<\/p>\n
Music for a 15th-century genius, a 20th-century actor, a modern-day chef and the natural beauty of both Asia and the Americas: this year\u2019s Emmy nominees in the documentary-score category are as diverse and compelling as ever.<\/p>\n
This year\u2019s nominees include a Pulitzer Prize winner and a composer whose house was destroyed in the California fires as he was finishing a score about a famous chef, whose nonprofit subsequently arrived to feed fire victims including his family.<\/p>\n
More from Variety<\/strong><\/p>\n Caroline Shaw was the youngest recipient of the Pulitzer in music when, at the age of 30, she won for her \u201cPartita for Eight Voices\u201d in 2013. Veteran PBS documentary filmmaker Ken Burns and his producing partners Sarah Burns and David McMahon commissioned her to compose the score for their four-part \u201cLeonardo da Vinci\u201d series.<\/p>\n \u201cThey were really excited about doing something that was all original and felt as inventive as Leonardo was,\u201d Shaw tells Variety<\/em>. \u201cRather than tethering ourselves to the original time period, making something that is inspired by that but moves forward in a way.\u201d<\/p>\n The producers wanted to \u201cfind the humanity and humor in Leonardo, this character who has always been portrayed as the grand old man with the beard,\u201d she says. \u201cWhat goes on in Leonardo\u2019s head?\u201d<\/p>\n Shaw chose three ensembles, all \u201cdeeply versed in the music of the Renaissance, Baroque, Classical and Romantic periods,\u201d she says: the Attacca string quartet, the eight-person vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, and the So Percussion quartet.<\/p>\n Shaw began \u201cwith a broad brush of thinking about emotions versus mechanics, thinking a lot about texture and colorful,\u201d and came up with \u201croughly 20 different two-minute bits of music\u201d based primarily on reading the script. These were sent to the producers, who began placing them in the film, although she adds that \u201cevery single sequence ended up being meticulously shaped.\u201d<\/p>\n She spent more than a year working on music for \u201cLeonardo.\u201d<\/p>\n Composers Duncan Thum and David Bertok composed music for the \u201cChef\u2019s Table\u201d profile of innovative Spanish-American chef Jos\u00e9 Andr\u00e9s, who helped popularize the small-plates dining concept and whose World Central Kitchen has provided meals for millions in the wake of many natural disasters since 2010.<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s such an eclectic, very colorful personality,\u201d Bertok says, \u201ca mad-scientist chef, a humanitarian and very generous, going to all these disaster zones.\u201d They chose mostly traditional instruments: a string orchestra, classical piano, nylon-string guitar (for Andr\u00e9s\u2019 Spanish roots) but also modular synthesizers and a human voice.<\/p>\n \u201cAs he is taking a familiar dish and reinventing it, we wanted to have something unexpected in the music,\u201d says Thum. \u201cFor us, the voice was a lovely way to do that, to have one foot in the avant-garde and one in something that\u2019s very familiar.\u201d<\/p>\n They had received approval for their demos of the score and were preparing to record when Thum learned that his house was destroyed in the Altadena fire. \u201cSo it was very emotional to record the strings for that episode,\u201d he says. \u201cI had to put my headphones down and just went into tears at one point.\u201d<\/p>\n During the aftermath, Andr\u00e9s\u2019 World Central Kitchen came to Altadena \u201cand fed my family and many of my dear friends and neighbors.\u201d He met the superstar chef weeks later at a Netflix event in New York and was able to thank him personally.<\/p>\n For \u201cSuper \/ Man: The Christopher Reeve Story,\u201d the challenge for London composer Ilan Eshkeri was \u201ctrying to capture a very honest emotional picture of what [the actor] meant and what he continues to mean to people who are trying to recover from, or come to terms with, spinal cord injuries.\u201d<\/p>\n Documentary scoring, he says, \u201cis one of the hardest disciplines for a composer, because in fiction you can really push the boundaries. But with documentary, if musically you push it too far, the audience feels manipulated, they lose faith and they don\u2019t believe in the honesty of it.\u201d<\/p>\n The filmmakers\u2019 use of John Williams\u2019 iconic \u201cSuperman\u201d theme (for Reeves\u2019 most famous role) meant that Eshkeri needed to incorporate \u201cthe French horns and the strings, the Hollywood sound\u201d for a musical consistency. Beyond that, he wrote a theme for Reeve; another for his two great loves, Gae Exton and Dana Morosini, the latter of whom he married; and a third, a theme of \u201cinspiration,\u201d for Reeves\u2019 heroic battle to stay alive and inspire others to keep going in the face of insurmountable odds.