CineConcerts met with composer Marcus Norris to discuss his score to the new Apple TV series Lady in the Lake!

CineConcerts (CC): You have a very eclectic background. I feel like you’re one of those people that is constantly learning as much as you can about music, which I assume is the reason why you ended up getting your PhD. You don't really find many doctorates in your field of expertise, right? But what was it that really just made you want to start experimenting with music?

Marcus Norris (MN): I think I always was just a curious kid. And, you know, I didn’t understand x, y, z but I wanted to figure it out. I would pull it apart, look at it and see how it thing works. When I was 13, my uncle's mate, Andrei, introduced me to making beats on a software called Fruity Loops at the time. They've rebranded to FL Studio now. But at the time they were Fruity Loops, and I just remember my mind was blown and I remember thinking, I can be the whole band in this, and I was just obsessed ever since.

I think very fondly of that time, just messing around the first year or two, I didn't even show the music to anybody. It was literally just for me exploring. We didn't have YouTube at the time for tutorials, like, I didn’t know what reverb was. Let me turn it to 100 and see what it sounds like. Then let me turn it to zero and see what that sounds like and then stop when it sounds good to my ears. So, I think just that curious nature, it was innate, but was also kind of facilitated.

CC: Did you watch a lot of movies growing up or listen to a lot of music? Were you sort of in the arts at an early age, which kind of sparked this interest?

MN: I listened to a ton of music and a lot of movies. I mean, at the time, we didn't have streaming. So, you just kind of had the movies that you had. So, I don't know if they had a ton of them, but I'd watch the movies that we did have over and over again.

CC: I find that really interesting how some people have a very defined experience, they watch a movie and go, “Wow, I want to do that.”

It seems to me that your life experience and everything that you were surrounded with at the time fostered this need to just deconstruct stuff, rebuild it. And that sparked your musical beginning?

MN: No, I agree, and something I've been more thankful for, I try to curate that thankfulness. If I had been born five years earlier, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing or five years later. Had it been five years earlier, the only way to make music was with expensive beat machines. MPC’s, the 3000, all these. I was able to come upon this software, somebody just gave it to me and then I pieced together the computer, because we didn’t have any money.

Had I been born five years later, the computers would have been too small and you can't take them apart. Like if I asked you to build an iPhone or put together an iPad, you can't do it. So, I didn't come up privileged in many ways, but I do think there was a luck of the draw as far as the timing worked out to my advantage.

CC: Would you consider yourself to be a musical thinker? In other words, do you think about musical themes and the visuals that coincide? What's your reference point in terms of the musicality of yourself?

MN: I would say both. I try to start with the intuition, because I didn't grow up reading music, I didn't learn about music theory until I was an adult. Music is always, “how does it feel to me in art?” All art for me is, I judge it based on “how does this feel?” I think when I first started learning about composition in college, I thought I was at a huge disadvantage because I didn't have the background that a lot of my colleagues have.

But fast forward to now and I have a PhD. It's like, I know all the theory, I've taught the theory and all these things. So, I usually try to start with “how does this feel?” Then afterwards, apply the analysis and what felt good intuitively and why and how do I expand on that and take it to the next level.

CC: Apple TV+ has been releasing some fantastic stuff and I went in and listened to your score not knowing what to expect and was just like, whoa, this is like something I've never heard before. And I really mean that because there's a mix of a lot of stuff in there. I mean, there's a lot of really interesting things, creative decisions that you made.

For example, in the Main Title the whistling is very cool. You've got the orchestral elements; you've got these Western elements. So, before we get into your creative decisions on this, tell me a little bit about how you came onto the project.

MN: So, they had been working on it for a while. I came in kind of late. They had been trying to crack the sound and they couldn't quite figure out what it was going to be. They knew they wanted it to be unique.

I had done an indie film called Once Again (For the Very First Time) with my now good friend Boaz Yakin. He was working on Lady In The Lake and I had remembered him telling me, while we're wrapping, “I'm helping out with this Apple show. They’d never hire you but I think they really need you.” And I was like, “You know me, Boaz. I'm in no rush, man.”

