From Hollywood to the Concert Hall

All music is storytelling, composer Michael Abels argues. In a concerto, the featured instrument is the protagonist, and “a great symphony takes the listener on a journey,” Abels says. “Time is the canvas of music, and anything that takes place in time ends up being storytelling. I understand that there are artists who don’t think that’s true … and I don’t understand that, because I’m sure that everyone who’s ever been moved by a piece of music has been taken on a journey by that music. And if you’re taken on a journey, it’s storytelling.”

Who better than a film composer, then, to take on the various story forms of the concert hall literature? Once upon a time in the 20th century, there was a stark divide between the sounds that were fashionable in the concert hall and the more overtly pictorial, emotional, and tuneful music that was popular inside the movie theater. Now, it seems, the classical world is hungry for those exact qualities. The old class system that once discouraged Hollywood composers from obtaining commissions and performances by orchestras has gradually disintegrated, and today many composers who make their living scoring film and television—as well as video games—are tackling standalone “art music” in its various guises, and finding a very receptive audience.

“Not to be conceited about it,” says composer Jeff Beal, “but I think the symphony orchestra world needs us.”

Beal is placing a massive bet on this belief: he and his wife, Joan, recently donated $2 million to Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (LACO) because, fundamentally, he wants to build an even stronger bridge between the concert hall and composers working in visual media. The Beal Fund is an endowment that will go towards commissioning new concert music from living composers working in the entertainment industry.

LACO just might be the perfect orchestra for such a project: the chamber group was founded in 1968 by musicians who, by day, were recording film and television music in Hollywood studios. Even today, most of its members are professional studio players who can be heard on blockbuster scores by the likes of John Williams and Danny Elfman. (The Los Angeles Philharmonic, too, has historically contained many studio players, and so have other area orchestras.) Ben Cadwallader, LACO’s executive director since 2020, has been actively fostering the organization’s special relationship with Hollywood, in part by honoring titans in the industry at its annual galas.

Beyond building a stronger fiscal alliance, Cadwallader says his hope is that “this becomes a cornerstone of our identity” and that, “in 20 years, we don’t have this division between ‘serious’ concert classical music and music for film and TV.”

All of this builds on orchestras’ longstanding—and popular—practice of screening films while playing their musical scores. Films and their music range from the expected big hits (audience members and sometimes even musicians dress as characters from the films at performances) to more esoteric fare. But the recent activity takes the relationships between orchestras and film, video, and television composers in new and potentially deeper directions.

Crossing Bridges

The bridge has been slowly under construction for decades, and it was John Williams who really paved the way. The venerable composer of so many pop culture touchstones and Oscar-winning dramas wasn’t the first Hollywood composer to move successfully between these two worlds (his predecessors include Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Miklós Rózsa), but Williams’s concert canon is striking for the sheer volume and variety of concerti—more than a dozen, with a piano concerto set to premiere in 2025—making him one of the most important American composers, period, of the concerto form. Often flying against a tailwind of professional criticism and some orchestral skepticism, Williams proved that movie composers can also thrive away from the screen, and many of his concerti have joined the repertoire; James Ehnes recorded Williams’s first violin concerto with Stéphane Denève and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in an album released in 2024.

The bridge between the movie screen and the concert hall has been slowly under construction for decades, and it was John Williams who really paved the way.

Conductor Leonard Slatkin gave that piece its world premiere, with the same orchestra, 40 years ago. The son of two musicians who played classical music as well as film music (his mother played cello on Williams’ iconic score for Jaws), Slatkin has long been a champion of film composers who also want to write concert music. “I was of a time, and brought up in a household, where there were just no barriers or restrictions,” Slatkin says. “We didn’t put names onto anything. I mean, my parents would come home from doing a session with [Dimitri] Tiomkin and just launch into a Bartók quartet, and it didn’t make any difference. They just moved from one style to the other with ease.”

Slatkin does note that, in the mid-century years when academic formalism reigned, there was “a slight bit of pressure for the film composers to reach into a different zone, to create something that was more abstract,” and that Williams likely felt some of that heat; Williams’s concert work tends to be less overtly tuneful and more experimental than his populist film scores. But today, Slatkin argues, the idea of composers “trying to satisfy what they think people might want as opposed to what they want—I think we’re pretty much past that now. I think audiences today are more accepting of the variety of styles that we’re hearing.”

The past decade or so has produced a real boom of concert works from these amphibious composers, both young and old, driven in part by their desire to break free from the timecode boundaries and other restrictions that come with writing accompaniment music, but also by curiosity and even hunger from orchestras and arts organizations for musicians and composers with a uniquely cinematic background and skill set.

Joe Hisaishi, the Japanese composer of Hayao Miyazaki’s enchanting anime films (including My Neighbor Totoro and Princess Mononoke), recently premiered a harp concerto (adding to a body of work that includes multiple symphonies) with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Tamar-kali, whose films include Mudbound and the new boxing drama, The Fire Inside, premiered her Sea Island Symphony with the American Composers Orchestra at Lincoln Center in 2023. James Newton Howard—Oscar-nominated composer of The Fugitive and The Sixth Sense—has written a concerto for cello and now two for violin; the National Symphony Orchestra will premiere his second in June. The Lord of the Rings composer Howard Shore wrote a guitar concerto for Miloš Karadaglić and a piano concerto for Lang Lang. Terence Blanchard, star jazz trumpeter and Spike Lee’s go-to scorer, has had two operas—Fire Shut Up in My Bones and Champion—produced by the Metropolitan Opera.

