Apple TV Plus debuted with top musicians on board – variety

For a new streaming service, Apple TV Plus has made some great music choices from scratch, with Michael Brook and Attlee Arverson for “Morning Show”, “Defending Jacob”, “Little America” ​​and Attlee Arverson for “Drill and Lace”. Ian Hultquist for Apple “Dickinson” tapped Carter Burwell to score.

The two-time Oscar nominee Barwell (“Carol,” “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”) has never done an episode of TV before, but Jennifer Aniston-Ridge Witherspoon was interested in sending an AM-news-show. 17 Coen Brothers describes the film’s veteran: “They wanted someone who could openly take tragic situations and put a satirical joke on them.”

Piano, string bus and percussion were the main instruments: “The steep bus worked very well. To it it was an urban feel, a version of hippiens that seemed to fit these characters. We wanted to play the way they thought of themselves in New York City at the top of their game. It’s kind of like a jolt, which was actually a lot of awkwardness with these characters and then the piano seemed to be right for Aniston’s character, because it can be great but lets get some emotion.

Burwell spent six months on the pilot alone, then only had a week to score each of the remaining nine episodes – all recorded at his own Long Island studio because there was “no time” to list other musicians.

The Ga Def family drama “Defending Jacob” was directed by Norwegian Morten Tildam and composed by Icelandic composer Arverson, who later led it to the title “Nordic Nair”. We grew up in shameless places, ”he noted. “And that’s probably true [I wrote this] In late December in northern Iceland, where it is cold and dark, I think some of it is happening.

Arverson (best known for his NBC drama “Chicago Fire / PD / Med”) did not choose from what he wrote for film or TV, but for the music he immediately wrote for the unpublished solo album, “This Minimalist, Post” classical, piano based music. I’ve been working for the last few years.

“Music is really about studying in a broken family, and the sadness and loneliness that comes with it is more than driving its intriguing or thrilling aspects,” he noted. Arverson played the piano, added electronics, and recorded a string group of between three and 25 players.

And with music anywhere from 23 to 40 minutes of music per episode, “it felt like scoring a movie in a week for eight weeks,” he added.

Canadian composer Michael Brook may be hired based on his experience as a world-music artist in collaboration with Indian, Pakistani, Armenian, Tanzanian and Irish – a delightful, truth-based ethnographer of immigrant experience in America. Artists on the Real World label in the 1990s “But at the end of the day, we weren’t really foreign with too much. [score]”Cultural allocation is basically a bad idea, and I think it was created,” he said [the series] A little more fake-tourist. “

“Usually in a series you can create a bit of speed and theme, so you’re not starting from scratch for each episode,” Brooke said. “But these are collections of short stories. They have a meta-overall theme – people who come to America – but they have nothing in common in terms of culture, emotions, character, position. “

Guitarist Brooke (“Brooklyn,” “The Fighter”) played all the music in his studio and added his violin wife Julie Rogers to some of the tracks. He says he tried to reflect “American culture”, especially in the first episode, about an Indian boy who was forced to grow up and run his family’s Utah motel after his parents were deported.

“Dickinson,” re-elected in the life of 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson, may be the most unusual score. Married music partners Sophia and Ian Haltquist (she is professionally known as “Drum and Lace”) achieved this without considering the pictorial era

For the original headline, “They wanted it to be really loud,” says Sophia of her showcase. “It’s just a bunch of guitar distortions, but they thought it took away Emily Dickinson’s inner turmoil. We’ll take it!”

Ian adds: “We don’t think about the duration of the music, but the story comes and we’re still very aware of what the characters are doing. “

Rapper Wiz Khalifa played the role of Death in the series. Ian says: “We had to find a theme that was death, but also sexy. He was so fascinated by her, so we got this weird, spooky hip-hop sound to surround him. “

As Ian notes, as the season progresses, Sophia’s vocals become “Emily’s inner voice.” “It felt like there was a need for tenderness and relativity in the music,” Sophia added. “Once we begin to personally overlay my voice to Emily in the scene, it truly invites you to add that extra connection in a way that mechanical synthesizers really can’t.”