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Soundtrax 2024-1: Special Edition
Feature Interview:
Laura Karpman Interview: AMERICAN FICTION
Interview by Randall D. Larson
Composer Laura Karpman is a bold, incandescent talent, who creates powerful, imaginative scores that push the boundaries of storytelling. Her award-winning music, spanning film, television, theater, interactive media, and live performance, reflects an audaciously creative, prodigious fresh spirit. Karpman collaborates with some of the most renowned filmmakers of our time. This year is perhaps her most prolific to date, with six film and TV projects alone – ROCK HUDSON: ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWED (Max), WHAT IF? (Disney+), MS. MARVEL (Disney+), 61ST STREET (The CW), THE MARVELS (Disney) and AMERICAN FICTION (Orion/MGM) – as well as the score for KLANGVOLKE 23, a European multimedia musical event, held in Linz, Austria.
AMERICAN FICTION is Cord Jefferson's hilarious directorial debut, which confronts our culture’s obsession with reducing people to outrageous stereotypes. Jeffrey Wright stars as Monk, a frustrated novelist who’s fed up with the establishment profiting from “Black” entertainment that relies on tired and offensive tropes. To prove his point, Monk uses a pen name to write an outlandish “Black” book of his own, a book that propels him to the heart of hypocrisy and the madness he claims to disdain.
“The music for American Fiction may present like jazz in many places, but it is tightly crafted as a film score, bound to action, tone and emotion,” Karpman wrote about her score. “Instrumental solos are interwoven with dialogue, so the characters’ voices ‘swap fours,’ meaning the words they speak actually become solos that are intertwined with the saxophones and flute. The monologue of the ‘My Pafology’ section features multiple layers of piano creating a complex concerto-like texture with large orchestral underpinnings.”
Watch the trailer to AMERICAN FICTION:
Q: This is a uniquely amazing film, to which you’ve provided a uniquely amazing score. How did you become involved in this project?
Laura Karpman: You know, a lot of people have asked me that question, and I probably should ask them [the producers] how it really happened, but for some reason I don’t want to! My agent sent out a reel, and as you well know, it’s so rare that it ever leads to anything, but it got be a meeting and then I think Cord spoke to Nia DaCosta, the director of THE MARVELS – they’re friends, and I think she recommended me highly. So I got hired, which was great!
Q: Jazz is a prominent element of this score, one of many musical treatments you’ve furnished to the picture, and you’ve had a long practice using jazz. What can you tell me about your background in jazz and how it affected your film music?
Laura Karpman: I grew up playing jazz along with classical music. I had a wonderful piano teacher who never differentiated between the two. So we would do Hanon exercises and then play piano exercises that were jazz-based in every key. There was no hierarchy, in terms of jazz versus classical, so I grew up doing both of them. I used to sing and play quite a lot; I played in bands and when I was at Julliard I would, at night, go and play jazz in bars – I had little gigs which I enjoyed. So jazz has always been a part of my life, and in fact I think it was a pretty significant part of my musical language, even when it’s not obvious. In this case, it’s obvious, so I was able to really play with these elements as well as other elements that are more traditionally found in film scoring.
Q: When director Cord Jefferson asked for a jazz score, what was your starting point in generating a score with those prominent elements of jazz – and what types of jazz did you apply to the film?
Laura Karpman: I think the first thing was to talk about Thelonious Monk, as the character’s name is Monk. So I thought a lot about Monk, and I knew his music very, very well. We talked about arranging Monk, but ultimately that Monk should be an inspiration rather than a musical source. So I wrote a theme called “Monk’s Theme,” which is really kind of inspired by Monk’s composition and Monk’s playing, although it’s of my own nature, and then, really, the score emanated out of a combination of classic jazz of the late ‘50s, ‘60s, a lot of cool jazz, but also used elements of Bossa-nova, as we see in the pool scene. I had a large string orchestra, so at times it was in the scoring world but influenced by jazz, so it depended on the aperture of the particular scene. The beginning of the film is comedy, so it’s bongos and bass and little bleeps and blops, like you would find in a comedy score. By the time you get to the end of the first part of the film, which is when Lisa dies, you’re now in a big film score that’s about matters of life and death, and then it moved through these various elements closely following the action of the film.
