Category: music composition

• Creator of music ‘full of imagination and colour’, Doming Lam studied composition in Canada and film music in California before forging his career in Hong Kong
• A composer, broadcaster and educator, he helped found the ensembles that became the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra and Macau Orchestra

Prolific composer Doming Lam Ngok-pui, known as “the father of Hong Kong modern music”, has died at the age of 96.

Lam’s family said the death occurred early on the morning of January 11.

On Thursday friends and long-term collaborators paid tribute to Lam, praising his contribution to the Hong Kong music scene as well as his creative talent.

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Yan Huichang, artistic director and principal conductor of the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra, recalled Lam’s support for the ensemble as well as his compositions, and expressed deep condolences on its behalf.

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Doming Lam Ngok-pui is conferred a medal of distinction for cultural contribution to Macau, where he was born, by the then Portuguese territory’s governor in 1988, one of several awards he earned in a long career. Photo: Handout picture

From 1977 to 1993, Lam was an honorary consultant to, and guest conductor of, the orchestra.

Grace Lang, programme director at the Hong Kong Arts Festival, told the Post: “Doming was a master of contemporary music. His music is full of imagination and colour, [with melodies that are] clear, precise and easily accessible for players and audiences.”

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Doming Lam acknowledges the applause in the Musikverein in Vienna following a performance by the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra of his work The Insect World in 2002. Photo: Handout

Lang is in the process of obtaining for future festival performances the score for Lam’s 1979 work The Insect World, which the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra notably performed at the Musikverein in Vienna, Austria, in 2002.

Throughout his career, Lam was celebrated for his contribution to Hong Kong’s performance culture and his commitment to modernising Chinese music by fusing influences from East and West.

Adopting the creed “search for roots in tradition, find ways in the avant-garde”, he was a musical maverick, and one of few among his generation of Chinese musicians to earn an entry in the authoritative Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

© Provided by South China Morning Post
Doming Lam as a young violinist in 1948 shortly after he left Macau for Hong Kong to study music and look for more opportunities. Photo: Handout

Born in Macau in 1926, Lam moved to Hong Kong in 1947 and helped found the Sino-British Orchestra, for which he played the violin. It was later renamed the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra.

In his thirties, he moved abroad to further his knowledge, earning a diploma in composition in Canada in 1958 and studying film music under the three-time Academy Award winner Miklos Rozsa at the University of Southern California from 1960 to 1964. He interned in Hollywood alongside his studies.

After his North American stint, Lam returned to Hong Kong, where he worked as a producer of cultural and entertainment programmes for Rediffusion, which operated a radio station and launched the first television station in Hong Kong.

© Provided by South China Morning Post
Doming Lam worked for the now-defunct Rediffusion Television after his return to Hong Kong in the 1960s. Photo: Handout

In the 1980s, he produced a series of programmes about classical music for public broadcaster RTHK, a period during which he was also instrumental in the founding of various music groups and communities in Hong Kong. In 1981, he organised a conference to bring together composers from mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.

Lam taught music at the University of Hong Kong and was its composer in residence from 1989 to 1994. He also served as music director of the Macau Chamber Orchestra (which later became the Macau Orchestra) and the Hong Kong Children’s Choir.

In 2020, the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts awarded Lam an honorary doctorate.

© Provided by South China Morning Post
Doming Lam in 1985, when his roles included honorary music director of the Hong Kong Children’s Choir, which he had earlier served as its music director. Photo: SCMP

In his final years, Lam enjoyed a tranquil yet productive life, spending time with his grandchildren while devoting himself to writing music.

One of his last compositions, titled Calm, was a chamber work for a Chinese ensemble, with clean musical lines that conveyed a sense of peace and being at ease.

It seemed to sum up Lam’s ethos, which he once explained by saying: “Nothing should bother one’s mind. One is not affected by gain or loss. When faced with the external world, one always stays rational, grounded, and merciful. This is the natural state of mind.”

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This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (www.scmp.com), the leading news media reporting on China and Asia.

Copyright (c) 2023. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

Saffron is an organization working to address the gender imbalance within music technology, production and the recording arts. 

With the aim of creating space, visibility and representation for women, female-identifying and non-binary people within music tech, Saffron provide essential access to resources, workshops and mentoring while maintaining a supportive community that works towards this shared goal. The latest USC Annenberg report (opens in new tab) shows that less than 5% of the music tech industry is comprised of women, non-binary or trans people and less than 1% of these are people of colour.

Saffron also host an annual digital event called 7 Days of Sound. The event is made up of seven consecutive days of online music tech workshops, covering a broad range of topics within music production, sound engineering, composition, DJing and industry knowhow, and will be delivered by a number of notable figures within the fields of electronic music and music technology. 

The lineup for this year’s 7 Days of Sound has been unveiled this week. As part of the 2023 edition, mastering engineer Heba Kadry (known for her work with Bjork, Beach House and Ryuichi Sakamoto, among others) will deliver a talk on her journey into the world of engineering, her approach to working with artists and her processes behind the desk. Attendees are encouraged to submit questions in advance of the Q&A with Kadry. 

