Composer and pianist David Cieri had already scored a couple of small documentaries by the time he met Ken Burns’ team, which happened by complete accident.
When the Philadelphia native first moved to New York City, he hoofed around the city handing out resumes in “any place that had a piano” to start playing and earning some money playing night gigs. On a break during one of these gigs, he returned to the piano to discover a couple of kids taking their turn at the keys. He began improvising with them. The kids’ father was Erik Ewers, one of Ken Burns’ editors, and Ewers soon began hiring Cieri for projects, beginning with the 2009 documentary television series The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.
“There was a small hazing to it,” Cieri recalls. “I was in the studio and played something I’d recorded for everyone over the phone, and Erik comes on to the phone and says, ‘We don’t think that’s going to cut it.’ And I thought, ‘Man, I’m going to have to look for other kinds of work.’ But then the room sort of broke into laughter, and he said, ‘No, that’s great.’ And that’s how I got started with them.”
Cieri, who had known he wanted to score documentaries since he was a child as a way to merge his musical interests with his favorite brother’s passion for history, has since worked with Burns and his producers on projects including Prohibition (2011), The Roosevelts: An Intimate History (2014), The Vietnam War (2017), Ernest Hemingway (2021), Ben Franklin (2022), The U.S. and the Holocaust (2022), and the recently released The American Revolution (2025). Burns has written that Cieri is “a master composer, capable of the most subtle turns of phrase, and sensitive to every nuance of image and sound.” Cieri is one of a team of musicians and editors who bring Burns’ seminal American works to life.
-
Two recent documentary series from the Ken Burns team used original musical scores by contemporary composers to evoke each films’ respective historical era. -
Two recent documentary series from the Ken Burns team used original musical scores by contemporary composers to evoke each films’ respective historical era.
There are villages of composers, performers, and editors involved in each film, including names famous in the orchestra community like violinist, composer, and member of the Brooklyn Rider string quartet Johnny Gandelsman and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw, among others.
Both Gandelsman’s and Shaw’s classical credentials are top tier. Gandelsman, who has performed at Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, and Suntory Hall, among others, is an alumnus of the Curtis Institute and the Silk Road Ensemble. A MacArthur “genius” grant winner for his inventive, cross-genre approach to music, he released his This is America project, a series of 28 pieces he commissioned from musical artists including Rhiannon Giddens, Angélica Negrón, and Conrad Tao, in 2022. Shaw’s contemporary classical compositions and more experimental works have won her multiple Grammy Awards, including a 2025 Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble prize for “Rectangles and Circumstance” with Sō Percussion. In addition to writing chamber, vocal, and choral music—she was a co-founder of the adventurous Roomful of Teeth group—Shaw has been commissioned by U.S. ensembles like the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and more.
“Documentary is different from narrative film scoring because you’re generally not working with a fixed picture,” explains Shaw, who composed more than two-and-a-half hours of music for Burns’s Leonardo da Vinci (2024). “The music develops along with the final cut of the film,” Shaw says, “things are constantly changing and reordering.”
Composing for documentaries “is different from narrative film scoring, says Caroline Shaw, who wrote more than two-and-a-half hours of music for Leonardo da Vinci. “The music develops along with the final cut of the film.” Photo by Elena Olivo.
While narrative film scores—particularly for blockbuster franchises—have far larger budgets than documentary projects, the music in narrative films is typically added on in a matter of months toward the end of the editing process and must specifically fit the cut of the film. The composition process for documentaries, particularly those of Burns’s, on the other hand, is more organic. The musical collaborators become involved in the process early on, sometimes years in advance, and they are considered integral to the final product. Cuts of the images and cuts of the music are edited simultaneously to complement one another. Another key difference: singing, especially in English, is infrequent in these scores, as much of the music is set underneath narration.
For Cieri, the process begins with reading and primary texts. He sources numerous books and picks out key words, phrases, and sentences, and sometimes whole passages and paragraphs. Next, he builds what he calls a “music dictionary,” writing snippets and sketches of melody inspired by his reading. And then begins the back and forth with the documentary’s editing team.
