hard not to think about Kendall as a failed Britell, a parallel-universe version of what he might have been if he had stayed in finance: a Wall Street bro who hides inside his headphones and disconnects from the world he chose. <\/a>This comparison \u2014 the fictional Kendall and the real Britell \u2014 is more imaginative than you’ll see in most feature stories. When did it emerge? Did you discuss this particular passage at all during the editing process?<\/span> I think it emerged while I was talking with Nick. If I remember correctly, I asked him about it directly, whether the idea was something that resonated with him. The only discussion we had during the editing process was placement, making sure it came after wherever we placed the section about his time in finance.<\/span><\/span> The scene \u2014 a young man rapping earnestly inside a chauffeured car \u2014 offered a window into how the Roys\u2019 self-conception might contrast sharply with their destructive incompetence. \u201cWhat if the sound that they imagined for themselves was this dark, courtly, late-1700s harmonic sound?\u201d Britell asked himself. \u201cI played Jesse some of these chords,\u201d he said, \u201cand he was just sort of like, \u2018Yes<\/em>.\u2019\u201d

\u201cIt was just a wonderful, hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck feeling that you don\u2019t often have,\u201d Armstrong told me. \u201cTo get that feeling, to feel like, Oh, my God, this is something which just\u00a0feels like the show<\/em>.\u201d The waltz-like rhythm, reflecting the unsteady dance between the three central siblings, was \u201ca smart insight\u201d that continues to shape the way Armstrong writes the series.<\/p>

The show\u2019s addictive title sequence was the last recording Britell made for Season 1. He had structured the season\u2019s music like a symphony; the title theme, like an overture, introduces you to all the elements you\u2019ll hear in the show, which Britell recited for me. The beguiling melody. The detuned pianos. \u201cThe cello melody, the idea of these huge beats, the weird sleigh bell \u2014 \u201d The sleigh bell? \u201cThat\u2019s its own thing,\u201d Britell admitted. \u201cThat actually doesn\u2019t appear in other parts of the show.\u201d The main theme is everything, but brighter. \u201cYou\u2019re presented with these ideas so you will both recognize them but also notice how they change, and you\u2019ll have this set of expectations.\u00a0This is the world you\u2019re about to enter<\/em>.\u201d When Britell sent the title theme to the production team, he reminded himself that the nature of his profession is adapting; he\u2019s used to coming up with a hundred ideas, presenting a director a few dozen and possibly seeing them all rejected. But he also thought, I really don\u2019t know what to do if they don\u2019t like this.<\/p>

\u201cI\u2019ll never forget it,\u201d Britell said. \u201cJesse sent an email back, and he was like, \u2018I think the right words for this are [expletive] yeah.\u2019\u201d<\/p>
A<\/span>s Jenkins and I<\/strong> sat on the little studio couch, Britell played an early sketch for the opening of \u201cThe Underground Railroad.\u201d A violin bent into a brass fanfare, and then a piano waltzed in, suggesting mystery \u2014 another winding melody that makes bewitching missteps. At this point, he and Jenkins had about three hours of music drafted, and at least as many still to go. He scrolled down a long list of file names. \u201cSome of these things, we have a sort of very loose, amorphous idea,\u201d he said, hitting play on another piece. \u201cSo this is an idea of descending downward \u2014 \u201d

\u201cI think this comes from the cicada,\u201d Jenkins said. \u201cJust that one melody.\u201d He started singing softly. Do do do, do do do \u2026 <\/a>How deliberate were you in trying to capture dialogue, rather than just quotes?<\/span> I addressed this above, as far as my interest in capturing the way people actually speak. But I also wanted to transcribe the way that Nick and Barry bounce off each other, and follow each other\u2019s sentences to the end.\u00a0I was conscious, too, that this would be the only chance for a reported \u201cscene\u201d in the piece, since I wouldn\u2019t be visiting a set. So I wanted to capture the dynamics of two people at work.<\/span><\/span>

Jenkins had been making recordings on set, collecting natural sounds that Britell would pitch down to make instruments. The piano track he\u2019d played me earlier started out as a field recording: the whistle of cicadas and bird noise, an airy crackling that turned out to be cotton. \u201cI just do Play-Doh with some of this audio,\u201d Britell said, filtering out high frequencies and adding reverb until the cicadas sounded blurry and spectral. In one track, an insect caught in the Play-Doh turned into a bell, tolling the same three ghostly notes. \u201cWe don\u2019t know what that is, by the way,\u201d Jenkins said. \u201cWe just call him Fred now.\u201d

