Oscars 2024: How Composer Laura Karpman Crafted a Score That Mirrored ‘American Fiction’s Tonal Shifts

To pick the brain of someone like Laura Karpman is an exceptional treat.

The award-winning composer has over thirty years of industry experience and a deep knowledge and understanding of their craft that comes through immediately. Not to mention the passion and confidence that comes with knowing you’ve created a musically sensational score.

For Cord Jefferson’s directorial debut, American Fiction, Karpman composed a score that plays cleverly with the basic tenets of jazz. The music expands and contracts as our main character, Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), has an absurd brush with fame. Much of American Fiction also hangs on Monk’s relationship with his siblings (Tracee Ellis Ross and Sterling K. Brown), giving Karpman another element to explore musically.

Here, in an interview with Awards Daily, Karpman dives into the music of American Fiction and allowing the story to drive the Oscar-nominated score. She also reflects on balancing artistic expression with commercial success and creating a “maximalist” score that very much feels like Laura. What a treat, indeed.

Awards Daily: American Fiction has a lot going on tonally. How did you look at the film and go, ‘Okay, that’s what this should sound like?’

Laura Karpman: Well, that is the skill of film scoring. Basically, you sit and look at the movie, and in this case, they used a temporary score that was all classic jazz, and it felt right, tonally. But it didn’t move right with the picture. You know what I mean? Music and picture is this really crazy, mysterious, wonderful dance. Some things about it might be right, but it didn’t quite move in sync. And I think that was the case with that particular thing. The tone felt good, but it didn’t move with all the emotions of the film. The film has the entire range of the human experience in it.

So, first, you decide on the tone, and then you sit down with [director] Cord [Jefferson], and [editor] Hilda [Rasula], and the producers, and decide where the music should go and what it should be doing in that scene. And that has to do with performances. What do you want to amplify? What do you want to stay out of the way of? What does an audience need to feel at this moment? For example, at the beginning of this film, do we want to give the audience permission to laugh? The answer is ‘yes.’ Do we want to give them permission to cry? Later on, the answer is ‘yes.’ These are all the things that a crafted film score can do for a film. That’s what you have to decide.

Then, you go through the process of coming up with themes. In this case, there are two major themes—the Monk (Wright) theme and the family theme. Then, implement them at appropriate places in the film and see how they feel to you and the filmmakers. Does it work? Does it not work? What works about it? What doesn’t work about it? That’s the process of creating and crafting a film score.

AD: The score also has a whimsical, surrealist element running through it.

LK: Yeah! Well, I think jazz is a style, but not a mandate. So, you’re thinking about leaning into a sound of something that feels like jazz, but it also has to do what a film score does— all the things that we just talked about. So, you’ve got to be whimsical when you want to be super funny. You’re using elements of a comedy troupe, leaning into what traditionally has sounded funny.

Then you want to feel grounded in Monk’s head at certain times. You want to feel grounded in his anxiety or his pensiveness, his writing process, or his love affair. These are all different manifestations. In this case, you have two themes— his personal and family themes. I interwove them at different places for those [various] emotions.

AD: American Fiction does feel like a fever dream at times. It does throw everything at you. There’s a song on the soundtrack called “(Laura’s) Fever Dream.” How did you ground the score while also having places that feel frenetic and high energy?

LK: You just have to ground it by being able to turn on a dime. And that’s the thing about the score; it’s almost musically gymnastic. For example, one of the earlier scenes is when Lisa (Ross) dies, and then we cut immediately to her funeral on the beach, where Monk is reading out her last wishes. Then, the film cuts to the neighbor across the street in his sweater vest, and it becomes a comedy scene. So, you’ve got to be able to be in that space of mourning Lisa, meeting Cliff (Brown) for the first time, and then turn immediately into comedy. So, I think the way to ground it is to follow the action and tightly sew the music to what’s happening in the film.

AD: Tell me more about the two major musical themes of the score.

LK: One is Monk’s theme, which gives a nod to Thelonious Monk’s style of piano playing. When I think about Monk, his hands have different musical personas, really. The composer, Thelonious Monk, his left hand, has this blocky style of playing. His right hand is much more active and virtuosic. And that, to me, perfectly exemplifies the character Thelonious Ellison.