But I had told him I'd be willing to demo for it. Some months go by and they're still figuring it out and he's like, “You guys really need to talk to Marcus. I really think you should talk to Marcus.” Alma [Har’el] the director and show creator, came to a screening of that film and then she started pushing Apple and eventually they let me demo on it and I swung for the fences in the demo. I put everything I had into it and then I ended up getting a gig. Some of those demos are in the show now.

CC: So, when you do a demo for something like this as a composer, do you have guardrails? How do you even know what to put on it?

MN: You don't. It's really just shooting in the dark. You talk to the director but with this one, they didn't quite know what they wanted. So, there's no sure thing. You have to do your best and put your all into it and know that like-minded people will find you. If you're the right fit, then you'll be the right fit. And if you're not the right fit, then you probably don't want this job anyway. You know what I mean?

So, I just was like, I hope that my weirdness aligns with Alma's weirdness and then the higher ups will be on board for it and it was great. And I think our weirdness aligned.

CC: They couldn't figure out the sound, which is really interesting to me because when you said you came in late and you were shown the footage and you'd seen what they had shot…What was it like, knowing that you were there to help them figure that out? That must have been super exciting, but also incredibly stressful at the same time.

MN: I mean, it was exciting. There's a movie called Slumdog Millionaire where it's the main guy’s life has just put him in the perfect position to know the answers. I felt like that here because it's late 60’s black Baltimore. There's a lot of jazz and soul and Motown influence. But then there's also this intricate and weird murder mystery side. Then there's klezmer and just all of these influences.

I started a fusion orchestra dedicated to soul music and doing the modern version of it and I also have a PhD in composition and a Masters in Orchestration. My first orchestration teacher was big on klezmer music. He's one of the best in the world and my first studio sessions were with all my old jazz arranger guys. I'm a big band, old school jazz type of guy. When they described what this was about, in the world that it was in, I felt like it was made for me in this crazy way.

I will say, I'll be honest about the process, doing it was stressful. There was a lot of curveballs in there. There was a double strike, but I would say as far as the music, I was never worried about the music.

CC: Can you talk about the creative decisions you made, like to have an orchestral theme, but then you do something to it to make it a little unnerving. And I feel like you just must have had so much fun experimenting with instruments.

MN: Yeah, I think early on we knew that we didn't want it to be a simple dichotomy of, now we're in the Black part of town, let's play jazz to now we're here with Natalie Portman, it'll be orchestral or klezmer or any of these things going with the Jewish characters. It wasn’t that simple. And I loved that, it was like they were in conversation with me and we're on the same page about this.

I knew there was always going to be these interesting, weird juxtapositions. At the beginning for the main theme, we started off by asking, “what's the main theme that everything else is connected to in some way? The genesis of all this, that we can pull from.” We wanted to find something strong.

I did a batch of seven different ideas and they were all these fusions—because I think fusions are always more interesting. That's what we do with South Side Symphony. Even now, when I write classical music and even when I get commissioned. I was composer in residence for the Juilliard Music Advancement program and we did a piece earlier this year and it's a fusion piece. After creating these seven themes, I had one more idea and I knew I wanted this kind of whistle on there.

CC: How did you come up with that?

MN: I just thought it'd be weird and I really like the human elements in this. There's not a ton of synth and I do think synths are amazing as I grew up on a lot of them but because I work in so many mediums, people say, “what's your favorite genre?” And I always say, “Black people in a room.”

That covers Stevie Wonder, Cab Calloway, everything modern, The Roots, it covers everything. But the common thread is just that there's people, there's a human element. So, there's a lot of voices in my work, you know, breaths, there's claps. It's the band and the style of music or the genre changes. In my mind, the genres have never been, the barriers between them are not perfectly discreet, and it just is fluid. I just wanted to lean into the humanness of it. You know what I mean? On the violin, you can hear the grit in these things. It's not trying to get it as clean as possible or sample. I wanted to hear the imperfections of it. Let's hear the grit. We already had the brass, already had the claps and I was responding to those.

CC: I think that's interesting because it reflects reality. I mean, everything is just a mix of everything else, right? Nothing is ever clear cut ever.

