Los Angeles, CA · orchestral rock · film score · art-rock

Danny Elfman

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Oingo Boingo's madman turned Tim Burton's composer — a berserk orchestral-rock spectacle that mashes film scores into art-punk chaos.

Danny Elfman was born in Los Angeles in 1953 to a Jewish family of Russian descent; his mother, Blossom, was a writer and teacher, his father a teacher, and his brother Richard Elfman went on to work as an actor, musician and journalist. Raised in Baldwin Hills, he spent hours at the local cinema, where the scores of Bernard Herrmann and Franz Waxman caught his ear, this despite having been rejected from his elementary school orchestra for showing no aptitude for music.

After switching high schools in the late 1960s and discovering jazz and Stravinsky, Elfman dropped out of University High School and followed Richard to France, playing violin in Jérôme Savary's theatre troupe Le Grand Magic Circus. He then spent ten months busking across Africa and collecting percussion instruments, a trip cut short by illness. Back in Los Angeles, he became musical director of Richard's street-theatre group The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, which turned into the new wave band Oingo Boingo, with Elfman fronting horn-driven, hyperactive songs delivered in a nervous, high-pitched voice.

Elfman's scoring career began with Tim Burton's Pee-wee's Big Adventure in 1985, opening a partnership that has run across nearly all of Burton's films, including Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, and The Nightmare Before Christmas, on which he also sang. He has scored more than 100 films in total, among them Batman, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man films, and Good Will Hunting and Milk for Gus Van Sant, and wrote the theme to The Simpsons.

In recent years Elfman has returned to writing and performing songs of his own, working in a heavier, more abrasive vein that draws on industrial and art-rock alongside orchestral arrangement. Live, that material is typically presented with a band and orchestral players, mixing new songs with reworked film music.

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orchestral rockfilm scoreart-rock