Jonathan Beard’s career aspirations began with the back of a CD. As a teenager, he says, he was one of the few “nerds” who read the liner notes—and he noticed that listed under some of his favorite composers was another name. “I would see ‘Composed by Alan Menken, orchestrated by Danny Troob,’ and I would wonder, who is Danny Troob? Or ‘Composed by John Williams, orchestrated by Conrad Pope’—who is Conrad Pope?”
As an undergrad at Stanford and a master’s student at UCLA, Beard, ’03, studied music composition, a skill for which he has since won a regional Emmy—in 2022, for scoring the documentary 3 Seconds in October: The Shooting of Andy Lopez. But through composition he found himself drawn to the work that he’d first discovered in the liner notes: orchestration, the process of expanding and developing a musical score so that it can be performed by an orchestra.
Since then, he’s worked mainly as an orchestrator but also as an arranger, a composer, and a conductor on major movies, TV shows, and video games. His credits include Universal’s recently released movie musical Wicked, Amazon Prime’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, as well as The Mandalorian and The Handmaid’s Tale. Over the years, his work has ranged from Jordan Peele’s Nope to Minions: The Rise of Gru. His video game orchestration involves titles such as Call of Duty: Vanguard and God of War: Ragnarök. In 2021, he composed an electroacoustic horror opera, Cesare, Child of Night.
STANFORD: What’s the difference between a composer and an orchestrator?
Beard: Films and television have notoriously tight deadlines. So, when a composer sketches out a piece of music [and] gets it mostly done—the structure is there, the main melodies are there, they’ve created a digital version—they need to get that part of the process far enough that the person in charge of approving that music can hear whether it’s going to work or not. At that moment, the composer’s job is to move on to the next piece of music in the movie.
But let’s say, on that piece of music, in terms of all the notes needed for every single individual player in that orchestra, it may be 85 percent of the way there, it may be 90 percent of the way there, but there are always going to be little bits that need to be filled in. That is something that the composer, even if they have the skills to do it —which most of them certainly do—they may not have the time to do it. That’s my job: to take the sketch that they’ve crafted and finish filling in whatever needs to be filled in so that it can be performed and recorded by a live orchestra.
The job of orchestration is a job that exists on a spectrum. At one extreme, it is very similar to transcription, taking a composer’s completed composition that exists as either a sketch on paper or a condensed score that needs to be fleshed out into a full score in order to be performed by an orchestra on a recording. The other side of the spectrum would be akin to arranging, if the composer has mapped out a clear melody, maybe a chord progression, [but] they haven’t figured out all the instrumentation. Which instruments are going to play what parts? Does this need to grow and swell? In reality, the job of orchestration exists somewhere on the spectrum between those two extremes.
Do you have any go-to orchestration techniques for different moods or themes?
I love the question. There are common places that you can go, musically, to communicate something in the expected way. And sometimes we want to feel [that] expectation and we want those expectations to be met. There can be immense satisfaction in that. So, if a couple kisses on screen and the strings swell—gosh! That makes us feel good as viewers.
But what if we scored that moment of a couple kissing using flutes and clarinets? In some way, could we create an equally poignant dramatic moment but with an unexpected feel? There can be a certain loneliness in the sound of a clarinet, for example. There can also be immense beauty. In that moment when two people kiss on-screen, if there were the sounds of clarinets involved, could I use that to create a touch of melancholy in the subliminal emotional communication of that moment?
There’s no exact science to this. And certainly, as a composer and an arranger-orchestrator, I’m not thinking about these things in any kind of scientific way but in a feeling way.
You’ve worked on a lot of sci-fi and fantasy projects. How do you make music that sounds both familiar and otherworldly?
When you have an otherworldly tableau in a story, if you attempt to create something that is equally otherworldly in music, the risk you run is that you’re going to create something that sounds super out of this world right now but isn’t necessarily going to end up sounding really timeless in the future. And some of that you can see with old approaches to sci-fi scoring that have almost turned into a pastiche. They don’t sound super futuristic at all anymore; they almost sound old-fashioned in their approach.
Compare that with John Williams’s approach to scoring Star Wars and going, like, super romantic [and] classical. It didn’t sound really futuristic at the time, and it also doesn’t sound really futuristic now, but it doesn’t sound dated either. It just sounds sort of timeless.
What was it like to orchestrate a secret project like Rings of Power?
I work with two orchestration partners, Edward Trybek and Henri Wilkinson, and we orchestrated all of Rings of Power seasons one and two. The information that we could get [about] what was going on was extremely minimal. Bear McCreary, the composer, did have access to that information and basically had to keep it very, very close to the vest.
So even in our meetings with him, he’d be saying, “Guys, I need this to go in this direction. Here’s what we’re going for,” and then explain dramatic beats or sort of the epicness of something, but without giving any specifics on ‘This is in Númenor, and so-and-so character is going to be [doing] X, Y, and Z.’ [We knew] none of that until later, when it actually came out and we could watch this thing that we had spent months and months of time with and see it in context.
It was definitely a process of mystery in terms of specifics, but [with a] deep dive into the emotions of storytelling through music. I think that’s where the real power of that score comes out.
Photo: Shie Rozow
How did that level of secrecy affect the recording sessions?
Normally you’d have the movie playing up on a big screen, so that the conductor and the composer and whoever else is involved could see if it’s all lining up correctly. There was no video anywhere to be found in the recording sessions.
You see this in Star Wars, you see this in Marvel—those types of properties. This now happens more and more. The timings of the cues were very tightly timed with a click track [a metronome-like track in which the clicks line up with the on-screen action]. Basically, we would know that they were lining up, even if you couldn’t see it on the screen.
There is a degree to which that can work if it’s carefully timed out and if it’s been orchestrated in a way that musically makes the intentions clear. Then, even if the conductor is not seeing the picture going along with what they’re doing, you can still have a good idea of [whether] that take that you just did is going to work or if you need to record it again.
Do you have any advice for young musicians?
I love to use my own story as an example for younger composers or younger musicians, as a reminder that you never know exactly what your path is going to be. That is something to be afraid of to the degree that it’s productive—but mainly [it’s something] to be open to and celebratory of.
I remember having this thought very clearly about 10 years ago, when I composed some music for [the video game] Star Wars: Battlefront. That music was recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra, and it was recorded at Abbey Road Studios. I remember at that moment thinking, OK, if I could have a time machine to go back to tell teenage Jonathan something right now, I just want to say, “Hey, it’s going to be OK, buddy. You know, this thing that you love, you’re going to get to work on it someday. The curtain is going to get pulled back. And you’re going to get to be living in that universe someday.” That is a really special thing, and those moments have not stopped for me. There are still times 20 years into this career where I pinch myself and say, “I am so lucky. This is so awesome. How did I wake up today and get to do this?”
Sarah Lewis, ’24, is a former editorial intern at Stanford. Email her at stanford.magazine@stanford.edu.
More orchestrations by Jonathan Beard
Movies
- Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)
- Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)
- The Color Purple (2023)
- Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)
- King Richard (2021)
- Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021)
- Sonic the Hedgehog (2020)
- Us (2019)
- Creed II (2018)
- Venom (2018)
- Green Book (2018)
- It (2017)
- Deadpool (2016)
TV
- Percy Jackson and the Olympians (2023–24)
- Luke Cage (2018)
- Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2014–18)
Video Games
- Spider-Man 2 (2023)
- Death Stranding (2019)
- Assassin’s Creed Syndicate: Jack the Ripper (2015)
