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. 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; 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 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.
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 don't have any differentiation in my head between tonal and atonal, I either hear melody or I hear sonority — I don't hear atonal or tonal so much."
| “ | 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. | ” |
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—Goldenthal (March 2003), on Richard Martinez |
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. According to Martinez, "a lot of composers want to focus on writing their music, and that's what team allows Elliot to do."
At the website filmscoremonthly.com a former classmate of Goldenthals 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."
Respected cultural historian and critic Piero Scaruffi found fit to mention Goldenthal in lists of honour and general overview of film music on his website, placing three of Goldenthal's theatre works in a "Brief history of music through its milestone compositions" and putting his score for "Drugstore Cowboy" at number 27 in a list of "Best musicals of all time".
Read more about this topic: Elliot Goldenthal
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