MN: No, people always say to me, “You do so many things.” I’m always gracious and thankful. But in my mind, I just do one thing. I just make music. Sometimes it comes out this way and I'm collaborating with this type of person and then sometimes it's over here with this type of person, but to me it's all the same. It doesn't really feel so different.

CC:  Was there anything that you particularly learned on this project? Is there anything really specific about your craft that changed the way you thought about composing something or maybe changed your idea about an instrument and how it could be used?

MN: I learned a lot. So, there's a lot of process but it's not fun to talk about it. As far as the art, I will say, I think this is the furthest I've pushed, running with one idea. Because I came on late, I got to see rough drafts of the whole series, I knew where it was going before I started. I don't think that's normally how composing for TV works. So, I knew I wanted everything in this series to come back to this one idea somehow, this nucleus of an idea. It's all built on the half step in the whistle. It comes back sometimes in the base model, or sometimes it's hidden in the inner voices of the slow, jazzy stuff, but it's in there.

So, I'm like, “how do I make it all relate?” because, as it goes on, the story is just interwoven with all these things. I wanted it to reflect the story. When you write orchestra pieces or you write compositions, you do tie it all into themes. A famous one is Beethoven's Fifth. That rhythm is in everything.

So, I would say this taught me that you can push that so far in modern contexts, like, if you listen to the soundtrack, you're never like, “Oh my God, I'm sick of hearing that thing.”

CC: So, when you start, you have this whole TV series in front of you. How do you compose that? Where do you start? Do you sit down at a piano or a computer?

MN: I'm a big voice memo guy but I'm not a good singer. Sometimes, I work it out at the piano. But, yeah, I'm a big voice memo guy because I sometimes feel like when I'm at the keyboard or I'm at the software or the paper or whatever it is, I feel like I'm moving within those restraints. Sometimes our ideas end up forming to the guidelines. So, a lot of times I have voice memos where I don't want to forget an idea and it's free. I guess it's kind of like what I said earlier where, start with what do you feel intuitively and then I apply the formalities. As it is going to have to be in bar lines if the musicians are ever going to play it and it is going to have to get in the computer somehow.

So, a lot of times it starts as voice memos. Sometimes it does start at piano and I'm like, wow, this is good. A lot of pieces I've done, especially as of lately, have been from there, I set my camera at the end of the piano and record. And then later on, I go back and transcribe it and figure it out.

CC: You mentioned your Southside Symphony, so before we go, could talk a little bit about that?

 MN: So, I started with the idea, “what if the orchestra didn't exist and it was invented today by a young black man? What would that look like? Where would they play? What kind of stuff would they play? Would they be playing the music of a 300 year dead European white guy?” Probably not.

We've done a lot of cool stuff. We recorded the score for this. We do all the film and TV stuff together. We do all the concerts together. We play on records for artists. It's really a family man. I think about us as, “what if Quincy Jones was born in the 90’s and came up on R&B and rap?”

I think about it in the lineage of a Cab Calloway, a Duke Ellington, like some of these people in their orchestras. We did one recently that was so fun. It was like a concert lecture block party on black music in anime. I’m a big fan of anime. I started with two questions: “How come so many Black people of my generation love anime?” And then “how come so much of anime features Black American music genres?” Jazz, cowboy bebop, hip hop… It just defaults to black American music and we don't ever really look at it. I did this deep dive into the cultural exchanges and we did this big concert at the Segerstrom Center celebrating that cultural exchange. I wrote a piece with this ancient traditional Chinese instrument called the erhu. It was so funny, man. It was a party.

CC: Are you working on anything up and coming that you can talk about?

MN: Yeah. I wrote a score and Southside Symphony recorded for two films that I think are released into the public this year. They were projects I did before Lady in the Lake, but they come out later. A film by Nicki Micheaux called Summer of Violence. And then the film Once Again (For the Very First Time) by Boaz Kane, which is an experimental dance music film. There's like an hour of music in that one. I wrote a couple of songs for it as well, which I'm excited about.

Lady in the Lake is now streaming on Apple TV!