Michael Abels won a Pulitzer Prize last year for co-composing the opera “Omar” with Rhiannon Giddens, and his other recent works include a guitar concerto and an oratorio for Kronos Quartet and choir. Abels, 62, is somewhat of an anomaly in that he was writing concert music well before he started scoring hit films like Get Out and Nope for director Jordan Peele, but (as with Williams) the high visibility of those movies has been a real benefit in attracting commissions to feed his desire to tell all different kinds of stories with an orchestra off screen.

“For me, it has to do with the genesis of the idea,” says Abels, who is one of the first three composers to be commissioned through the Beal Fund; he is working on a concerto for orchestra that LACO will premiere in early 2026. “If the idea excites me, then the format, the musical structure which that takes, I’m down for whatever that is.”

The Silver Screen

For Jeff Beal, this is all rather personal. Beal, 61, has been scoring film and television since the 1980s; he is best known for series such as Rome and House of Cards as well as the documentary Blackfish. He was writing concert music—a fusion of jazz, minimalism, and Americana—while still in college at Eastman, where he majored in trumpet and classical composition. But like many other conservatory-trained composers, he was lured by the glow of the silver screen—for its occupational stability, yes, but also the inspirational spark of visuals and narrative and the creative opportunities the medium offers.

“When I found film, I found a career,” Beal says—and even though he would occasionally write a concerto or a quartet, he was content with his life in Hollywood. He scored films including Pollock for actor-director Ed Harris and won several Primetime Emmys, and “I think there was a point in which the film career kind of swallowed everything else,” he admits. “I told myself a narrative, like: I’m a really good craftsman, but maybe I’m not an artist—and that’s okay.”

When he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2007, and with a strong nudge from wife Joan, a professional singer, Beal responded by writing a choral piece called The Salvage Men for the Los Angeles Master Chorale. It was Beal’s way of “finding something cathartic to deal with the new normal of living with a chronic illness,” he says. “And then that sort of restarted my engine.” He has since composed several other choral works, a series of piano études, and a violin concerto: Body in Motion was premiered by violinist Kelly Hall-Tompkins and the St. Louis Symphony (under Slatkin’s direction) last January.

“When I got that first taste of having pieces back on the main stage,” Beal says, “there is a certain energy from that which… wow—there’s nothing like it. And of course, as an artist, it is a much more personal, complete statement of you out in the world.”

For composers used to accompanying film, concert works offer both liberation—no dialogue or sound effects! no notes from producers!—and the thrilling terror of a high wire. Film composers may already know how to write for the orchestra and how to paint narrative pictures with music, but now they have to completely captivate an audience with the notes and nothing but the notes, and to develop ideas organically with a logic that is not dictated by cuts or scene transitions or the arc of a screenplay.

For composers used to accompanying film, concert works offer both liberation—no dialogue or sound effects! no notes from producers!—and the thrill of a high wire.

That can be daunting and, as Abels notes, “there are many media composers who have no interest in writing concert works.” But the ones who do—like Danny Elfman—are bringing fresh perspectives and the kind of tuneful, storytelling music that had been missing from the classical arena.

“I didn’t have any interest in classical music as a kid at all,” says Elfman, 71. “It wasn’t until I heard Stravinsky when I was 16, 17 years old for the first time that my mind just exploded with the possibilities. And that led to Prokofiev and Shostakovich, and then what became this deep love of these incredible Russian composers that were both adventurous but at the same time totally grasped the seductive nature of a melody, or a motif, or a rhythm, or something that just pulls you into it. There’s so much emotional context in the music.”

Elfman knew he had several strikes against him when he started writing concert pieces 20 years ago: he’s a self-taught former rock-and-roller, he’s a Hollywood guy, and he wanted to write in the vein of those turn-of-the-last-century Russian romantics he loved so much. When he received his first commission in 2005, the artistic director of the American Composers Orchestra told him, “You know, the New York press will hand you your head on a platter.” Elfman responded: “Yeah, cool—I’m totally down for that.”

He has since written music for ballet and Cirque du Soleil, as well as concertos for orchestra with violin, cello, and percussion. Elfman is arguably on the most extreme edge of composers acculturating to different environments; besides his continuing work in Hollywood (he most recently scored Beetlejuice Beetlejuice for longtime collaborator Tim Burton), he had the polar plunge experience in 2022 of hearing Gautier Capuçon premiere his cello concerto with the Wiener Symphoniker in Vienna—and then, ten days later, he was singing his industrial rock songs at Coachella with his shirt off.

“I’ve always thrived on contrast,” says Elfman.

And even though he believes he has no hope of ever getting a call from certain exclusive classical ensembles, Elfman has had no difficulty finding interest from orchestras and soloists from around the world to feed his personal goal of writing a new concert work every year, and the audiences are turning up. Perhaps it’s because, even when he’s spinning an ambitious and occasionally dissonant story across three movements in a concerto, he still sounds like Danny Elfman.

“I got good advice early on by a couple of good musicians,” Elfman says. “They would say to me, ‘Don’t lose your personality by trying to prove something, because you’re going to lose connection to what it is that makes people love your music.’ I thought that was really good advice.”