“Can you believe this is an online orchestra?” asked composer Laura Karpman.
She talks about the musical score of HBO’s new ‘Lovecraft Country’, which debuted Sunday night and is believed to be the first post-pandemic series to be fully scored, from the first episode to the last, by musicians who ‘ t remotely pick up from their homes.
Together with musical partner Raphael Saadiq, Karpman scored the 10-part series in which three African Americans ride America through the 1950s, experiencing not only prejudice but also hidden monsters from the imagination of pulp writer HP Lovecraft.
Creator Misha Green told her composers (who worked with her on the slavery series WGN “Underground”) that she wanted “gothic, orchestral R&B” to accompany her journey to horror. And while this combination of musical genres seems confusing as impossible, Karpman and Saadiq have taken it down.
Karpman has used 30 musicians, all of them in their home studios, and has created a symphonic sound for “Lovecraft Country.” She has been planning this since the lockdown forced the closure of LA studios in March.
‘Everything was closed,’ she recalls, referring to the closure of recording studios around the world at the time. Musicians could not play together, so scoring that required ensembles from players became immediately impossible. Or so everyone thought.
Karpman, a current double Emmy nominee for the documentary series “Why We Hate,” began brainstorming alternatives. Recording musicians remotely – playing parts in their home studios, then recording the recorded tracks – has long been a part of the music industry, much more so in the pop / rock / hip-hop world than in film choirs.
Composer Laura Karpman
Courtesy Laura Karpman
Together with other composers in the same predicate, she wondered if you could build an orchestral sound, one player at a time. “I had found in the past that, especially for players I had worked with for years and who knew my music, it was really good,” she says. “They would know what I wanted.”
Working together with contractor and Juilliard-trained violinist Lisa Liu, they put together a group of 29 players (20 strings, six brass, one wood block, one percussion and one harp). Karpman called it the Unison Orchestra. Liu says they come from all over the world, including players from the Metropolitan Opera, New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Toronto Symphony and elsewhere.
Karpman’s engineer Brad Haehnel helped the musicians choose the right microphones, and “we’ve done all these Zoom tutorials with people” to teach them the details of recording at home, she says.
In Karpman added to piano and Saadiq to guitars and synthesizers – they also work separately in their personal studios – they went on, one musician at a time, to score every note of the ‘Lovecraft Country’, which were then mixed (along with sampled sounds) in an artificial orchestra.
The surprise, and one that was particularly relevant to the “Lovecraft Country” project, was that “what came back sounded to me like Jerry Goldsmith, that close-mic’s 1960s allegorical music,” she says, referring to the late, highly respected film composer and his supposed music for such sci-fi and horror classics as “Planet of the Apes” and “Alien.”
“It was wildly appropriate” for the HBO series, she adds. ‘Part of the sound of the show is the way we record it. Suddenly, a bass clarinet like a double bass clarinet is a wonderful double for low brass, and because it is insulated, you can have as much volume as you want. A unique sound has begun to appear. It’s fun to be in front of an orchestra, to conduct, but these players do not need me. ”