Electronic music producer rRoxymore will be hosting a session called Mixdown Surgery Hour, in which attendees can submit their tracks and receive feedback, while XL Recordings in-house engineer Josette Joseph will be opening up her DAW live to break down tracks she’s worked on as part of the Beat Breakdown workshop. 

Certified Ableton trainer Pops Roberts will be delivering a workshop based around vocal production techniques, composer and producer Homay Schmitz will be taking a deep dive into composition and arrangement for strings, and NTS resident Elena Colombi is set to explore the process of setting up and running an independent record label in an industry-focused workshop.

We spoke with several members of the Saffron team in March of last year about the event’s previous edition. “We invited people all over the world to come and listen to women and non-binary people talk about music tech,” Saffron’s Glade Sinclair told us. “There were, I think, nearly 300 people in the room, online. It was really beautiful to have that. I think it’s allowed us to connect with everybody a lot more.”

7 Days of Sound takes place 27th January to the 2nd February 2023. Attendees can book a ticket for just one day, or the entire week. The event is open to women, non-binary and trans folks worldwide.

Tickets for 7 Days of Sound can be purchased via Saffron’s website. (opens in new tab)

Revisit our 2022 interview with the Saffron team to find out more about the work that they do. (opens in new tab)

Reviewing​ a festival of Frederick Delius’s music in 1929, the Times declared that his ‘strength and weakness … is his solitariness. He belongs to no school, follows no tradition, and is like no other composer’ in form, content or style. When Delius died in 1934, his obituaries described him as ‘a dreamer’ who ‘lived in a world of his own’. Over the years, the story of his singularity was repeated so often that in 2014 his biographers Martin Lee-Browne and Paul Guinery could still claim that ‘Delius would spend his life composing music that bore no relationship to anything, good or bad, that had been written before.’

Delius has been perceived this way in part because he wrote music that was not easily associated with any national school, at a time when codifying ‘Englishness’ in music was thought to be of real importance. When in 1904 a German critic denounced England as ‘the land without music’, it hit a nerve. The lack of a composer to compete with Beethoven and Brahms had for decades been the source of national anxiety, widely discussed in the musical papers. Music wasn’t only a form of soft power, but was believed to be a way of shaping the nation’s morals – and England was dancing to Germany’s tunes.

Delius seemed at first a promising candidate. He was born in Bradford in 1862 to a respected middle-class wool merchant. Many of his later works refer to his Yorkshire origins, conjuring up an idealised North of England. His enduringly popular orchestral piece Brigg Fair (1907), for example, is based on an English folksong of the same name, about a fair in a Lincolnshire market town. When it was performed in 1908 under the baton of Thomas Beecham, it got rave reviews: ‘Mr Delius sees poetry and sentiment,’ the Daily Telegraph wrote, where ‘to the conventional eye all is harshness and frivol … The result is a work of intense feeling, pregnant with rare emotion and serene beauty.’

But he didn’t quite fit. His parents were German, and he spent much of his life travelling. He lived in the US, France and Germany as well as in Britain, and incorporated a wide range of cultural influences into his work. Among his operas, A Village Romeo and Juliet (1901) was based on a Swiss story, Fennimore and Gerda (1910) on a Danish novel, and The Magic Fountain (1895) is about Juan Ponce de León’s ‘discovery’ of Florida. Even Brigg Fair, the Times commented, ‘does not sound like an English folksong when Delius harmonises it’. Delius’s ‘Englishness’ sounded very different to that represented by his contemporaries Elgar, Vaughan Williams or even Ethel Smyth, who, like Delius, studied in Leipzig and travelled widely.

Delius’s music has a distinct and identifiable sound. He drew on Debussy’s French impressionism and Wagnerian harmony so that his works are often described as ‘meditative’ and ‘atmospheric’. Modulation between keys is one of the main ways in which composers can create tension within tonal music, but Delius favoured key relationships that don’t, relatively speaking, generate a sense of momentum and forward drive. This is heightened by his tendency to undulate between keys rather than dramatise his key changes. When added to his heavy focus on string and woodwind timbres, these musical characteristics create an opulent, seemingly static sound world. Delius’s rhapsodic works often have an ethereal, almost otherworldly quality. His career spanned six decades of musical upheaval: at the start of his life Wagner had yet to premiere Tristan und Isolde; by the time he died in 1934 Bing Crosby was dominating the US charts. Yet his style remained relatively constant. His technique developed and his palette expanded, but in contrast to the careers of, say, Schoenberg or Strauss, Delius’s early works bear striking similarities to his last, moving beyond Wagner but never embracing jazz or the more experimental paths of 20th-century music.

All this has made him a divisive composer. According to the Times, reviewing his memorial concert in 1934, ‘whatever else he may be Delius is not an acquired taste.’ His music either ‘captivates at once and those who have been captivated may go on to discern new varieties within the rather limited range of emotions it represents’ – or it does not, in which case even a small amount of Delius can be too much. His lyrical, allusive and sometimes whimsical works have been upheld as the best and worst of early 20th-century music, characterised as both the visionary utterances of a prophet without honour in his own country, and as the ramblings of a figure who represented the last gasp of a dying age. In the years after Delius’s death, opinion moved against him. Writing at his centenary in 1962, Deryck Cooke lamented that ‘Delius’s admirers have to face the fact that … the general attitude of English musicians to his art has been one of strong moral condemnation: to declare oneself a confirmed Delian today is hardly less self-defamatory than to admit to being an addict of cocaine or marihuana.’ Thanks to the sustained efforts of musicians such as Cooke, however, the tide has gradually turned. Delius may still be divisive, but his fans have grown in number. There is now a Delius Society dedicated to promoting his music, and a journal publishing research about him. Various books about his music have been published over the last twenty years, and while he’s still far from being a fixture of concert programmes, most of his major works have been recorded, often to favourable reviews.

