Danny Elfman

Greetings everyone! I hope you are all staying safe and healthy during the current global pandemic. This week and in weeks to come I hope to share with you both good stories and good thoughts during these troubled times. A huge thank you to our healthcare workers, who are the real heroes of the past few months.

Keeping with my discussions of different film composers with which I have done copious amounts of work, in several of my last posts I’ve spent some time talking about Michael Giacchino and my relationship with him as a principal horn. I’ve also shared stories of my connection with watching him grow as a composer, learning about his compositional style, and some of my favorites of his film scores.

Today I would like to talk about another composer I have played many, many, many scores, probably forty or so, over the course of my career, sometimes as principal horn, sometimes as a section horn; Danny Elfman. Probably the most unique film composer I can think of, at least during the years I was working! For those of you who know Danny Elfman as a film composer, you may or may not know that he was the lead singer of a group called Oingo Boingo. They were a big hit band in the ‘80s, although they were kind of alternative. They didn’t have many major major hits, “Dead Man’s Party” was probably the biggest one, but they did have others as well. I wouldn’t call Oingo Boingo a stadium band, but they definitely had a very loyal following and created some really interested music.

This group evolved from a theater performance art group called the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo. They incorporated a lot of theater, a lot of really “weird” stuff in the band, but eventually morphed into a kind of standardized pop band with a sax and a trumpet. At this point they truly became Oingo Boingo and had a very successful career. 

The majority of these guys in the beginning were all students together (although Danny never officially attended) at the California Institute af the Arts, which was colloquially known as the “anti-arts school arts school.” It was actually founded by Walt Disney! You were allowed to just be a creative thinker, and with the leadership of the faculty there, become who you were, so to speak. The program was very free in the types of things you could study. It created a very creative atmosphere back in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, which is when Elfman attended. 

It was during his time at the Institute that Elfman developed a friendship with a budding film director named Tim Burton. Afterwards, they got together and worked on a film called Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. It was the first film that Danny ever scored. Both of them had a very unique style of creativity which meshes extremely well together. Danny’s next score was Big Top Pee-wee, and that was the first time I personally worked with him. After that, I worked with him on pretty much every film he did for the next twenty-five years or so. 

Danny’s chief orchestrator was a man by the name of Steve Bartek, and he was certainly a big help to the composer. It is still unclear to me how ‘trained’ a musician Danny was in the traditional sense, and I think some people decry that as him being not legitimate, but many others argue that’s where his creativity comes from. Truly, he is one of the more creative film composers I can think of. 

Some thematic type of ideas that he came up with have been quoted many, many times, either directly or indirectly, stylistically speaking. One of his wonderful early scores was the score to a movie called Edward Scissorhands, and when you listen to that particular score you will know what I am talking about! There are some vocal parts, particularly the chorale, that were incredibly special in the telling of the story, but also manage to stand on their own as musical compositions. In fact, they still do, the sounds that Elfman created have been copied or mimicked ever since by other composers.

Danny then started getting into some bigger budget, bigger picture works. The Michael Keaton Batman films, the first couple Spidermen movies, and his themes for these were iconic. What made him truly unique was the way that his style of composition would always begin with a cue that almost never ended up being exactly what was written on the page. That’s where the creativity came in! This is contrast to composers like John Williams, who in the twenty or twenty-five years I worked with him I don’t think ever changed a note on my page in between rehearsals and takes. Pretty much what was there was there. That was pretty old school, Lalo Schifrin, Elmer Bernstein, etc. all the older school composers worked this way. Danny’s brilliance, on the other hand, lay in his ability to adapt with each cue. I would describe his compositional style as experimentational. But regardless of how it was achieved, the end result of his experiments was always magical! Clearly, his creativity and his brilliance has always won out over the amount of changes that would go into every score, because the amount of important work that he has created is undeniable!  

I think my favorite Danny Elfman score that I ever played on was The Nightmare Before Christmas! It was fun in a number of ways, not the least of which was the fact that it was the only time I was ever actually able to record with him where he was singing! As you may know, he was the voice of Jack Skellington in the film, so as we were recording the instrumental tracks his vocals were being piped over to our headphones from the booth! 

 His recognizable style of writing was in its own way as unique as Hans Zimmer. When you hear a Zimmer score, you know its him - particularly when it’s a Pirates of the Caribbean score because everything is in D minor, it’s the key of the pirates! Don’t worry, I’ve done enough films with Hans that I know he writes in other keys! 

In the same vein, when you hear a John Williams score, it’s a John Williams score, and when you hear a Danny Elfman score, you know it’s a Danny score. It’s hard to say that about every composer, so that in and of itself gives Danny a place that although he doesn’t not come from the same schools of training, (at least I never got that sense from him), his music certainly comes from the same elements of creativity, genius, and instinct in ways that simply cannot be taught.

In my next post I will be sharing my recollections of Michael Kamen, so stay safe and stay tuned!