Thomas Newman

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Thomas Newman with his BMI Film Music Award

Thomas Montgomery Newman (born October 20, 1955 in Los Angeles, California) is an American film score composer. He is a member of a film-scoring dynasty in Hollywood that includes his father Alfred Newman, his uncle Lionel Newman, his brother David Newman and his cousin Randy Newman, who is also a singer and songwriter.

Newman was educated at Yale University, and began his film-scoring career in 1984 with his score for Reckless. His breakthrough came in 1994, when he earned two Academy Award nominations for his scores to Little Women and The Shawshank Redemption. He has achieved significant critical and commercial success in recent years, with scores for American Beauty, Road to Perdition, Finding Nemo and Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events.

Newman also composed the theme music to the television series Boston Public and Six Feet Under, as well as the miniseries Angels in America. He will compose the music for the upcoming film Young Hannibal: Behind the Mask and the Todd Field film Little Children.

[edit] Musical Style

Newman's earliest scores from the 1980s were predominantly electronic. Starting with The Rapture in 1991, his scores have alternated a more traditional orchestral sound with other passages that use a shifting array of unconventional, non-Western, and modified instruments, such as processed hurdy gurdy, detuned mandolin, tabla, and xaphoon, as well as electronic elements to create a percussive, gamelan-like sound. Chas Smith and Rick Cox are frequent collaborators when Newman works in this style. Some of his scores lean more heavily towards one or the other of these modes; the scores for The Player, American Beauty, and Erin Brockovich exemplify his more percussive, "experimental" sound, while his scores for The Shawshank Redemption and Road to Perdition use conventional orchestration equally effectively.