Jeremy Dibble is an admirer. Delius’s music was the soundtrack to his teenage years; he was drawn to its ‘lyricism and poetry’. His book focuses on Delius’s compositional processes. ‘We can only do true justice to Delius’s music by understanding how his music coheres,’ Dibble writes, opposing ‘the accusations of formlessness’ which were once levelled at Delius and contributed to ambivalence about his music. Describing a piece as ‘formless’ could prove fatal for its reputation – it implied incoherence and compositional incompetence, a lack of the structural rigour that has historically been thought of as a hallmark of ‘great’ music. Delius’s orchestral work Sea Drift (1904) came in for particular criticism on this front. By presenting an analytical study of Delius’s oeuvre, Dibble hopes to expose the allegation as being ‘demonstrably untrue’. He counters the Musical Times’s complaint in 1908 that the ‘comparative formlessness’ of Sea Drift made it ‘difficult to follow’, for example, by demonstrating that the work has a large-scale ternary structure in which the returning key of E major provides an anchor. His book will be a useful guide for those looking for a chronological overview that pays close attention to musical detail without getting into an unapproachable level of theoretical depth; it is especially insightful on Paris (1900), In a Summer Garden (1908) and A Village Romeo and Juliet. But on the question of Delius’s form, Dibble agrees with the academic consensus. The ‘accusations’ he cites come mostly from the thirty years after the composer’s death; few critics today would make this complaint about Delius’s music.

Dibble’s previous books include biographies of Charles Villiers Stanford and Hubert Parry, and in this one he approaches Delius principally as a British composer. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the sections on Britain are the strongest. Dibble shuttles between context, reception and analysis to illuminate his central question about musical form. Composers would usually be introduced to London’s musical public in concerts alongside more established figures (Smyth’s London debut at the Crystal Palace, for example, featured August Manns conducting her four-movement orchestral Serenade alongside the English premiere of Tchaikovsky’s Second Piano Concerto and works by Schütz, Wagner and Parry). Delius, however, opted to present himself in 1899 with a three-and-a-half-hour-long concert dedicated entirely to his own music, organised and paid for by himself. Solo concerts weren’t unheard of, but Dibble’s comparisons with similarly ambitious undertakings by Stanford and Granville Bantock help to explain why even within an unusual format, Delius’s music was considered peculiar. He incorporated influences from the US, Scandinavia and Germany in his work. Placing this debut in the broader context of more introspective British music-making shows why his work would have been perceived as ‘strange, unprecedented and cosmopolitan’. While many appreciated Delius’s newness, others ‘didn’t know what the devil to make of this music, and most of us were frank enough to say so’, as the critic John Runciman put it – an attitude that no doubt contributed to the perception that Delius’s music was formless.

Delius spent so much of his life abroad that the British context offers only a partial perspective. As a child he taught himself piano, having had violin lessons. He spent many of his early years resisting his father’s attempts to apprentice him into the family’s wool business, but couldn’t avoid, when in his early twenties, being sent to represent the firm’s interests abroad. On arriving in Chemnitz, however, he abandoned his business duties to make the most of Germany’s musical offerings – and the same happened in Sweden, France and America. Eventually, in 1886 his exasperated father granted him permission to study at the Leipzig Conservatoire. His time with the family business instilled a love of travel; he often visited Norway, but eventually settled in Grez-sur-Loing, near Fontainebleau, where he lived with his German wife, Jelka, until his death.

When trying to explain Delius’s impressionistic mise-en-scène in Fennimore and Gerda, Dibble mentions Wagner and the innovative Swiss lighting designer Adolphe Appia as possible influences. But just as significant was August Strindberg, whom he had befriended while in Paris. Delius’s whimsical approach to stage directions is also characteristic of Strindberg’s symbolist plays, particularly his Till Damaskus trilogy, and Delius’s letters show a keen interest in the debate around theatrical realism that dominated German and Scandinavian theatres in the early 20th century. The Austrian director Max Reinhardt may have been another influence. Delius would most likely have been aware of Reinhardt’s work; the set designer for the Berlin premiere of A Village Romeo and Juliet had previously collaborated with Reinhardt, as had Edvard Munch, with whom Delius was close friends. Dibble doesn’t explore the influence of this German-Scandinavian milieu on Delius’s approach to operatic form, nor does he consider Delius’s relationship to visual culture more widely – something that feels especially important given that Jelka was an artist, and that Delius often gave his pieces visually evocative titles.

