Carter Burwell

Carter Burwell has composed the music for a number of feature films, including Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing, Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, Rob Roy, Fargo, The Spanish Prisoner, Gods and Monsters, Velvet Goldmine, The General's Daughter, Three Kings, Being John Malkovich and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (BAFTA nomination for Film Music), Before Night Falls, A Knight's Tale, The Rookie, Adaptation., Intolerable Cruelty, The Ladykillers, No Country for Old Men, In Bruges, Burn After Reading, Twilight, Where the Wild Things Are (Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Original Score), A Serious Man, The Blind Side, The Kids Are All Right, True Grit, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2 and The Fifth Estate.

Burwell's more recent credits include Bill Condon's mystery-drama Mr. Holmes, which starred Ian McKellen; the true crime-thriller Legend, directed by Brian Helgeland; Todd Haynes' drama Carol, which starred Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara; the score for Charlie Kaufman's first stop-motion film Anomalisa; the ocean thriller The Finest Hours starring Chris Pine and Casey Affleck; and the Nicole Kidman and Jason Bateman drama The Family Fang.

Burwell received his second Golden Globe Award and first Academy Award® nomination for Best Original Score for Carol and an Annie Award nomination for Outstanding Achievement in Music in an Animated Feature Production for Anomalisa. He also won the Los Angeles Film Critics Association's award for Best Music for Carol and Anomalisa. Hail, Caesar! marked Burwell's 16th collaboration with the Coen brothers.

For television, Burwell worked on the HBO mini-series Mildred Pierce, which starred Kate Winslet and resulted in two Primetime Emmy Award nominations. He won in the category of Outstanding Music Composition for a Miniseries, Movie or a Special (Original Dramatic Score).

His theater work includes the chamber opera The Celestial Alphabet Event and the Mabou Mines productions Mother and Lucia's Chapters of Coming Forth by Day.

In 2005, Burwell developed a concert work for text and music entitled Theater of the New Ear, presented in New York, London and Los Angeles. The text, by Joel and Ethan Coen and Charlie Kaufman, was performed by a dozen actors, including Meryl Streep, Steve Buscemi, the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, Hope Davis, Peter Dinklage, David Thewlis and Jennifer Jason Leigh. The music was performed by the eight-member Parabola Ensemble, conducted by Mr. Burwell.

Burwell's dance compositions include the pieces The Return of Lot's Wife, choreographed by Sara Pearson and Patrik Widrig; and RABL, choreographed by Patrice Regnier. He has performed around the world with his own ensembles as well as others, such as The Harmonic Choir.

Burwell's writing includes the essay "Music at Six: Scoring the News, Then and Now," published in the inaugural issue of Esopus magazine in 2003 and reprinted in Harper's Magazine in 2004 as "Orchestrating War," and the essay "No Country for Old Music" in the 2013 Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics. Burwell has taught and lectured at The Sundance Institute, New York University, Columbia University and Harvard University.

Universal Pictures