Britell started a new piano track.<\/p>

Jenkins: \u201cAnd this piano was to match \u2014 \u201d<\/p>

Britell: \u201cTrying<\/em>\u00a0to match Fred\u2019s melody.\u201d<\/p>

Jenkins: \u201cSo Fred the bug has to get a co-producer credit.\u201d<\/p>

Jenkins had also been drawn to the noises of the human environment during the shoot. \u201cWe were shooting down in Savannah,\u201d he said, \u201cand there was a construction site next to our set, and I was like, \u2018Oh, that drill has a really nice rhythm to it.\u2019 And so I had the P.A.s go out and record it and sent it to Nick.\u201d Britell started laughing. \u201cI remember getting these texts from you in the middle of the day,\u201d he said, \u201cand it was just noise.\u201d<\/p>
There\u2019s a slight Willy Wonka vibe to Britell in his studio, and as I processed Fred and the drill, he and Jenkins grinned like the inventors of the Everlasting Gobstopper. Over time, the two have grown more comfortable with thinking about a score in terms of manipulated recordings, not just a composition for instruments. \u201cIf everything\u2019s in context,\u201d Britell said, \u201cthe drill is music.\u201d In \u201cMoonlight,\u201d they used ocean sounds; in \u201cBeale Street,\u201d subways. They were looking forward to getting new fire sounds. \u201cWe actually do have people on set burning things,\u201d Jenkins said.

Britell cued up early footage from the show: images of an enslaved family in ragged clothing, faces stinging with confrontation; a white-haired Black man standing alone in a cotton field as cicada noises crackled, as if the field were catching fire; two young Black women seated at a dance, a man bowing and offering his hand \u2014 a fairy-tale sequence that feels more like a horror movie.<\/p>

\u201cI didn\u2019t mind the fire being out by that point,\u201d Jenkins said. \u201cRight as he reached for her hand.\u201d<\/p>
I didn\u2019t fully understand what they were up to until Britell played me a trailer they made for the Television Critics Association, a summary of the show\u2019s music that starts with frantic arpeggios, almost unbearably high, then moves through the waltzing midrange of the Fred-the-bug piano melody and settles gradually into a resonant bass. \u201cIt\u2019s that descending idea,\u201d he said. \u201cGoing underground, going downward.\u201d The final bass notes were made from the sounds of the drill \u2014 you literally hit earth. <\/a>I like how you include your own thinking at the beginning of this graf, allowing the reader to follow your own mind as you recognize how Jenkins and Britell had turned the parts into a thematic idea. Was that always part of this graf or was it introduced later?<\/span>That was always there, because I thought it was helpful. I was appreciating the individual parts but it wasn\u2019t until I saw the trailer, descending until it finally hit that drill at the end, that I fully understood. It was an \u201caha\u201d moment that also felt like a \u201cduh, of course\u201d moment. I should have realized that much earlier.<\/span><\/span>

As we wrapped up, Jenkins concluded, \u201cThe piano just works for the show.\u201d

\u201cIt does.\u201d

\u201cLike, I can\u00a0see<\/em>\u00a0the episodes when I hear this stuff.\u201d

\u201cAnd what\u2019s so interesting is at no point in any of the other projects did we feel that way,\u201d Britell said.

\u201cThe piano\u2019s just the bedrock, man,\u201d Jenkins said. \u201cThe piano and Fred.\u201d <\/a>You spend a lot of time with Nicholas and Barry. What made this the right spot to end?<\/span> The ending is the section that changed the most. In the version of the piece that would have been un-pegged, this was the penultimate section. I ended on Nick telling me about how the pandemic had affected him and Caitlin (they were both very sick, and for a while he couldn\u2019t write at all, because of the enormity of what was happening). Here\u2019s how it closed: \u201cThere\u2019s an enormous piano in Britell\u2019s living room. He starts each morning with Bach, like a prayer.\u201d After I called Nick this April for an update, I had ended on new information about the project \u2014 how he had tried to do his usual sessions with Barry by holding a laptop up to the screen, but had to fly out to Los Angeles with Caitlin in the end; they had managed to record it remotely, with the strings together and the other elements piped in; some of the specifics of how the musical world changes from episode to episode. But in the end, the feeling was that the update wasn\u2019t necessary, not at the expense of cutting elsewhere or breaking up the story. The top editors loved seeing Nick and Barry work, so my editor split the session so that you can jump in almost immediately, toward the top, before revisiting at the bottom. It still feels a little strange to me, likely because the draft took a different shape for a whole year before that. But as Nick told me, there are so many different paths a project can take, and in the end what works has to be what feels right to the director, too.<\/span><\/span>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

icholas Britell\u2019s music has infused a lot of film and TV shows recently, from the rich aural landscape of HBO\u2019s \u201cThe Underground Railroad\u201d to the unexpected banger that is the \u201cSuccession\u201d theme. So when Jamie Fisher got the opportunity to profile the composer for The New York Times Magazine, she wasn\u2019t content to report at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8808,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"topics":[],"authors":[11],"issue":[],"class_list":["post-2159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-annotation-tuesday","authors-trevor-pyle"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA profile of a film-score composer that soars like his music - Nieman Storyboard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2021\/06\/15\/a-profile-of-a-film-score-composer-that-soars-like-his-music\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A profile of a film-score composer that soars like his music - Nieman Storyboard\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"icholas Britell\u2019s music has infused a lot of film and TV shows recently, from the rich aural landscape of HBO\u2019s \u201cThe Underground Railroad\u201d to the unexpected banger that is the \u201cSuccession\u201d theme. 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