Dibble’s​ narrow lens becomes most problematic in his discussion of Delius’s American works. He produced his first large-scale orchestral piece while running an orange plantation in Florida. When it became clear that he had no interest in the wool business, Delius’s father sent him to Florida in a last-ditch attempt to steer his wayward son towards a stable profession. In fact, this decision had the opposite effect, because it was there that Delius first encountered African American vernacular music. He attributed his ‘urge to express myself in music’ to hearing the family of his foreman, Albert Anderson, singing on the plantation. Delius incorporated some of this music into Florida (1887), which depicts across four movements a day on the plantation, and in later works such as Appalachia (1902) and his opera Koanga (1897). This was based on an episode from an 1880 novel, The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life, by the American author George Washington Cable. One central character is an enslaved prince, Koanga, who is killed after cursing his enslavers and attempting to escape from them. But Delius and his librettist, Charles Francis Keary, changed Cable’s original in crucial ways, altering the message and character of the story. The whole opera takes place as a flashback, and instead of Koanga’s curse incapacitating only the white slave-owners on the plantation it wreaks destruction on the enslaved as well.

As musicians have become more attuned to issues around representation and musical appropriation, Delius’s oeuvre has provided many opportunities for discussion. Works like these are difficult and obviously contentious. How does one stage an opera that is, as musicologist Eric Saylor puts it, ‘a product of its creator’s fascination with black culture that was fixed within fin-de-siècle attitudes and stereotypes about racial hierarchies’? What were the historical power imbalances that produced these works? How did Delius’s music contribute to cultural constructions of whiteness? These questions have prompted a flourishing literature on Delius and race. Daniel Grimley, for example, has considered Delius’s American works ‘as part of a much wider literary-artistic construction of the South’. Delius’s first encounters with American culture were not in Florida but in Bradford, through the blackface minstrel shows that played in the city. Grimley shows that Delius came to the plantation with a ‘colonial worldview’, which shaped both his behaviour and the music he wrote there. Florida adopted Jim Crow laws, and had America’s highest per capita rate of the lynching of Black citizens between 1882 and 1930. But the idyllic, peaceful image of the state conjured up in Florida ‘perpetuates a familiar colonial fiction’. In the opening movement, for example, woodwind bird calls and a modal oboe melody over shimmering strings give the impression of an unpeopled landscape. To Delius, Florida was a place of wonder, magic and relaxation. He was so preoccupied with composing that he seems not to have noticed that his neglect of the plantation risked the livelihood of the Black workers whose songs he used for his own music.

Dibble’s survey could have built on such studies, but beyond an acknowledgment that Delius’s interest in African American vernacular music was primarily as a ‘novel source of colour and fantasy’, The Music of Frederick Delius sidesteps the questions raised by this literature, and often treats complex issues as simple. Historical quotations that describe Delius hearing Black workers singing on the plantation as a moment of ‘ecstatic revelation’ stand without contextualisation or critique, while musical analyses rehearse familiar formulations about Delius using African American songs to generate an ‘exotic atmosphere’.

Delius was by no means unique among composers in the US in fusing European classical and African American vernacular idioms. He was composing during an era in which American, like English, musical identity was hotly contested. The pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-69) had found fame using Creole music in his compositions, and Delius’s Florida followed such pieces as John Broekhoven’s Suite Creole (1884) and Ellsworth Phelps’s Emancipation Symphony (1880), which incorporated spirituals and had a loose narrative celebrating the abolition of slavery. Delius may not have known Phelps or Broekhoven, but he would certainly have been aware of Gottschalk: a musical association in Jacksonville, not far from Delius’s plantation, was dedicated to him, and his popular memoir was published in 1881. As the musicologist Douglas Shadle has demonstrated, there was by the late 1880s a lively debate in the US about how music might combine the ‘aesthetic and national’, and what it meant to make African American music the foundation of the ‘national’.

This debate became significantly more bitter in 1892, when Dvořák was appointed director of the National Conservatory in New York and declared that ‘the future music of this country must be founded on what are called negro melodies.’ His pronouncement – followed by the premiere in 1893 of his Symphony No. 9, the ‘New World’, in which he put his theories into practice – caused a scandal. In Jim Crow America, many white Americans ‘considered the music of Native Americans, enslaved Africans, and Asian immigrants “barbaric”’, Shadle writes, ‘and therefore un-American’. In this context, Dvořák’s remarks were ‘explosive’; they were printed and discussed in newspapers across the US. Letters pages filled with racist invective as well as more measured responses acknowledging that Dvořák’s comments were only the latest in a long history of wrangling about what constituted ‘national’ American music.

Delius began writing Koanga in 1895, three years after the Dvořák furore – vital context for understanding his compositional decisions. Dibble’s observation that ‘negro melodies … imbue Koanga with a unique American flavour’ is far from being neutral. (Not least because the term ‘negro melodies’ was contentious even in 1893. As Shadle points out, the term’s broad-brush nature sparked disagreement about what music it included: was it ‘the music of Southern enslaved people, Creole music of the gulf coast, African music, blackface minstrelsy or some combination’?) Delius’s American works are saturated with the racial politics of the period in which they were composed. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t perform them, study them or listen to them. But it does mean that they need to be approached and programmed with care and attention to those politics.

