Scoring a period piece can't be the easiest of musical endeavors. I mean, just listen to Barry Lyndon.
Even harder, though? Incorporating sounds so dated they've only been conveyed to modernity via word of mouth.
In light of 12 Years a Slave taking home three big Oscar statues, the music in the film begs for deeper insight, especially since the whole endeavor places such a high value on authenticity--from costumes and language to overall setting (which, to be fair, were unremittingly researched for near exact replication).
Enter, then, composer and pianist Nicholas Britell, who wrote "My Lord Sunshine" specifically for Steve McQueen's movie.
And while the 33-year-old Juilliard-cum-Harvard grad was not the film's Hans Zimmer--the man behind the score, that is--Britell encountered many challenges trying to write music for an epoch that has no physical record of its own.
So, Britell did his darndest, supplementing scattered musicological research with the real-life Northup memoir, interpolating themes as necessary.
He explains: "In the prefaces to those books, the people who were notating this music say, 'This is our best guess at how this sounds, because Western notation can't capture the nuances or the spirit of what we're hearing.'"
Hmm, sure sounds like a timely DMA thesis...
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