“They don’t use temp music, which I really love,” Cieri says. A common practice in narrative films is to use temporary musical tracks to set the mood during editing; a common complaint among composers is that directors then want the final score to sound too much like the temporary tracking, reducing the freedom to create original music. “There’s collaboration” in the documentary process, Cieri adds. “There’s back and forth. I send them things. They like things. They don’t like things.”
Johnny Gandelsman, who has worked as a producer and composer with Burns’s team on several projects including The Vietnam War, Hemingway, The U.S. and the Holocaust, and the 2025 American Revolution documentary series, says that they team sometimes looks to period sounds for inspiration. “For the American Revolution, the filmmakers wanted to create a soundscape of what music might have been heard,” Gandelsman explains, adding that early demo playlists and recording tracks included a blend of Western classical Baroque in its original form and some reimagined Baroque music as well as American roots music with collaborators like Rhiannon Giddens.
“For the American Revolution, the filmmakers wanted to create a soundscape of what music might have been heard” in the period, says composer and instrumentalist Johnny Gandelsman. Early demo playlists and tracks included Western classical Baroque in its original form, reimagined Baroque music, and American roots music with collaborators like Rhiannon Giddens. Photo by Marco Giannavola.
“One of the things that we identified early on that would have a resonance with the American Revolution series was this idea of a standard Baroque passacaglia,” he says. (A passacaglia is a Baroque musical form where an evolving melody is played over a repeating bass line.) “We didn’t want to use an existing passacaglia, though, so we created our own bass and had our musicians improvise over the progression in the studio in a bunch of different ways to use in different places.”
Musicians at work recording an original score for a recent Ken Burns documentary. Photo by Megan Ruffe.
For Da Vinci, the filmmakers and Caroline Shaw took a different approach, largely but not completely eschewing period music or historical performance practices like gut strings in favor of using modern techniques and sounds with the ensembles Atacca Quartet and Roomful of Teeth to complement Da Vinci’s own ingenuity. “The percussion is kind of this mixture of vibraphone and marimba, but also flower pots and kind of bells and bowls of water,” Shaw says.
In the early stages, she’d write 20 experimental cues of various lengths, and the filmmakers would respond by asking for specific timing or mood adjustments to begin to fit the cues to cuts of the film. “They’d say things like, ‘Could we consider combining maybe the propulsiveness and the mechanics of this cue with some of the softer edges or the rising line of another cue,’ ” she explains. “So then it’s a really fun Top Chef challenge to put together ingredients. Like a fun musical puzzle.”
Shaw’s longer concert works tend to last 20-25 minutes. Da Vinci required more than two hours of music, not including a couple more hours of drafted music that landed on the cutting-room floor. “It was a real beast of a project. I just had to lie down after it,” she jokes, noting that she was particularly happy with how cues like “The Last Supper” and “Mona Lisa” worked in the documentary’s final cut. (Both tracks appear on the soundtrack, which is available for streaming.) “There was a lovely humor in [the Mona Lisa segment], a beauty and a sadness that I feel reflects the story of the painting. It was a longer cue where I was able to really build an emotional arc.”
David Cieri during a recording session for The American Revolution at Figure 8 recording studio in Brooklyn. “Mostly the team is trying to figure out how to let the full life of the music breathe as it would naturally,” he says. Photo by Rachael Hacking.
With so much material to build and craft and edit, the composition process for these documentaries can begin as early as a decade out, but Cieri says the process usually takes around two-and-a-half to three years. This is still far longer than the process for a typical narrative film, and the creators who have done both say they find documentary scoring more artistically satisfying. “The picture is edited to music, and some things do match up,” Cieri says.
“I do have to make changes sometimes, but mostly the team is trying to figure out how to let the full life of the music breathe as it would naturally,” he continues. “If you just put the music on at the end, you spray it onto the picture and that’s that. But if you get started at script level, music has a chance to influence the film and vice versa. There’s magic in that integration.”
Making the Music for Leonardo da Vinci offers a behind–the–scenes look at the creative process inside the recording studio with composer Caroline Shaw, vocalists, and instrumentalists.