The myth of Delius’s individualism may once have been a useful way of understanding his music. Positioning him as a man outside of his time, uninterested in and unanswerable to his surroundings, made him more attractive, more easily categorised. But Delius was just as influenced and shaped by the politics and culture of his day as any other composer. Acknowledging this means admitting that he was less innovative than some of his advocates claim. He was not the first white composer to show interest in Black music, nor even the first to use a wordless chorus, as Béla Bartók believed. (Delius’s Mass of Life incorporated a wordless chorus in 1905; to pick just one predecessor, Debussy used the technique six years earlier in his Nocturnes.) But it is exactly this worldliness that makes Delius interesting today. British music of the early 20th century is undergoing a reassessment – Ethel Smyth, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, John Ireland, Ivor Gurney and Rebecca Clarke are all gracing stages once again, and established historical narratives are being upended by new scholarship on their lives and works. Delius, in all his messiness, belongs to the same world.

BRUNSWICK — The Bowdoin International Music Festival is accepting applications for its music institute scholarship.

The festival is the recipient of a $200,000 endowment fund gift from The Bingham Charitable Trust for Maine student scholarship. Following the wishes of the late William Bingham, the award allows all accepted young Maine musicians who play violin, viola or cello to attend the six-week summer institute with full tuition scholarships, according to a news release from Daniel Nitsch, executive director of the Bowdoin International Music Festival.

From the time of his youth until the end of his life, Bingham enjoyed playing the violin. Although his father strongly discouraged Bingham’s early love of the instrument, Bingham persisted. Throughout Bingham’s life, his violin served not only to delight him and his friends but as solace in difficult times.

Bingham’s gift now encourages young people to pursue their own love of music, regardless of financial circumstances.

To apply, visit bowdoinfestival.org. The festival has waived all application fees for Maine residents.

The Music Institute priority application deadline is 11:59 p.m. Monday, Jan. 16. For those who miss that deadline, applications will remain open for the Instrumental, Composition, Wind Fellowship, and Collaborative Piano programs until all studios are filled, although application fees increase. Those who miss Monday’s deadline should submit their application by Friday, Feb. 10.

Check out other upcoming area events!

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She may have an Oscar, an Emmy and two Grammys, but composer Hildur Guðnadóttir is uncomfortable in the spotlight. She’d much rather be in her Berlin studio practicing her cello, driving her son to school or making dinner for her family.

The Icelandic composer of “Joker” and “Chernobyl” is in Hollywood to talk about her two award-season projects, Todd Field’s “Tár” and Sarah Polley’s “Women Talking” (the latter of which is on Oscar’s shortlist for score). And she does so easily and candidly, with a friendly demeanor and an infectious laugh. But it’s clear this isn’t the place she would normally choose to be.

“I had been going about my music for 20 years and no one really cared that much,” she says with a smile. Her bracing, emotionally powerful music for 2019’s “Joker” – which made her only the third woman in Oscar history to win for original score – altered all that overnight.

“It was a huge change for me to have so much attention,” she says. “Then, of course, straight after the Oscar, COVID hit. So it was a complete U-turn from all the events to just seeing no one. And it made the whole thing a little bit surreal – being by myself, then being around all these people, and then again being alone.”

The Fields film came first, in late 2020. What attracted her to “Tár” was its focus on the process of music-making. “I’m more interested in that than I am standing on stage and performing, or the final product,” she says — an unusual attitude for a composer.

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Hildur Gudnadottir Variety Cover Extra Edition

“Hildur’s a composer that I’ve admired for a long time, before she started doing any television or film scoring,” says Field, a classical-music buff who made Guðnadóttir his second call (after Cate Blanchett, who plays the film’s title character) upon writing the script for his film about a powerful symphony conductor whose troubled personal life intrudes on her very public career.

“We had an unusually long process together that began long before prep and went all the way through the film,” Field notes. “Our first conversations really started about noises and sounds. How does she hear? How does she listen? Ultimately she wrote music for all of the actors to have in their ears for when they moved on set.”

Adds “Women Talking” director Polley: “I’ve been in love with Hildur’s work for a long time. She never has any sentimentality in her work, and as this score needed to be concerned with hope, I needed her steady hand to make sure it never felt manipulative while still embracing the concept of faith and a possible future.”

Yet these are the only two films the composer has done since “Joker.” “I’m very picky,” Guðnadóttir admits. “It’s very important for me to be present for the project that I’m working on, that I have the time and space and mental energy to really live inside the story that I’m telling.”

And, Guðnadóttir makes clear, she is not just a “film composer.” “It’s very important for me to not get stuck in one medium,” she declares.

Her musical interests are much broader: In July, she debuted a 16-minute work for choir and orchestra at London’s famous Proms (“The Fact of the Matter,” her musical response to the state of the world) and she recently performed another concert piece in Krakow, Poland, for what she calls “robotic feedback instruments.”

Experimental music – some of which was performed by the L.A. Philharmonic in November 2021 – plays a huge role in her career. Her disturbing, Emmy-winning score for HBO’s “Chernobyl,” for example, was built entirely from sounds she recorded at a Lithuanian nuclear power plant, processed with tape machines and electronic gear in her studio.