<\/p>\n He employed 40 musicians from the London Metropolitan Orchestra and added electronics \u201cfor the medical-science element\u201d of the story.<\/p>\n Music for the two nominated natural-world documentaries was scored by Hans Zimmer\u2019s Bleeding Fingers collective. For NBC\u2019s 10-part \u201cThe Americas,\u201d Zimmer composed the grand-scale theme but the scores were written by Kara Talve and An\u017ee Rozman.<\/p>\n he direction from their producers was different than the usual nature doc: \u201cThis is more like a Pixar film than it is natural history,\u201d Talve reports, \u201cbecause each animal has its own little cinematic movie, and it\u2019s scored like animation would be, with a lot of sync points and references to other cinema.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe target was families,\u201d Rozman adds, \u201cinteresting for the parents but not scary for the kids. That\u2019s why it\u2019s also a bit comedic.\u201d What was required, Talve says, was \u201ca lot of detailed orchestral writing,\u201d with unique instruments for almost every destination.<\/p>\n \u201cWe used many different ensembles and soloists from all around the world,\u201d she adds. Some of their regional choices were an Aztec double flute for the Mexico episode, the cactus-based gaita from Colombia, Andean flutes for the nominated \u201cAndes\u201d episode, and a 140-year-old zither for a lonely coyote for the \u201cWild West\u201d installment.<\/p>\n \u201cBecause every scene was a short movie, there were a lot of emotions and they needed to change very fast,\u201d Rozman says. \u201cThis was very challenging because you would switch from romantic to a really intense battle scene,\u201d Talve adds. They wrote more than nine hours of music in five and a half months.<\/p>\n \u201cAsia,\u201d latest in the BBC\u2019s \u201cPlanet Earth\u201d series, was a collaboration between Bleeding Fingers composers Jacob Shea and Indonesian-born Laurentia Editha (they previously worked together on \u201cPlanet Earth III\u201d). Their main theme for the seven-hour series incorporates traditional Chinese instruments including the two-stringed erhu and the ancient woodwind sheng.<\/p>\n They used fewer electronic elements than usual, Shea says. They overdubbed the strings of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales with many different sounds (many of them wind instruments from across Asia) and Editha\u2019s own vocals. \u201cI made up a language that sounds like it\u2019s from the Coral Triangle,\u201d she explains.<\/p>\n Japanese gagaku ensembles scored dancing cranes, and Borneo\u2019s traditional lute-like sap\u00e9, the Indonesian gamelan, a bowed string instrument from Kazakhstan called kobyz, were among other exotic sounds showcased. \u201cI\u2019ve always felt that Asia is a very metallic continent,\u201d notes Editha. \u201cLook at the gamelan, the singing bowls from Bhutan, Tibetan bells\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n Says Shea: \u201cThe syntax and language of the region, even if it wasn\u2019t directly applied to the instruments, informed our work. We\u2019d use those flavors with the Western orchestra.\u201d And, he adds, \u201cremaining a bit impartial in these nature documentaries is an important element, not to force an audience to have an emotion, but rather just kind of reveal the storytelling.\u201d<\/p>\n They wrote more than five hours of music over an eight-month period.<\/p>\n Best of Variety<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for Variety’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Music for a 15th-century genius, a 20th-century actor, a modern-day chef and the natural beauty of both Asia and the Americas: this year\u2019s Emmy nominees in the documentary-score category are as diverse and compelling as ever. This year\u2019s nominees include a Pulitzer Prize winner and a composer whose house was destroyed in the California fires […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1980755,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[355181,355173,355175,355184,355180,355177,355178,355183,355174,355176,355182,355179,355185],"class_list":["post-1980754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-california-fires","tag-caroline-shaw","tag-chef-jose-andres","tag-david-mcmahon","tag-documentary-filmmaker","tag-duncan-thum","tag-emmy-nominees","tag-ilan-eshkeri","tag-leonardo-da-vinci","tag-natural-beauty","tag-natural-disasters","tag-sarah-burns","tag-world-central-kitchen"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/This-Years-Emmy-Nominated-Documentary-Scores.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1980754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1980754"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1980754\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1980755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1980754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1980754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1980754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}