The Sunday Read: ‘The Composer at the Frontier of Movie Music’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 19 September 2021

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

You have almost certainly heard Nicholas Britell’s music, even if you don’t know his name. 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. His most arresting scores tend to fuse both ends of his musical education. “Succession” is 18th-century court music married to heart-pounding beats; “Moonlight” chops and screws a classical piano-and-violin duet as if it’s a Three 6 Mafia track. Britell’s C.V. reads like the setup for a comedy flick: a Harvard-educated, world-class pianist who studied psychology and once played in a moderately successful hip-hop band, who wound up managing portfolios on Wall Street. That is until he started scoring movies, and quickly acquired Academy Award nominations. “What I’ve found in the past,” said Jon Burlingame, a film-music historian, “is 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 ‘Moonlight,’ I was frankly stunned. I didn’t think it was possible.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	My name is Jamie Fisher and I'm a research editor at the New York Times magazine and I'm
0:07.6	also a freelance writer.
0:12.5	My latest piece is about the film and television composer, Nicholas Bertel.
0:17.0	I don't have a single memory of the first time I heard his music.
0:21.3	I just gradually realized that all of the film and television music I was drawn to invariably
0:27.5	when the credit sequence came up, it would be by Nicholas Bertel.
0:37.9	How could all of these different projects that are also, I mean the sound is so accessible
0:43.0	and wonderful?
0:44.2	How could they all come from the same person when they're so varied?
0:55.7	And I wanted to know who is Nicholas Bertel?
0:58.2	How did he score like a comedy epic like VICE?
1:07.0	But also if Beal Street could talk, which has this beautiful jazzy analog sound.
1:13.6	I have a memory of watching succession and like more than the plot,
1:25.6	what kept me going through the first season was just waiting for the theme that he had written.
1:32.4	There's just this fresh sound to it where it's classical music and then there's heavy
1:38.9	beats, there's a sleigh bell and there's this pop that almost sounds like a cannon of
1:44.1	a crow popping open and it just felt like relentlessly contemporary in the most wonderful way
1:50.5	and I just had to know more.
1:55.2	I spoke early on with a teacher of Nix when he had first started to try writing film music
2:02.4	who told me he was just amazed by the cheerful way Nick would scrap everything and start
2:07.4	over if he was asked to.
2:09.5	Just completely in a good spirit without mourning for the work he'd lost, you know?
	...

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