From ‘Batwoman’ to ‘The Witcher,’ 10 Composers to Watch
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From Netflix's "The Witcher" to Hulu's "Little Fires Everywhere," here is Variety's list of 10 composers to watch.
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Variety
Bostic is the first African American female composer in the Academy, but it’s not something she gloats much about. “How absurd we are still talking about pigment in 2020,” she says with a laugh. In fact, Bostic likes having her accomplishments in scoring do the talking: including Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’ 2019 Toni Morrison documentary, “The Pieces I Am.”

“It’s one of the few films I’ve ever scored where I only got three notes from the director,”says Bostic, who tapped into the energy of the iconic storyteller. “I was given a scene where she’s at home and she’s talking about her process — there was something so embryonic about that pure moment that I just started to write from that feeling. I always write from feeling, not from places of thinking about how to feel.”

Ironically, for Chinonye Chukwu’s recent prison drama, “Clemency,” the director requested emotional restraint to reflect the starkness of death row. “That was one of the hardest movies I’d had to score because it relies so much on silence — silence as music, silence as a part of sonic conversation,” she says. She embraces her chosen career path. “Let’s just cut to the chase — it’s a real gift to be paid to write music for someone’s vision.”

Florence Welch may be the face of Florence and the Machine, but now her bandmate Summers is carving out her own identity as a composer. Trading England for L.A., she’s reinventing herself as modern-day lady of the canyon.

“After a dozen years of being the ‘sound guy’ who makes the music, this is the most joyous progression — watching TV for a living is fantastic,” says Summers, who cut her teeth at composing by collaborating with Mark Isham on Hulu’s “Little Fires Everywhere.” Summers credits the show’s “genius” music supervisor, Mary Ramos, for offering her the opportunity.

The self-described “hard-working Polish girl” found success in scoring as fast as she did with Florence. “With the band, I threw a snowball and created an avalanche, and now I feel like I’m doing it again with this motion-picture stuff,” she says. “I went straight into scoring for Reese [Witherspoon], an Oscar-winning actress, and now I’ve got three shows coming up.” They are: “Sex/Life” for Netflix, “Panic” for Amazon and the third, she says, is a “secret” — and deeply personal — project.