New Yorker Elliot Goldenthal was already an acclaimed contemporary composer when his work on movies such as “Heat” and “Michael Collins” began to spread the word to a wider audience.
The same can be said of few of his film music peers. Philip Glass and Michael Nyman are obvious exceptions, yet Goldenthal is decidedly not of their minimalist school, being an unusually bold and intense writer whose approach is plainly his own.
His latest movie score is for “Titus”, based on Shakespeare's bloody Titus Andronicus and directed by his wife, theatre director Julie Taymor.
It incorporates sounds as disparate as Tibetan music, heavy rock, ‘Rite of Spring’-like ostinatos, choral grandiosity and swing jazz while somehow avoiding the aural car crash the description implies.
Besides writing theatre music and acclaimed concert-hall works such as his oratorio, ‘Fire Water Paper’, commissioned for the 20th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam war, Goldenthal provided the frame for the ’90s’ most audacious Hollywood soundtrack – for Michael Mann's thriller, “Heat”.
Where most soundtracks fall into one of two categories – conventional orchestral score, or collection of popular music tracks – “Heat” collapsed the traditions into a unified approach.
Darkly dramatic, it featured full orchestral resources as well as minimalist electronics and avant-garde rock.
So it's surprising to hear Goldenthal say that “Heat” was his only unhappy movie experience to date, largely because writer-director Mann remixed his original score (“he'd just maul it”) and hired other composers without telling him.
“I would have written something for the final scene,” Goldenthal says from Spain, where he has been discussing a future project.
“He'd be really high about it, but behind my back hire a composer to write a piece for the same sequence. If I'd known, I would never have accepted the job.”
Besides writing extensively for the theatre Goldenthal has scored more than a dozen movies including four by Irish director Neil Jordan – “Interview with the Vampire”, “Michael Collins”, “Butcher Boy”, and “In Dreams” (two more for Jordan may be in the pipeline).
Yet his career is not without its dips into pop culture's shallower pools, such as his scoring of the last two “Batman” movies.
Still, I suggest, it's when his music is at its most dark and doom-laden that Goldenthal seems most in his element.
“‘Butcher Boy’ wasn't so dark,” he retorts, before saying that while he understands the meaning of ‘light’ in music, he doesn't understand its opposite.
“You can suggest the feelings of a love of a woman, of an idea, a spiritual love,” he says. “You can express all these things in music and people will say that it is dark, when it is searching.”