April 22, 2021
Variety: Jon Burlingame Queries Joseph Trapanese About Scoring SHADOW AND BONE
In today’s edition of Variety, film music journalist Jon Burlingame interviews composer Joseph Trapanese to dig deep into how the composer created his fantastical score for the Netflix film, SHADOW AND BONE, which debut’s tomorrow.
SHADOW AND BONE is based on the best-selling novels by Leigh Bardugo; the series follows the dark forces that conspire against orphan mapmaker Alina Starkov when she unleashes an extraordinary power that could change the fate of her war-torn world.
The mystical and epic original score comes from composer Joseph Trapanese, who took great influence from fairytales, Russian stories, magic, and fantasy. “My favorite thing to do is to build a world, musically,” Trapanese told him. “You’re going to hear influences from that Russian czarist period,” the composer says, and those dark hues, added Burlingame, “dominate the seven-plus hours of score that Trapanese wrote over 11 months last year.”
The key themes, reported Burlingame, belong to Alina (Jessie Mei Li), the orphan whose unexpected power might save her country, and General Kirigan (Ben Barnes), the Darkling whose own powers are gradually revealed. Their themes are “mirror reflections of each other,” Trapanese explains.
Burlingame also revealed the composer’s next-in-line project: Joseph Kosinski’s science fiction film ESCAPE FROM SPIDERHEAD, also for Netflix and due later this year.
Read the full interview here.
If you missed it in our earlier reports, watch the trailer for SHADOW AND BONE here:
