Composer of the Month: Danny Elfman
By Nox Conroy
Winner of 39 awards, including 2 Emmys, a grammy and 24 BMI film and Tv awards, and nominee of a further 105, there can be no doubt that musician Danny Elfman is a brilliant and critically successful composer. Elfman’s immense toolset is entirely self-taught which is likely why his music has retained such stark individuality.
“Having a particular style is not bad, but I prefer to push myself in the direction of being a composer who you never know what he's doing next.”
Elfman is renowned for blending digital sounds such as synth and recording techniques, influenced by his time in the electric rock band, with soaring string lines he cites as inspired by the works of golden age Hollywood. film composers Bernard Herrmann, Dimitri Tiomkin, Max Steiner, David Tamkin, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Carl Stalling. He has scored over 100 films, encompassing 19 scores of Tim Burton’s 22 film discography, and plays keyboard, guitar, voice, violin, percussion and trombone.
Before I explore Elfman’s musical works, I would like to address the current media scandal around Nomi Abadi’s accusations of sexual assault against him. “Rolling Stone” reported that Abadi accused Elfman of sexually harassing her between 2015 and 2017. Under pressure from the “Me Too” movement, Elfman signed an out of court agreement to pay $830,000 over the course of five years under the condition that she refrain from releasing this statement. Due to his failure to pay this disclosure, Abadi and her team of lawyers are now suing Elfman. While public accountability for celebrities in positions of power, such as Danny Elfman, is incredibly important and I advocate believing and supporting survivors, this article will proceed to discuss his career without comment on this incident.
On 29th May 1953, Elfman was born in LA to a family of Polish-Jewish and Polish-Russian descent. He frequented the cinema often as a child and has since quoted sci-fi films and the music of Bernard Herrmann and Franz Waxman as great influences on his own work. It wasn’t until the late 1960s however, after switching high schools and falling in with a more arty crowd that he took an interest in music, being introduced to the likes of Stravinsky and influential jazz artists such as Duke Ellington, whose work he would go on to orchestrate for his brother’s art performance group. Where other composers underwent classical training, the famous composer reported that it was “getting fucked up and listening to jazz late at night when I should have been doing homework [that] was very instrumental in forming me.” After he finished High School, Elfman took a turn away from traditional further education and bought a violin, before promptly travelling to Paris to join his brother Richard.
In 1972, Elfman’s brother asked him to be Musical Director for his “the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo”. He orchestrated and altered scores of 1920s and 30s jazz artists, before later taking over and downsizing the group from 15 to 8 artists and taking a ska new wave approach. Inspired by the 1970s and 80s punk movement, he had wanted to start a band but felt that “I’ll never be a punk’. I was already an old man, I was 27 when I made this decision, so I already felt like a senior citizen.”. The band released 8 studio albums before disbanding in 1995, the most successful of which was “Dead Man’s Party”.
The next decade, the 1980s, was the beginning of Elfman’s career as a film composer.In 1982, he scored his brother’s movie “Forbidden Zone”, highly experimental with its use of synth driven melodies and discordant sound effects characteristic of his work in Oingo Boingo. The next big project to follow was his first solo studio album “So-Lo” in 1984, combining predominantly electronic sounds such as bassy synth, wah-wah electric guitar and distorted backing vocals. Already a fan of his work in “Oingo Boingo”, gothic director Tim Burton commissioned Danny Elfman as composer for “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure” the next year and began a 38 yearlong ongoing collaboration with the artist. “Overture” can be seen to mimic some of Ennio Morricone's soaring woodwind and string melodies, as well as the lively piano left hand of blockbuster scores such as “Jaws”. The film represented his first job with a major film company, and a lasting career shift into more orchestral composition, although he still retained electronic new wave influences in his work given his future reputation as unconventional in his field, reflected in his comment I get drawn to things that don't make any sense, and I learned early on not to resist that.”. The scores for “Beetlejuice” and “Scrooged” followed in 1988 and in 1989 his score for “Batman” won a grammy for “Best score soundtrack for visual media”. This was not to be his only commission by DC and marked his dramatically successful expansion into action and superhero movies. In the same year, he also expanded into TV series with his work on “Tales from the Crypt” and “The Simpsons”.