Listen to the cue “Family Is, Monk Is” from AMERICAN FICTION, via YouTube:
Q: In addition to those jazz elements, you’ve got a broad arrangement of interesting instrumentation across the film. Would you tell me about your piano and pianistic treatments that you brought into the film score.
Laura Karpman: There’s a lot of piano – piano’s probably the lead instrument, again inspired by Monk. I played a lot of the piano; I also brought in Patrice Rushen, who’s this phenomenal jazz artist/composer/educator of all great things, and she played her style, so we had the two styles. I used Fender Rhodes, I used a monochord which is a piano with one string on it as opposed to three strings – they’re these small pianos that were manufactured in Japan during World War II, and that’s a part of it. So there are all these various pianos layered, as well as my Steinway, and an upright piano which we prepared. The film has multiple layers of piano, a lot of bass, drums, different kinds of percussion, saxophones, an oboe, and flute which is played by Elena Panderhouse, who’s this amazing young musician who interns in our studio as a film composer – and she’s out there touring with Herbie Hancock and Terri Lyne Carrington, Errol Clayton, great jazz artists. She brought a lot of her soul and spirit to it as well, and then we recorded a large string ensemble in Vienna.
Q: How would you describe these other musical characteristics of the score, such as your use of Rhodes Mark II, the Marvel-ous percussive “space junk” studio found-sound, and how you added these sounds to the score?
Laura Karpman: Yeah [laughs]! Basically, when I was doing THE MARVELS I was looking for some fun sounds that might play with the idea of what sound was in space, and I went to a prop house in Burbank, and they had literal space junk – like things that came off rockets and different kinds of space things! We went over there with a bunch of mallets and we just played stuff, right? Stuff that had really cool sounds that I brought home and there it was, in my recording room, and when it came to the drip scenes in the film, when Cliff and Monk are talking and there are these drips that come down from the upstairs and it’s kind of this funny scene until it’s not funny. It was clang-y and so I decided well, I’ll use some of this space percussion and see how that sounds, and it worked out. It was in there along with the piano and it gives us an even more percussive edge.
Q: How did you musically treat Monk’s character and other primary characters, thematically as well as dramatically, as their performances might have suggested to you?
Laura Karpman: Basically, there are two major themes in the film, there are other sort of sub-themes, but the two major themes are Monk’s Theme, which is in 5/4, it’s got kind of the edgy nature of Monk – but it also goes to a place, in the middle of it, that then became a romantic theme for Monk and Coraline. There’s the Family Theme, which is a much more fluid theme, much less rhythmic; it’s sort of a flow-y theme. It’s generally played by multiple instruments but they play the same music, although not at exactly the same time. So you have these kind of [Laura sings a short filigree, stops for a brief fermata, then the notes re-emerge slightly faster], and I’ll do it a lot with Elena. It won’t quite be together, which is very much the way that families are. The time that it really comes together – and the only time that it really does – is in the pool scene where it becomes the Bossa-nova. It’s like that to give it that kind of light ‘60s people-playing-in-a-pool sound, but it also has to do with, thematically, the fact that these brothers are kind of working out their relationship, and being playful together in the pool. It’s a tightly conceived-of score in every sense of the word. There are sub-themes like the “My Pafology” theme that happens when he’s writing the book, and that returns for the first ending, that kind of mystery/anxiety music. And then there’s another theme that works when Monk is really anxious, when he’s at the lunch with the producer and he runs off to assist his mom, as well as this kind of bass music for “Stagg R. Leigh,” so there’s all of that as well. But the two major sort of thematic thrusts are for Monk and the family.
Listen to the cue “Beautiful Family” from AMERICAN FICTION, via YouTube:
Q: From your standpoint, what is the film’s message, or messages, and how have you configured elements of your score on styling that message to the audience?
Laura Karpman: I think there are a lot of messages. I think that Monk is a full person living a full life, and all of that is represented on screen in a very, very funny, satirical, touching, tragic, optimistic, every possible experience of the human condition, and I think that that is something that has to be dealt with musically. I think the subject of the way black people interact is something that is painted in a really, really fantastic, funny, and poignant way, and I think there are a lot of discussions in the film about what it is to be an artist, which is something that we all deal with. What it is to work in publishing or to work in Hollywood, where we’re trying to make films that are commercially successful but that also are artistic, and where do you lean one way and where do you lean the other way… and these are all issues that all of us have thought about over the years and were the subject of many, many discussions that I had with the team.
Q: The film’s three endings are unique – fascinating, funny, and unexpected, and offer a beautifully rewarding conclusion for the film. You’ve mentioned that “the gymnastics of the score come to play in this ending tryptic.” Would you describe how you gave the film its conclusive musical elements?
Laura Karpman: Basically, there are three endings that are fundamentally the same footage with additions, so it’s really interesting to look at from a scoring perspective. The first ending is basically that mystery/tension music that you first hear in the “My Pafology” scene, but now it becomes bigger, it becomes more dramatic. The strings are added in the moment where “Stagg R. Leigh” was born in that first scene, and Monk is about to reveal his identity as “Stagg R. Leigh,” so it’s obvious to bring back that music, and for that to be the first ending. It’s not the real ending, but it's the ending you think is real as you’re watching the film. Then the second ending is the love theme; it’s Monk’s theme but rendered in the most, romantic, string-based with piano, theme. That is meant for the romantic comedy ending, so it’s that moment where in every romantic comedy, after the couple that you’re rooting for has broken up, where they come back together again, and so while you’re believing that that’s going to happen, the music has to support that. And then, finally, the last ending is the ‘90s cop drama ending, with hip-hop beats and orchestra, that then leads into the Mozart Requiem and that kind of over-the-top scene. So that had to lean into that genre of cop-drama and driving action until we hit the Requiem scene. So, it was a very cool experience to be able to attack those three similar pieces in the film, but work on them with the concept of using completely different cinematic musical genres.
Listen to the cue “My Pafology” from AMERICAN FICTION, via YouTube:
Q: What was most challenging, and most rewarding, for you about scoring AMERICAN FICTION?
Laura Karpman: I think that all of it was rewarding. To have a pallet like this that has everything in it, and to get to score it in a jazz-influenced score if like a dream come true to me. It’s yummy-yummy-yummy-yummy! I think the challenges were mostly about getting the comedy right, especially in the first part of the film. Like, do you want it to be edgy, do you want it to be totally funny, how much of comedic tropes to you want to use, do you want the audience to know that it’s okay to have permission to laugh… so these are all the things that we talked about, extensively.
Q: What’s coming up next for you, that you’d be able to talk about?Laura Karpman: There are two things I can’t talk about… There’s a third thing that I can almost talk about but can’t talk about, and there’s our musical based on Dance, Girl, Dance, the [1940] Dorothy Arzner movie. Nora and I have the rights to that and we’re going to be creating a movie musical out of it.
Q: Wonderful! We’ll be looking forward to that! Thank you so much for taking the time out to chat with me about AMERICAN FICTION!
Special thanks to Jeff Sanderson from Chasen & Company, and Lana Lay on behalf of Amazon MGM Studios, for facilitating this interview, and especially to Laura Karpman for taking time out to chat with me about her score for this film!
Listen to the digital soundtrack to AMERICAN FICTION from Masterworks, a label of Sony Music Entertainment, available at Apple Music, Spotify, and other digital music providers___________________________________________________________________________________________
Randall D. Larson was for many years publisher of CinemaScore: The Film Music Journal, senior editor for Soundtrack Magazine, and a film music columnist for Cinefantastique magazine. A specialist on horror film music, he is the author of Musique Fantastique: 100+ Years of Fantasy, Science Fiction & Horror Film Music, and Music from the House of Hammer. He currently writes articles on film music and sf/horror cinema, and has written liner notes on more than 300 soundtrack CDs. He can be contacted via https://musiquefantastique.com/ or follow Musique Fantastique on Facebook. Follow Randall on Twitter at https://twitter.com/randalldlarson and https://twitter.com/MusiqueFantast1
