A level Music (Edexcel) set works wider listening - Elfman

by Liz Dunbar @HuntSchoolMusic

Like Hitchcock and Herrmann, Tim Burton and Danny Elfman have enjoyed a highly successful, and long running film making partnership.  eg. "Nightmare Before Christmas", "Batman Returns” "Sleepy Hollow" and “Alice in Wonderland”. Elfman is a self‐taught composer, with a parallel career as a rock musician. His work with Tim Burton on the soundtrack to "Batman Returns" in 1992, brought him to public attention and established him as a credible film composer.

His scores reflect a complex range of influences from the lush Hollywood string writing of Steiner and Korngold, to the adventurous timbral combinations, asymmetric metres and dissonance of Bartok and Stravinsky. You can also hear the  dark Jazz underworld of Weill, and the experimental approaches to timbre found in the music of Partch and Reich.

Here's an ever evolving playlist to provide you with plenty of wider listening references to use in questions 5 and 6.