So, I definitely wanted to lean into Thelonious Monk’s music, but I also had to write a theme that could go through a lot of paces, something that could exist as a theme for Monk’s romantic life. And it does. It turns into something really beautiful for when he’s with Coraline (Erika Alexander). The theme had to have both edges and sway into romance.

The family theme is unique in that it’s a loose structure. It goes, ‘ba bee ba bee, ba da da da da da da da da da da, bee ba bee.’ It never really moves exactly in time. And it’s always with two instruments, and those two instruments are never actually playing together simultaneously. So, it’s exactly like a family where you’re kind of working with the same material but maybe not moving in quite the same direction. The only time it really comes together in a different rendition is during the pool scene when Cliff and Monk swim and connect, at least the first time we see them as brothers. That’s when the theme becomes almost a ’60s bossa nova: a ‘bop, beep, bop, beep, bop, beep, bop, beep, bop, beep.’ Moving together. So, the score closely follows the emotions of what’s happening in the picture.

AD: Another key scene in American Fiction is when Monk writes his book, “My Pafology,” throwing all these ideas out there. That piece of the score really stands out and mirrors that pivotal moment very well.

LK: Yes, basically you have this kind of mystery music…[sings theme]. This line moves underneath as this counterpoint is played on multiple pianos, three layers of piano, which are layering in Monk’s complex, conceptual writing process as he starts to spin out this thing. It’s thinking music. It’s like, ‘What’s going to happen next?’ But it’s creative process music as well.

Then the music drops out, and we hear sound effects come in—sirens and sounds of Monk imagining the ghetto scene. Then, it goes into the monologue, almost like a Shakespearean Hamlet monologue. At that point, I come back in with a large string ensemble and a piano concerto with very fluid piano writing, almost classical but still within jazz’s harmonic and tonal language. I’m thinking about it, at this moment, a little bit differently than I have before—[the piece] follows the monologue given at that point, which is this large expository monologue, but it is also this rich play between high art and low art. I think that that’s kind of what Monk is playing with at that moment.

AD: I wondered if working on a movie that’s so much about the creative process has made you think about your own creative process differently.

LK: We talked a lot about this. I do a lot of work for Marvel. And with Marvel, there are all these incredible spaces to be super creative and do your thing, but you also have to hit a commercial note. You’ve got to have that theme that is hummable and singable and that everybody’s going to get sucked into immediately.

I have thought a lot over my whole career about doing what’s right for the film, doing what’s right for the picture, and simultaneously carving out little places that feel like me. I think I do that. I think I always have. I’m a maximalist. I’m not a minimalist. When people say, ‘Less is more.’ It’s like, ‘I’m not your gal for that. I’m not your less is more gal.”

My best friend is a painter. We talk about this constantly. You want people to like and enjoy your work. But, if you’re a creative person, you also have the sensational need to express yourself. And do those two things align into something that’s commercial? Do they not align into something commercial? Is something that’s completely commercial capable of having places where you can express yourself?’ I mean, I don’t think so. But other people do. I think it’s something we all have thought about, and we talked about a lot in this film. And I’ve talked about it for years and years with friends of mine in all aspects of the arts.

AD: What is a moment in the American Fiction score that feels like Laura, like you’re putting a little bit of yourself in there?

LK: Oh, I think all of it does in this score. I was really able to be myself— with the exception of the second to last cue, the one where it’s like the 90s action cue when the police are storming into the [gala.] That was totally genre-based. But that was fun because it’s a challenge.

But there’s a lot of me in this score. You talked about “My Pafology,” that piano concerto is a real Laura cue. When I played it for [the team], I thought, ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Because it’s maximalist, it’s a big approach to that scene. But they liked it. And I think the family theme is something that’s really moving.

The thing that I love about the score, which is a little unusual for me, is that the instrumentation expands and contracts. Sometimes, it’s just solo piano. Sometimes, it’s multiple layers of solo piano. Sometimes, it’s a full jazz ensemble with strings and other orchestral elements. Because the film does so many things, the score had to expand and contract in a way I hadn’t done before.