Vivek Maddala on silent films, Tom and Jerry, the PBS Series Asian Americans, and the intersection of film and music.

We were very fortune to recently interview two-time Emmy® award-winning composer and multi-instrumental performer, Vivek Maddala. He has scored dozens of feature films, theater & dance productions, and TV programs. His music, which combines melodic symphony writing with modern textures from around the world, has been described as "an emotive frenzy of guitar, percussion, brass, woodwinds, and strings." Vivek is a Sundance Institute Lab Fellow for film composition, and has had work premiere at the Cannes, Toronto, Berlin, Venice, and Sundance film festivals. In 2018 and 2019, Vivek won consecutive Daytime Emmy Awards in the category of "Outstanding Music Composition" for his animation scoring work.

CineConcerts (CC): So nice to meet you! Firstly, we wanted to talk about how you got your start in composing music for film and TV. Did you take lessons on a particular instrument? 

Vivek Maddala (VM): I got here by a very indirect route, I had been writing music since I was a small child, I think I started writing music when I was around 7. I actually started on piano when I was 3, I have an older sister who was learning piano, and basically whatever she was doing, I just wanted to emulate. Then when I was around 6, it sounds silly to say, but I was actually in my first band. We only played one song, “My Sharona” by the Knack, it was the early 80s. I played piano, but there is no piano in that song, and it sounded kind of lame. My friend was the drummer in the ‘band’ and that was the ‘cool’ gig among all of us. So I realized that is what I really want to do. I started taking drum lessons, and that really became my main instrument. 

When I was 12, I started doing a lot of recording in studios in Gainesville Florida, where I grew up. I ended up working a lot in the studio and really developing my chops as a producer. As a writer it became clear to me that I was just as interested in the sounds of music and how to create those sounds as I was in the things that we think of as composition, melody, and counterpoint. At 15 I entered the Berklee College of Music in Boston to be a jazz drummer, but the thing is, when you are the best in Gainesville, you get to Berklee and all of a sudden there are million other guys just like you. I was a decent drummer but I was no Vinnie Colaiuta. But while there, I recognized one of my strengths was writing music and producing, performing was just a means to that end. 

I also had a very good background in math and physics and at 16 I ended up at Georgia Tech studying engineering, and later on I ended up going to graduate school for electrical engineering and applied physics. But the entire time I was doing academic things I felt like what I really wanted to be doing was making music, and the ironic part was when I was in music school I always felt like I wanted to do something a little more cerebral. One of the nice things about film scoring is that it's kind of in the Venn diagram of those circles and exists at that intersection.

CC: Was there a film or something that inspired you to look at film scoring when you were young? 

VM:  I remember when I was 8 years old my father saw in the TV Guide that Hitchcock’s North by Northwest was going to be on television. He told me I would really dig it. And of course the movie has one of the most iconic scores of all time. That’s when I really started getting into Bernard Herrmann and that’s also when I realized that this was a thing, writing music for films was a pursuit. 

CC: It’s amazing that you were 8 when you realized that, most people don’t even register music in movies, even as adults. 

VM: Maybe in retrospect I am making it seem like I was more analytical than I was. It was more on a visceral level. But also I was always very interested in movies and music and the intersection of those things. 

I remember when I was a kid there were a lot of bad movies that had really iconic music, Top Gun, Footloose, silly stories but really iconic soundtracks. There were lots of influences however, John Williams was a big deal in my formative years and, Mike Post, all of his great themes for TV shows like Magnum PI.  I remember the music from Miami Vice when I was in middle school, and how it played a prominent role in the storytelling. Somehow these were all seeds that got planted and I knew that I wanted to compose, but I didn’t really know how to get into that profession. 

My father was a university professor, a mathematician and economist, and there was this prevailing assumption that I would go into something that was more of a traditional academic field. The idea of being an artist was not considered a serious pursuit. I don’t want to say my parents discouraged it, but as you grow up you get all kinds of messaging, it was kind of in the metadata as it were, so I didn’t really pursue it in the way that one would if you decided you want to go into film scoring.  

CC: Those sorts of university programs are fairly recent, probably around the time you were in college there were only 3 or 4 specific film scoring programs. 

VM: That’s right. I know that UCLA, USC or NYU had those kinds of programs, but I do remember when I was applying, the options were more limited. 

CC: So how did you eventually land on this path? 

VM: Fast forward to the year 2000, there was a national competition for film scoring that was co-sponsored by Guitar Center and Turner Classic Movies. To enter the competition you basically score some silent film clips, and the grand prize was a one-off movie deal with Warner Bros. scoring a silent film restoration for Turner Classic Movies. I entered the competition and I won the grand prize. My first feature was a 74 minute orchestral score for a silent film restoration for TCM. They liked what I did enough that they made me a quasi-resident composer and I did another five features for them. 

CC: So you hadn't been composing music before you entered that contest as a profession? You were doing something else before that? 