“There’s just so much to explore in music,” she muses. “My mind is much more driven by the process than necessarily knowing what the outcome is going to be.”

She loves her life in Berlin, where she has lived “off and on” for the past 20 years. Born in Reykjavik, the daughter of a composer and an opera singer, she began playing the cello at age 5 and went on to study electroacoustic composition at the Berlin University of the Arts.

She fell in love with the city and its thriving classical and pop music scene, and decided to stay. “It’s a place where I can hear my thoughts,” she says. “There’s something very grounding about the city. It’s very easy to just disappear. You don’t have to see anyone if you don’t want to, which is mostly what I do.”

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Hildur Gudnadottir Variety Cover Extra Edition

Guðnadóttir spent several years collaborating closely with fellow Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, whose music for “Sicario” and “Arrival” earned widespread praise in 2015-16. “We were very much on the same musical page. He moved to Berlin to work with me and we shared a studio until he died (in 2018).”

Her custom-made instrument, the electroacoustic Halldorophone, played a prominent role in nearly all the Jóhannsson scores, and her original music for the “Sicario” sequel “Day of the Soldato” drew the attention of director Todd Phillips, who commissioned the “Joker” score from her.

She and her husband, English composer-producer Sam Slater, collaborated on the acclaimed videogame score for “Battlefield 2042” (and he produced her scores for “Joker” and “Chernobyl”). They are currently converting an old Berlin restaurant into a new 2,500-square-foot studio; they expect to complete the work in February.

They were married in California in September 2019 (“a very spontaneous decision,” she remarks) just hours before a Society of Composers & Lyricists reception they were attending to celebrate her Emmy nomination for “Chernobyl.” “Brexit was just around the corner, and he was a bit nervous about what would happen. So it was a kind of Beverly Hills Brexit escape,” she says with a laugh.

The international nature of their lives and careers becomes even more apparent with an anecdote about the pandemic. The father of her 10-year-old son is French, and during the COVID lockdown she had to homeschool him for a year and a half in that language. “No one speaks the same language at home. It’s very confusing,” she says with another laugh. “It’s a big mess.”

She finds solace in her daily routine. Yoga, meditation, practicing her voice and cello (usually Bach) in the morning, composing through the afternoon, retrieving her son from school, home to cook dinner in the evening,

Now 40, Guðnadóttir feels this is the best time of her life. “I have a better understanding of what I need to function as a person – what helps me maintain my body, my mind and my creative process. I feel I’m just starting to learn that now. I’m not very strategic about how I choose new projects. It’s normally quite obvious very fast whether a project will resonate with me or not.”

She is just beginning work on “Joker 2,” a reunion with director Phillips and star Joaquin Phoenix, whose soft-shoe to the composer’s “Bathroom Dance” music very likely won her the Oscar. Lady Gaga joins the cast as Harley Quinn.

Yet this happy, successful composer continues to shun the limelight and insists: “My life is pretty boring.”

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American rapper, Meek Mill, has deleted a music video he filmed at the Jubilee House from his Instagram page.

Per multiple checks by MyJoyOnline.com, the video, which the rapper uploaded on Sunday evening is no longer available on his page as of Monday morning.

The deletion comes in the wake of widespread public agitations from a section of Ghanaians about the said video.

In the video, the singer was seen joyously walking through the Jubilee House, together with his colleagues as they jammed to his latest composition.

From the visitor’s hall to other locations in the Jubilee House, including the front of the facility, Meek and his friends accessed the building for their shoot.

But this has not gone down well with some Ghanaians.

According to the critics, the video is an affront to the country’s image, given that it was shot at the seat of the presidency without any recourse to what the facility connotes.

In a series of widespread social media sentiments, hundreds of Ghanaians have decried the use of the Jubilee House, which is the embodiment of the country’s executive power, for filming a music video by a foreigner.

Meek Mill posted the video on Sunday evening, hoping to excite his audience.

But he was met with anger from a section of the populace.

Meanwhile, North Tongu MP, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, says those who allowed American rapper, Meek Mill, to film a music video at the Jubilee House must be sacked immediately.

According to the lawmaker, the video and its content constitute a ‘despicable desecration’ of the Jubilee House.

In a tweet on Monday, Mr Ablakwa bemoaned the development, questioning the security implications of the said filming at the presidency.

“All those responsible for this despicable desecration of the Jubilee House by Meek Mill must be fired immediately. How do those explicit lyrics from the president’s lectern project Ghana positively?

Is Ghana’s seat of government no longer a high security installation?”, Mr Ablakwa tweeted.

Government is however yet to officially comment on the matter.

DISCLAIMER: The Views, Comments, Opinions, Contributions and Statements made by Readers and Contributors on this platform do not necessarily represent the views or policy of Multimedia Group Limited.

Music in the background of a movie is often crucial to how we experience the film. In some cases, it can become as memorable as the movie itself. Think of the screaming violins in “Psycho” or the haunting tuba in “Jaws” – the latter written by John Williams – who for more than a generation was Hollywood’s leading composer.   

But over the years as directors and studios began to look for edgier scores, they have increasingly turned to a German-born composer named Hans Zimmer. If you’ve been to the movies in the past 40 years, you’ve heard a Hans Zimmer score. 

Action, drama, comedy, romance, blockbusters – he’s done them all.

Including the 1994 film, “The Lion King,” for which he won an Oscar. With its opening Zulu chant, sung by Lebo M., a South African musician who was working at a car wash in Los Angeles when Hans enlisted him.  

Hans Zimmer: That’s how that opening song came about, literally. Microphone in the room, not in a booth or anything like this.

Hans told the executives at Disney that he wanted to say right off the bat this is not a typical Disney movie; it’s a father-son story that takes place in Africa. 

Hans Zimmer: And they said, “Exactly. That’s good. Do– do what– do what you do.” 

He showed us what he does at his studio in Los Angeles, where he composes his scores on this keyboard and computer. For example, the music for the first “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie.

Hans Zimmer: So, if you have “Pirates,” which is basically this sort of a thing, there’s a jauntiness, right– 

Lesley Stahl: Yeah. 

Hans Zimmer: And it’s– The music is really big. And he’s in a little rowboat with a little sail, and you hear this huge orchestra. Because that’s the music he hears in the– in his head, because he’s the greatest pirate that has ever lived in his imagination. So when you listen to the Joker [from “The Dark Knight”], he’s quite the opposite. It’s like, you know, a bow on a bow and arrow. And you stretch it.

Lesley Stahl: Ooh. Oh my god. 

Hans Zimmer: And it’s– it’s not pretty.

Lesley Stahl: It’s very emotional inducing. I can’t even express why. I wouldn’t know– be able to put words to it. But—

Hans Zimmer: That’s the idea. At my best, words will fail you because I’m using my own language.

Since the 1980s, Hans Zimmer’s language in his scores, like last year’s biggest hit, “Top Gun: Maverick,” has defined not just the characters but has helped tell the stories of chest-thumping action films and sci-fi epics. Like “Dune,” which he won an Oscar for in 2022, in which he used juddering drums and electronic synthesizers.

Lesley Stahl: So you’ve been called a maverick. You’ve been called a visionary. How would you describe yourself?

Hans Zimmer: I would describe myself as somebody who’s deeply in love with music, and deeply in love with movies, and playful. I love to play, like, as any musician does, as in any language. It says, you know, you play music. 

His choices have been unpredictable. For every “Man of Steel,” there’s a “Kung Fu Panda” and a “Sherlock Holmes,” in which he used a broken piano and banjos for the 19th-century detective turned quirky action hero.

Lesley Stahl: How important is the instrument to getting what you want?

Hans Zimmer: Vastly important. I mean, because instruments come with baggage. You know, for instance, the definition of a gentleman is somebody who knows how to play the banjo but refrains from doing so.

Lesley Stahl: Whoa. (LAUGH) 

Hans Zimmer: Why that banjo worked, right? Because it was funny.

He has used banjos, bagpipes, buzzing electronics. And this, a good old-fashioned orchestra.

Think about the composer of “The Dark Knight” writing something this delicate.

Hans Zimmer: Really good. Can we just have one more to, you know, protect the innocent?

He invited us to watch him record the score of a new movie in a London studio last summer. It’s about a young girl coming of age based on a Judy Blume book, “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret,” that will be released in theaters this spring.

Hans Zimmer: Like the sound?

Jim Brooks: Mmm-hmm.

Academy Award-winning director Jim Brooks is a producer of this movie. This is the eighth film they’ve worked on together.

What’s unique about Hans, says Brooks and other directors, is how deeply involved he gets in more than just writing the music. His process typically begins with a conversation with the director long before a single frame of the movie is shot.  

Jim Brooks: You talk about what the movie’s about. The story of it. What the scene’s about. You don’t turn to a composer for that. 

Lesley Stahl: So he becomes almost a partner in the–

Jim Brooks: Absolutely–

Lesley Stahl: –writing and the directing– 

Jim Brooks: Yeah, yeah, yeah–

Lesley Stahl: –every phase?

Jim Brooks: Yeah, yeah. 

On “Gladiator,” he partnered with director Ridley Scott. He says he told him that he thought this movie should be about more than just a man in a skirt going into battle.

Hans Zimmer: And I felt right at the beginning we needed to set up the possibility that in this movie we could have poetry.

Lesley Stahl: Can we listen just to a bit–

Hans Zimmer: I mean–

Lesley Stahl: –of the music that you wrote for the–

Hans Zimmer: It starts off just with this note.

Lesley Stahl: And you see the hand.

Hans Zimmer: And you see the hand. And you’re already in a different world.

Lesley Stahl: And there’s— no one is talking–

Hans Zimmer: You left the 20th century. You don’t expect the tenderness. 

Lesley Stahl: I mean, you are setting a mood. 

Hans Zimmer: It’s a cry. It’s a cry.

His love of music, his obsession, grew out of his childhood in West Germany. While other kids liked to play games, he liked to play the piano.

Lesley Stahl: So did you take piano lessons? 

Hans Zimmer: Absolutely. It was two weeks of absolute torture.

Lesley Stahl: Two weeks? 