Elfman kicked off the 90s with the live action movie “Edward Scissorhands”, a masterpiece that continues to receive critical acclaim today. Much like the charming world in which it is set, the soundtrack is a puzzle of dichotomies; with the unsettling low brass lines on “Cookie Factory” contrasting harshly with the wonderful, idyllic Celesta and vocal melodies of “Ice Dance”, that remind the listener of the delicate shapes and movements of snowflakes. The latter has a truly infamous legacy and continues to appear in “Best Film Score” sheet music compilation books to this day. In “Good Will Hunting”, towards the end of the decade, Elfman continued to develop his more subdued, lyrical style with the soothing flute, string and bell themes in “Main Title” and “End Titles”. These two scores demonstrated remarkable musical versatility, and a distinct move away from the upbeat, chaotic style of his previous works in “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure” and the band.
Whilst Elfmans success continued in the 2000s, I believe his most succesful score of the decade was the stop motion musical “Corpse Bride”. This beautiful soundtrack married his more recent lyrical piano work, as seen in “Victor’s piano solo” and “The Piano Duet”, with a truly authentic homage to his beginnings in Oingo Boingo in the track “Remains of the Day”. Throughout the film, Elfman sings vocals for and voices the charismatic skeleton character “Bonejangles”. Meanwhile, on the 23rd of February 2005, his first concert piece “Serenada Schizophrana” made its debut, performed by the “American Composers Orchestra”, which was shortly followed by performances of followed by Violin Concerto “Eleven-Eleven” and several piano quartets in later years. As well as experimenting with the concert stage, Elfman also became involved with the theatrical one when he wrote the music for the ballet “Rabbit and Rogue”. The “intro” track follows a lilting ostinato on pitched percussion, and fanciful flute melody which is reminiscent of his work on “Edward Scissorhands”. Also this decade, Danny Elfman released his first video game score for the fantasy RPG “Fable”, which saw a return to the more dramatic style of “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure” and allied with the sounds of composers such as Howard Shore and John Williams. That said, “Temple of Light” is a calming piece built around muted synth arpeggio lines, which provides a much-needed reprieve from the loud orchestral work elsewhere in the soundtrack.
In recent years, he has shown no signs of slowing pace in his musical career. In 2021, he produced his 2nd studio album “Big Mess”, written over the Lockdown period and addressing themes around mental health. On the 16th of April he performed at the Indio music festival “Coachella” with great success and established a name for himself as a solo artist, prompting the 2023 tour “From Boingo to Batman to Big Mess and Beyond!”. Also in 2022, he worked on the Tim Burton Netflix series “Wednesday”, branching out into the recent convention of arranging orchestral covers of famous popular music pieces, culminating in the incredible instrumental cover of “Paint it Black”. This particular style of soundtrack composition was made famous by the artist “Ramin Djawadi” in his work on “Westworld”, although his cover of “paint it black” differed largely from Elfman’s in its preference for piano and brass where the latter features the haunting Cello that the character Wednesday Adams plays. So, what’s next for the jack of all trades? Having already conquered writing for TV, streaming, video game, film, theatre, concert, group and solo work, one is left to wonder what is left. To be released in 2024, Elfman has been confirmed as composer for Tim Burton’s next work “Beetlejuice 2” and is reportedly currently committing himself to a new classical work, writing for two violinists and a singer. Those projects combined with his current success as a touring artist, has made the 2020s perhaps the busiest decade of the man’s life, as he jokingly relates “Life is strange. If you would have asked me, at 30, what my life would be like at 69 or 70 — let alone told me that it would be the busiest year of my life — I would have said: ‘I’ll either be dead or retired.’ Clearly, neither eventuality seems on the horizon for Elfman while his relentless reshaping of the classical, film and pop genres is alive and thriving.
Edited by David Williamson
… whose favourite Elfman score is:
Nox Conroy writes the column: Composer of the Month. They are a first year English with Creative Writing student