VM: I worked as a research scientist and as an engineer, but I was also playing in bands and producing little independent records. I was a hardware design engineer at Techtronix, developing cutting edge technology and I was developing audio technologies for some of the applications at Dolby Laboratories in San Francisco. But I also briefly toured with the classic rock band Boston, I was actually in grad school at the time but I got a call to join the band for the greatest hits record and the US tour. I kind of had one foot in each world. But really I had a number of day jobs as an engineer and scientist until I got my first break with that competition. I continued working as an engineer for a while after that, and then moved to LA in 2008. Then I got the film scoring fellowship from Sundance which really brought me more into the world of independent film and documentaries. I developed a lot of relationships through Sundance and to some extent through Turner Classic Movies. In fact, there was a film that I scored a couple years ago called American Revolutionary which was directed by Grace Lee who I met through Caroline Libresco at Sundance, and she happens to be one of the three directors on Asian Americans. 

CC: How did you initially get started on Asian Americans? 

VM: I mentioned Grace Lee, she is a filmmaker I had worked with on a few projects, most notably American Revolutionary and I liked her aesthetics and we became friends.  I don’t know how she signed on to do the series, but it makes sense given what her interests are and the other films she’s made, so I am guessing that she recommended me as somebody to consider to score the show. I went in for an interview and we talked about different ideas, how music can serve the story, the objectives of the filmmakers, I don’t know if there was a formal auditioning process. 

Since I was old enough to think about ideas critically I’ve been really interested in history and social justice and in what’s happening in the world. That’s interestingly one of the things that drew me to Sundance, since that festival exists at the intersection of those things.

Talking to the Asian American filmmakers I was really attracted to their perspective about what they wanted to say. There is a history of oppression and subjugation which many of us are familiar with, but the show is not depressing, it’s really an optimistic series. For example, it's interesting when they talk about the Japanese internment camps. I had assumed, maybe naively, that everyone knew about that. The filmmakers actually had to make that part of history clear, because a lot of people don’t know. That was surprising to me. So on one hand there is a question of how remedial do you want to be in the storytelling, versus assuming people already know the basic history, but you are trying to get them to connect dots that maybe they hadn’t connected. And I think that the series is actually really successful in doing both. 

CC: Is that the approach that you took musically as well? I am assuming that you saw a lot of footage as you were composing. 

VM: That’s right, in fact one of the things about film scoring, and music in general, the reason why we are drawn to music is because it operates on a very visceral level. Sure you can deconstruct things and put on your analytical hat and look at the underlying musical architecture but fundamentally that’s not why we like music. When you put a piece of music against film it changes that story, it changes the impression of what you see or it can affect it, it can amplify it or take it in another direction. The thing about documentaries and particularly documentaries on important subjects, is to be very careful about what we are saying and how much we say because I think modern audiences are very sensitive to feeling manipulated by music. One of the things that I think music can be really good at is half posing questions that the audience can then themselves complete. They can complete certain things themselves rather than the music hitting them over the head with it. 

Having said that, I think that there are places in the score where the music is very direct and bold. For example, in episode 4 which deals in part with the Vietnam War, I had some music that was a sort of brooding electronica, something you might associate with a Nine Inch Nails, which obviously is not something you would have heard in the late 1960s. The reason it works is because we are viewing those events through a present day lens. 

However, there are places in the score where the music is trying to make you feel like you are immersed in that world. In episode 1, which takes place mostly in the 19th and early 20th century the music is very tactile, there are a lot of plucked instruments, and a lot of bowed instruments, it feels like that world. Even though compositionally I was using musical constructs that hadn’t been invented until the middle part of the 20th century, the colors and textures feel of that world. 

CC: Is that something you talked about with the filmmakers before you got started? Or was it something that you brought to the project thinking that ‘this is the direction that this particular piece is going to go in’? 

VM: Kind of both. The filmmakers were very involved which is a really good thing in this case because I really like having filmmakers in the room with me where we are watching the same thing, listening to the same things out of the same speakers, breathing the same air, there is something that feels communal and collaborative in a way that you don’t get when you are sending .wav files back and forth over the internet. I feel like we made the most progress and had the most fun when we were in the room together when I was working with the director of the given episode. 

Leo Chang directed episode 1,  and one of the things that he kept saying was “it sounds too modern.” He would mention that and maybe he didn’t even know why, but the music would remind him of a modern song, it just wasn’t something you would have heard 100 years ago, even if I was using traditional instruments that existed in the 19th century. Or there were cases where I used a lot of guitar and I realized that anything that sounded overtly guitar-y to him, like string bends or sliding my  finger up and down the fretboard would pull him out of the story. Maybe hearing acoustic guitar made him think of Simon & Garfunkel, and so one of the things I had to do was be very careful with string bends. I got a lot of notes from the filmmakers about these sorts of things. I ended up arriving at certain musical motifs and musical structures that were evocative but couldn’t necessarily be placed either temporally or geographically. I ended up using a lot of instruments that sound guitar-y but are not the guitar like a charango or a ronroco which are Andean instruments from South America, and I actually use them quite a bit with film scoring. The nice thing is there is something evocative about them but they don’t actually sound like an instrument you know, so you don’t necessarily have a cultural association with it. It was actually a difficult needle to thread, because the idea was to say things that were emotionally evocative and draw you into the story without having you make an emotional connection that's outside the story. Which is a tricky thing to do. 