Hans Zimmer: Well, yeah, because he then went to my mother and said, “It’s either him or me.” And, luckily, my mother made the right choice. She kept me, you know? (LAUGHTER) No, no– 

Lesley Stahl: No, no. Tell me about piano lessons– 

Hans Zimmer: I drove– I drove him crazy. You know, I’m six years old. So my idea was a piano teacher is somebody who teaches you how to– the stuff that’s going on in your head, how to get that into your fingers. That’s not what they do. They make you do scales. They make you play other people’s music. And I didn’t wanna do other people’s music. 

Lesley Stahl: Right from the beginning.  

Hans Zimmer: Right from the beginning. But I promise you, I know my Beethoven and my Brahms inside out.

He learned about them from his mother, a classically-trained pianist.

Hans Zimmer: And there is the other side, which was my dad who was an extraordinarily appalling jazz clarinetist, but with great enthusiasm. In the middle of his work day, he’d get out the clarinet. I’d be banging around on– and– and we’d be jamming, you know? So that’s where I got the joy.

Instead of college, he became a rock-n-roller, performing with the Buggles­.

He was the young guy in the black jacket on the synthesizer. They made pop history in 1981 with the first music video to air on MTV, “Video Killed the Radio Star.”

He began composing scores for low-budget films. One of which in 1988 caught the attention of the Hollywood director Barry Levinson, who showed up one night out of the blue at what was then Hans’ London studio.

Hans Zimmer: And so he said, “Would I mind coming to Los Angeles and maybe doing his movie?” So, off I went to Los Angeles. And I got nominated for an Oscar.  

Lesley Stahl: First movie, really.   

Hans Zimmer: First movie. I didn’t win, but it didn’t matter because everybody wanted to meet me.   

That film was no less than “Rain Man,” which led to “Driving Miss Daisy,” “Thelma & Louise,” “Black Rain,” and more than 140 other films that began to push the sound of movie music into a new direction. 

Hans Zimmer: I love the idea that electronics let you shape sounds in a way that go beyond the way an orchestra can.  

He became a pioneer in fusing electronics with orchestral music, using his secret weapon: a digital library that he built himself, with original computer code. He painstakingly recorded each instrument in a real orchestra, note by note, using world-class musicians and the finest instruments, and loading it all into his computer.

Lesley Stahl: Take a violin. And you have the violin play middle C. And then you have that instrument play middle C loud, soft, and all different–

Hans Zimmer: Oh, yeah. Look, look. It can play pizzicato. It can play short, you know.  

Lesley Stahl: So, you’re not making it piccato. They played it that way.

Hans Zimmer: They played it that way. 

Lesley Stahl: And you’re bringing that up? Whoa. That must’ve taken months. Years?

Hans Zimmer: No, it’s actually taken years.  

And millions of dollars. He doesn’t write out his compositions on paper, his computer does it for him, and it helps create the “unconventional sounds” you find in his scores.

Lesley Stahl: Scraping metal. 

Hans Zimmer: Yeah. 

Lesley Stahl: And electronic thuds.  Music? 

Hans Zimmer: It can be. Everything can be made to be a musical instrument in one way or the other.

He often collaborates with Pedro Eustache, a world-class flautist, who has built contraptions that produce unusual sounds that Hans thinks up for his movies.    

Pedro Eustache: This is an ostrich egg, okay?  

Lesley Stahl: That’s an ostrich egg! You put the holes in.  

Pedro Eustache: Yeah, and I put all that there. And, it’s a musical instrument.  

Lesley Stahl: So you made–  

Pedro Eustache: Yeah.  

Lesley Stahl: –an ocarina out of an ostrich—

Hans Zimmer: Lemme explain.

Lesley Stahl: Yes, please.

Hans Zimmer: When he’s not stealing eggs at the zoo, (LAUGH) he is a very good customer of Home Depot. And– (LAUGH) and– (CLAPPING) and so many of his instruments made out of PVC piping.

Pedro actually used PVC piping to come up with the 21-foot-long horn that Hans wanted for “Dune.”

He’s currently working on “Dune: Part Two.”

And now he goes on tour with a 38-piece orchestra and band to perform his movie scores.

Lesley Stahl: How have you changed? You’ve been working at this for 40 years. 

Hans Zimmer: I tell you what. So, when you start out, you have all that stuff that you’ve never done before. Every movie had every idea, every device, every chord change, every– whatever in it. Now, I think it’s more of figuring it out what to do new. But it becomes harder and harder, because I’ve used up so much ammunition in the past. 

He told us that after more than 150 films, he lives in constant fear of the day his phone will stop ringing.

Lesley Stahl: Even after 150? Do you think you’re motivated by that fear–

Hans Zimmer: But it’s only 150, do you know what I mean? (LAUGH) It’s like, what if 151 is a complete disaster? (LAUGH)

Lesley Stahl: Oh, wow–

Hans Zimmer: You know, I’m still alive. You know, I’m 65 years old now and people are going, “Are you gonna retire? You gonna go and put your feet up?” And I’m going, “No, I’m full of ideas. I’m just getting started.”

Lesley Stahl: Do you really think that?

Hans Zimmer: I really think that.

Produced by Richard Bonin. Associate producer, Mirella Brussani. Broadcast associate, Wren Woodson. Edited by Richard Buddenhagen.