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Browse piano sheets by Thomas Newman on Zen Virtual Piano. Thomas Newman’s uncle Lionel Newman, who succeeded Thomas’s father Alfred as music director for 20th Century Fox, gave him his first scoring assignment on a 1979 episode of the series The Paper Chase. Thomas Newman said he thought it was a tough job at first, requiring him to develop vocabularies and a sense of procedure, and that he became comfortable writing scores, and not fraudulent in his efforts, only after eight years. Linking a first television assignment to a long period of learning can be read as a career in which the craft was built gradually on the job. BFI says he belongs to a family of celebrated film musicians: his father Alfred, who wrote the Twentieth Century-Fox fanfare, his uncles Lionel and Emil, his brother David and his cousin Randy. He told Variety that he didn’t have that close a link with his uncles, that his father died when he was fourteen, and that he followed along with his music training because it was expected. His studies included a music degree from Yale under Jacob Druckman and Bruce MacCombie, and private study with George Trembley and David Raksin, and his prime mentor, he recalls, was Stephen Sondheim. Belonging to a celebrated musical family, yet following a path that also ran through Yale study and mentors such as Sondheim, can be read as a composer who combined an inherited setting with training of his own. Newman likes to vary the instrumentation of his scores, from full orchestra to percussion-only music, and he is fond of unusual instruments including the zither, hurdy-gurdy, psaltery and hammered dulcimer, as well as unexpected sounds such as Aboriginal chants and the chirping of cicadas. He declared that he has an interest in mundane experimentation. BFI describes a distinctive style that often mixes bold instrumentation, striking rhythms, electronic sounds, intimate piano and lush orchestral sweep, in scores from The Shawshank Redemption to WALL-E and Skyfall. A taste for cicadas and hurdy-gurdies alongside the full orchestra suggests a composer who finds music in everyday sounds, treating the whole world as a possible orchestra. In his BFI interview he said he never comes in with a clear intention, because intention strikes him as limiting, and, while often watching the film, tries to react as if he were not attached to what he has created. He is a huge fan of not overemphasising with music, he said, and the more silence there is, the more chance to underline a newer moment with more refreshment. He added that he collects postcards of Los Angeles and likes to bike in the mountains. Set beside his remark that more silence gives more chance to underline a newer moment, a distrust of intention points to a scoring practice built on restraint and listening.
Browse piano sheets by Thomas Newman on Zen Virtual Piano.
Thomas Newman’s uncle Lionel Newman, who succeeded Thomas’s father Alfred as music director for 20th Century Fox, gave him his first scoring assignment on a 1979 episode of the series The Paper Chase. Thomas Newman said he thought it was a tough job at first, requiring him to develop vocabularies and a sense of procedure, and that he became comfortable writing scores, and not fraudulent in his efforts, only after eight years. Linking a first television assignment to a long period of learning can be read as a career in which the craft was built gradually on the job.
BFI says he belongs to a family of celebrated film musicians: his father Alfred, who wrote the Twentieth Century-Fox fanfare, his uncles Lionel and Emil, his brother David and his cousin Randy. He told Variety that he didn’t have that close a link with his uncles, that his father died when he was fourteen, and that he followed along with his music training because it was expected. His studies included a music degree from Yale under Jacob Druckman and Bruce MacCombie, and private study with George Trembley and David Raksin, and his prime mentor, he recalls, was Stephen Sondheim. Belonging to a celebrated musical family, yet following a path that also ran through Yale study and mentors such as Sondheim, can be read as a composer who combined an inherited setting with training of his own.
Newman likes to vary the instrumentation of his scores, from full orchestra to percussion-only music, and he is fond of unusual instruments including the zither, hurdy-gurdy, psaltery and hammered dulcimer, as well as unexpected sounds such as Aboriginal chants and the chirping of cicadas. He declared that he has an interest in mundane experimentation. BFI describes a distinctive style that often mixes bold instrumentation, striking rhythms, electronic sounds, intimate piano and lush orchestral sweep, in scores from The Shawshank Redemption to WALL-E and Skyfall. A taste for cicadas and hurdy-gurdies alongside the full orchestra suggests a composer who finds music in everyday sounds, treating the whole world as a possible orchestra.
In his BFI interview he said he never comes in with a clear intention, because intention strikes him as limiting, and, while often watching the film, tries to react as if he were not attached to what he has created. He is a huge fan of not overemphasising with music, he said, and the more silence there is, the more chance to underline a newer moment with more refreshment. He added that he collects postcards of Los Angeles and likes to bike in the mountains. Set beside his remark that more silence gives more chance to underline a newer moment, a distrust of intention points to a scoring practice built on restraint and listening.
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Common questions
Thomas Newman is a film composer from a family of celebrated film musicians, known for scores such as WALL-E, The Shawshank Redemption, American Beauty and Skyfall.
His uncle Lionel Newman gave him his first scoring assignment on a 1979 episode of The Paper Chase.
He varies instrumentation from full orchestra to percussion-only music and likes unusual instruments such as the zither, hurdy-gurdy, psaltery and hammered dulcimer.
He says he never comes in with a clear intention, because intention strikes him as limiting, and while often watching the film tries to react as if he were not attached to what he has created.