CC: Especially composing so much music, since documentaries tend to be so music heavy. 

VM: And these are five PBS hours. A PBS hour is 56 minutes of actual material, and altogether I think I counted four and a half hours of music. So there is a lot of music in it. 

CC: Just to switch gears for a moment, because you have worked on such varied projects, like Tom and Jerry and Scooby Doo, and looking at both of those, and thinking that the same person writes music for cartoons and for PBS documentaries and Silent Film Festivals, how do you approach these different kinds of projects? Do your sensibilities change?  

VM: Well ultimately it’s really about helping to tell the story through music. I feel like in order to write convincingly and appropriately you have to live inside the story that is being told in order to have it feel authentic. In the case of Asian Americans that was not difficult to do because that is the world we live in, there are direct and indirect connections between some of the things in the series and a lot of things that are happening in the world today. It was not really hard to get inside the heads of the respective directors and the showrunner and understand the story they wanted to tell. It was still a difficult process because everyone has different aesthetics and calibrating exactly how much you are saying and how you are saying it musically becomes a bit of a project.

In the case of something like the Tom and Jerry show, we are talking about a literal two dimensional cartoon where there is no depth. So that’s actually an opportunity for the music to create the emotional depth for us to care about those characters. There is legitimate storytelling in that show and it’s really kind of a broad canvass for music to do a lot, not just in terms of storytelling but creating emotional depth to those characters. With Tom and Jerry there is no subtly, it’s very note-y. It’s all melody and harmony and counterpoint all the time and the music is very carefully sculpted to every contour of the story and every physical action has some kind of musical gesture that goes along with it. On a technical level it's a very different process and it's a very labor intensive process, whereas in scoring a documentary or dramatic feature the heavy lifting isn’t so much in the music writing as in the storytelling. 

In 2008 when I did the Sundance Composer Lab, the first part of the lab, you are scoring scenes with advisors. Sometimes you are scoring something that they wrote the actual music for. There is a scene from a film called The Great Debaters, directed by Denzel Washington, and it takes place in the 1930s in Texas. Forest Whittaker plays the father of an African American family, he’s a college professor and in this scene he and his family are taking a trip in the country, there is some sort of accident, and his son in the backseat witnesses something he hadn't seen before. His father gets out of the car to try to figure out how to fix the flat tire or whatever it is and there are these poor white farmers who come out and one of them pulls a gun on him, and there are all these other things happening in the scene. There is tension between the husband and wife, they are in the Jim Crow South, and his father who in the boy’s little microcosm, lived very high on the social hierarchy, in the 1930s in the Jim Crow South these poor white farmers were actually higher up on the socioeconomic ladder. So all these things are happening in this scene at the same time and the kid rolls down his window and sees the farmer’s kids looking at him through a chain link fence with contempt. All these things are happening, and my first attempt at scoring this scene I basically hit everything, guy pulls out a gun, it's a timpani hit. There’s a romantic theme between the husband and wife, I took that theme and soured it a bit. And Carter Burwell (my advisor) is very good at quickly figuring out what the essence of a scene is and what it needs and what it doesn’t need. He got me to understand that guy pulls out a gun, clearly there is danger you don’t need to hit it with a timpani. You don’t need to punctuate that. The whole scene is about this kid realizing for the first time in a palpable way that his place in the world is not where he thought it was. It wasn’t about the fact that the guy pulled a gun and the immediate danger, or the tension between the husband and wife. So what I ended up with at the end was just a single clarinet note, just under the kid’s face, to tell the audience what was going on with the kid right now.

Now if you listen to it musically the first thing I did was so much more interesting, and the second thing was not interesting at all. But in terms of the storytelling, in terms of the dramatic role that each piece of music plays, the second piece was much more effective. The reason I am mentioning this is because for dramatic features or documentaries it’s an example of how music is really more about unlocking the story and figuring out how music can serve it in the most effective way. 

Scoring a show like the Tom and Jerry Show is a very different proposition where the music is part of the design of the show. The music plays a huge prominent role in not just the storytelling but in creating a sense of excitement. It’s just a whole different thing. On one hand there is some commonality because you have to live inside those worlds, but on the other hand it is a whole different set of skills, it's almost like another job in a way. But maybe that’s just because these are two extreme cases. 

CC: Well it’s interesting because you do them both, and you are just one person. And if it's two different jobs, there is clearly the necessity for a different approach to each project. 

VM: So one of the defining characteristics I think of being a film composer is that, and this is both good and bad, and you have to, I don’t want to say subjugate, but maybe I do, your own musical personality to the story. Ultimately you are speaking with your unique voice and everyone has their own ways of hearing melody and harmony and everyone has their own ways of orchestrating, but you are serving the dramatic vision of the director. What I would write for one kind of film for one filmmaker could be dramatically different from what I would write for a different filmmaker and different project. However, I think I still sound like me. I think that if you listen to my scores for the Tom and Jerry Show and listen to my scores for dramatic features or the PBS series, I think you will still find that it sounds like me. I think that as long as I am drawing the audience into the story and into the film I feel like I am probably doing my job.