Five Questions With: Nathan Barr, Composer of ‘The Great’ and ‘Hollywood’

Composer Nathan Barr received his two Emmy nominations for one of my very favorite Emmy categories: Original Main Title Theme Music. Those two nominations came from FX’s The Americans and Netflix’s Hemlock Grove. They give just a hint at the wide array of projects Barr undertakes. Not sticking any single genre, Barr’s compositions can be heard in such varied projects as HBO’s True Blood, FX’s Fosse/Verdon, Amazon’s Carnival Row and Sneaky Pete and such films as The Hunt, Cabin Fever, and The House With a Clock In Its Walls.

But it’s his scores for two major spring projects that put him back into the forefront of the 2020 Emmy conversation. In addition to his work earlier in the year for Carnival Row, Barr received acclaim for the score to Ryan Murphy’s Netflix limited series Hollywood as well as Hulu’s The Great. A thread running through his career, the difference between both scores highlights Barr’s ability to work across genres.

Here, Awards Daily talks to Barr about working with Ryan Murphy on Hollywood, about working in a series with a complicated tone, and about the period/modern clash of influences for The Great.

Awards Daily: You have two major scores in competition this spring with The Great and Hollywood. Starting with Hollywood, what were some of your hallmarks in creating this 40s-era score?

Nathan Barr: Some of that music from the 1940s I love. I’m a huge fan of Franz Waxman and Max Steiner who were at their hay day in the 40s. It features sweeping lush melodies, and the Ryan Murphy is very committed to the idea of memorable melodies. They’re always listening for that. The whole score is five different themes repurposed throughout the season. We knew going in that we didn’t want to stray too far from the sound of that period.

AD: Did Ryan and the creative team give you any specific guidance on the kind of score he wanted for the series?

NB: The first thing I’d say that Alexis Woodall, the head of Ryan’s company and basically his show runner on everything, is super knowledgeable about music and super sensitive to music. She’s also very good at directing the composer. So, from the beginning, the main thing they will bring up at the top is the desire to have memorable melodies that will last after you’ve heard it once. That’s the major piece of direction, and then they knew also up front that they didn’t really want to stray from the 40s periods too much. They wanted the score to mesh well with the source tracks in there. Other than that, they work quite different in that, when you present a piece of music to them the first time, you give it to them in stems so they have all the different elements split out from one another. They take it from there, and they place it where they want. They know very much what they want.

AD: So, The Great is miles away from Hollywood. Tell me how you landed that project.

NB: A lot of composers wrote demos for it. Out of the gate, the producers were not interested in the straight-forward period score. A lot of the demos weren’t considered because they lived in that world. Maggie Phillips, the wonderful music supervisor on The Great, kind of gave me the direction that they wanted to hear something off the wall and different. She told me to throw out the rule book as far as how you would score a period piece. So, that’s what I did. I wrote literally an all 70s-style score with a synth violin over it, and they loved it. The irony in that was that Hulu ended up pulling back a bit from being too contemporary because they felt the sensibilities of the show were already so modern that it didn’t need that extra touch.

AD: So, were you trying to use period instruments in what you ended up creating for The Great?

NB: Yes, in the sense that we didn’t use instruments that wouldn’t have existed back then. For the source stuff, it was always fiddles and cellos and drums and any instrument that would have existed back then. And then we used orchestra for the other score stuff. We were more concerned about being period specific with the on-camera stuff where there were musicians in a party scene actually playing. That was really fun to explore, writing these vaguely Russian-sounding themes.

AD: The major theme of Hollywood is rewriting the wrongs of the past on the underrepresented cultures in early filmmaking. If you could rewrite a past wrong, what would it be?

NB: Oh my gosh, there are so many. I’ll make it super specific, but Ennio Morricone is one of the most wonderful composers of all time. I think Hollywood ignored his career for many, many years. Hollywood is sort of famous for having those blind spots when it comes to some of the greatest talents in the world.

Both The Great and Hollywood are streaming now on Hulu and Netflix, respectively.