Ryan Murphy’s upcoming FX sequence “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans” boasts one of many best casts of the TV season. But it surely has additionally damaged new floor on the music aspect: a father-daughter workforce offering the musical rating.
It’s believed to be a primary for music in movies and TV. Emmy winner and 15-time Oscar nominee Thomas Newman has written the theme, however his daughter Julia Newman, in her first main outing, has composed the rating for the complete eight-hour miniseries.
Julia Newman, 29, earned a grasp’s diploma from the College of Southern California’s display scoring program in 2020 and has since labored on brief movies, documentaries, video games and net sequence. However “Feud” was an enormous new problem, and, she says, “my dad and [executive producer] Alexis Martin Woodall allowed me the chance to unfold my wings.”
The sequence (which debuts Jan. 31) takes place between 1955 and 1984 and depicts a literary and private scandal involving author Truman Capote (Tom Holland) and his highly effective socialite pals Babe Paley (Naomi Watts), C.Z. Visitor (Chloe Sevigny), Slim Keith (Diane Lane), Lee Radziwill (Calista Flockhart), Ann Woodward (Demi Moore) and Joanne Carson (Molly Ringwald).
“It’s elegant, it’s attractive, it’s New York excessive society,” says the composer, who sought to “seize a gilded age completely misplaced… desperately wanting to carry onto one thing that’s slipping by way of your fingers. Beneath the backstabbing and the gorgeous clothes is a narrative about human connection, a profound human-ness.”
She labored for 5 months to jot down and document almost three and a half hours of music, a few of it with cellist Cameron Stone, guitarist George Doering and woodwind participant Steve Tavaglione, together with appreciable music generated electronically in her personal Los Angeles studio.
With the elder Newman busy ending the Pixar movie “Elemental,” he had time solely to jot down a fundamental title theme — a compelling one, with fast-moving piano figures and a 40-piece string orchestra — leaving daughter Julia to concentrate on the storytelling wants of the eight episodes. She scored them sequentially, starting with episode 1.
There are themes for Capote and for “the swans,” his well-known ladies pals, and the general sound, she concedes, is just not in contrast to a Thomas Newman rating. “I believe my dad’s harmonic sensibility is deeply embedded in me,” she says.
Julia Newman credit her apprenticeship along with her father, together with observing the scoring course of with such administrators as John Madden (“Operation Mincemeat”) and Marc Forster (“A Man Known as Otto”), with giving her “perception into tips on how to keep actually versatile [while] all the time striving for excellence.”
Julia Newman is a part of the third technology of the Newman dynasty that has been concerned with music for films since 1930. Her grandfather Alfred Newman was the longtime head of music at twentieth Century-Fox; Thomas is his youngest son, energetic in movies since 1984. He earned an Emmy for the theme for “Six Toes Below,” and his 100-plus movie scores embody “The Shawshank Redemption,” “American Magnificence” and “1917.”
She calls her time on the “Feud” sequence as “in all probability one of many best studying experiences of my complete life.”
