Composer Spotlight: The End
For this month’s Composer Spotlight, we’re thrilled to welcome The End‘s director and lyricist Joshua Oppenheimer alongside composer Joshua Schmidt as our featured guest playlist curators!
Set in a near-ish future and now playing in theaters via NEON, The End follows a family living in a vast, luxurious bunker two decades after the end of the world. Inspired by the Hollywood’s Golden Age musicals of the ‘50s, Oppenheimer was fascinated by the genre’s reliance on buoyant optimism and sentimentality, as well as how the musical format could parallel a story of self-delusion, and serve as a vehicle in which the characters’ innermost feelings could be intimately explored. The film’s soundtrack, featuring 12 original songs performed by a cast led by Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon, George MacKay, and Moses Ingram, captures the contrasting emotions and conflicts at the heart of the film’s nuanced, post-apocalyptic narrative.
To celebrate The End’s theatrical release, Oppenheimer and Schmidt have curated a playlist that offers a glimpse into their creative process:
“These tracks were key inspirations as we wrote The End’s songs. They roughly follow the film’s chronology, so you may intuit how this soulful, emotional music inspired specific songs, recurring themes, rhythms, moods, or the score as a whole. You may even imagine the passionate discussion we had around these pieces. Music works on the unconscious, so crucial connections were often strongly felt but never spoken. We hope therefore that you will discover for yourself many resonances that shaped our writing process, even if they went unarticulated. That so much could remain unsaid – yet deeply felt – was the beauty of our collaboration on the songs, and with Marius de Vries on the incidental score. We offer this playlist, therefore, to welcome you into the heart of our process, and to invite you in as a collaborator.” – Joshua Oppenheimer
Early in the production process, Oppenheimer turned to Schmidt, an accomplished composer, sound designer and musician with over 250 Broadway and Off-Broadway credits under his belt. Working in close collaboration over the course of eight months, the duo sketched out early demos with only solo piano and vocals, Oppenheimer distilling the film’s key dramatic moments into prose poem-style lyrics and Schmidt adding instrumentation and orchestration. Accomplished music producer & composer Marius de Vries (La La Land, Moulin Rouge, Annette) also contributed to the scoring process and served as Executive Music Producer for the production.
Of the collaborative process and some of the inspirations behind the score, Joshua Schmidt adds:
“The first proper song that Joshua and I started to write was “The Big Blue Sky,” which is Father’s number, and that music undulates in fragments all the way throughout the film. The next song was Mother’s song, “The Mirror.” In Caroline, or Change, Jeanine Tesori has this song called “Lot’s Wife,” and it’s essentially a long let-it-all-out monologue; maybe a very early predecessor of that is in Gypsy, with Sondheim and Jules Styne’s “Rose’s Turn,” which was constructed of fragments from other songs in the piece. The fragmentary nature of those songs presents a state of mind. It’s about somebody going through a bunch of different emotional things all at once. Little pieces of music all throughout Mother’s song work their way through the entirety of the film as well. How I like to work, particularly when trying to nestle in a bunch of music actively within a dramatic framework: The songs themselves can be very distinct, but the musical material that they come from has a sense of continuity. You get a sense that there’s a cohesive world at play.”
Check out the curated playlist and take a listen to the full soundtrack, out now. Don’t miss The End, now playing in theaters via NEON – Get Tickets here.