“Evocative original music” – LOS ANGELES TIMES

A composer who brings to her music feverish imagination, impeccable musicianship, complexity, versatility, unbridled joy, and fearlessness, Emmy-award winning composer Laura Karpman’s rigorous musical approach, coupled with conceptual and progressive uses of technology and recording, is that of a true 21st century American composer. Named one of the most important women in Hollywood by Variety Magazine, she is one of a handful of female composers with an active career in film and television, winning four Emmys and receiving an additional seven nominations, an Annie Award nomination and two GANG awards and a nomination for her video game music. Karpman’s concert music is widely performed in major venues internationally, and her lifelong obsession with jazz (which began with memorizing Ella Fitzgerald’s scat solos at age 11) is embedded in her uniquely creative work.

Recent and upcoming commissions include a new opera Wilde Tales for The Glimmerglass Festival, her new genre-breaking work Hidden World of Girls with the Kitchen Sisters for the Cabrillo Festival, the One Ten Project for the Los Angeles Opera, Different Lanes for string quartet and two iPads, a new opera Balls! about Billie Jean King/Bobby Riggs with New York Times columnist Gail Collins for The Industry in LA (and for which she received an Opera America female composer grant), plus works for the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus and Pacific Symphony. Karpman's ground-breaking, two-time Grammy-Award winning score for the multi- media evening ASK YOUR MAMA, featuring Jessye Norman, The Roots, jazz vocalist de’Adre Aziza, and George Manahan conducting, premiered with the Orchestra of St. Luke's to a sold-out house at Carnegie Hall and made its West Coast premiere, with Nnenna Freelon joining the cast, at the Hollywood Bowl and returned to New York’s famed Apollo Theater.

Her concert works have been commissioned by Carnegie Hall, percussionist Evelyn Glennie, Los Angeles Opera, Tonya Pinkins, American Composers Orchestra, Czech Philharmonic, Juilliard Choral Union, among others, and performed by orchestras and ensembles internationally, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Cabrillo Music Festival and conductor Marin Alsop, Juilliard Chorus, and the Detroit, Richmond, Seattle, Houston, New York Youth, Tucson, San Jose Chamber, and Prague Symphonies. Her theater catalog includes three musicals for Los Angeles's A Noise Within theater company as well as underscore for dozens of classic plays. Among her extensive media music credits are most recently the score to WGN hit TV series Underground, Steven Spielberg's Emmy-winning 20-hour miniseries Taken, PBS's acclaimed series The Living Edens, for which she received nine Emmy nominations, a collaboration with Raphael Saadiq scoring the musical film Black Nativity for Fox Searchlight, plus numerous films, television programs and video games, including music for Halo 3 and her award-winning score for Everquest II. Karpman received an Annie Award nomination for "A Monkey's Tale," a short film commissioned by the Chinese government, the score later received its US premiere by the Detroit Symphony.

Karpman has received an Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and several ASCAP Foundation and Meet the Composer Grants, residencies at Tanglewood, where she studied with John Harbison, and The MacDowell Colony. Karpman was among the first composers selected as a Sundance Institute Film Scoring Fellow, where she worked with Dave Grusin, Robert Redford, and David Raksin. She attended the Aspen Music School and spent a life-changing summer studying with the legendary Nadia Boulanger at Ecoles d'Art Américaines de Fontainebleau. She received her Bachelor of Music from the University of Michigan, where she studied with William Bolcom and Leslie Bassett, and received both her Master’s and Doctoral degrees at The Juilliard School where she studied with Milton Babbitt, composing and studying the complexities of concert music by day, while playing jazz and scat singing in Manhattan clubs by night.

A member of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, she is currently a professor at USC Thornton, and has taught at UCLA, ran the first master’s degree film-scoring program at Berklee College of Music’s campus in Valencia, Spain, and has appeared as Guest Composer/Lecturer at the Juilliard School, San Francisco Conservatory, Mills College, Emerson College, and many others. She is founder and President of the Alliance for Women Film Composers, an advisor at the Sundance Institute, serves on the Music Peer Group Executive Committee of The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, and was recently elected Governor of the Music Branch of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Photo: Histeria Producciones

PRESS

NEW YORK TIMES “Ms. Karpman’s music [in ASK YOUR MAMA], melding Ivesian collage with club-culture remixing, morphed from one vivid section to the next in a dream-like flow, with repeated phrases and motifs lending a strand of continuity. The audience thundered its approval.”

SAN FRANCISCO CLASSICAL VOICE “The night belonged to Karpman [for her piece Hidden World of Girls], who’s brilliant underscoring showed her cinematic chops through and through. Karpman is a true craftswoman, whose sensibilities in, and understanding of, multimedia served to uncover new emotional dimensions. Her compositions were bold and self-assured.”

VARIETY “…imaginative, colorful, and often surprisingly varied music.”

VANITY FAIR “[ASK YOUR MAMA] is fevered, restrained, super-lush in turns…always impressive.”

LOS ANGELES TIMES “Laura Karpman's "Waxing Nostalgic" for viola, guitar and electronics was fascinating churning of historic scratchy Edison wax cylinders made by a historical local figure, Charles Lummis, into snappy Latin rhythms.”

SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS “We just listened and marveled.”

GRAMOPHONE "Karpman has developed the skill to shift musical gears with ease"

SMITHSONIAN.COM “[In ASK YOUR MAMA] words take flight, soaring to the rafters...both funny and prescient...playful and serious all at once.”

THE NEW YORKER “Carnegie Hall...reaches a climax with Laura Karpman’s new work [ASK YOUR MAMA]”

LOS ANGELES TIMES “Hidden Girls" could become a work worth wide exposure.”

COVERS MAGAZINE “[ASK YOUR MAMA]....one of the most compelling pieces to rile ears this side of the twentieth century.”

NEW MUSIC BOX “[In Rounds for viola and piano] the music was so visual that a film could have been made as accompaniment to the score.”

OUT MAGAZINE “A pioneer.”

THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER "[Karpman] has got some real chops.”

Cabrillo Festival's 50th anniversary By Joshua Kosman | Published 2:17 pm, Wednesday, July 25, 2012

No one ever accused Marin Alsop or the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music of thinking small. So as the festival's 50th anniversary season came into view, they decided to commission a big multimedia extravaganza to mark the event.

The result, which has its world premiere this weekend during the festival's opening program, is "Hidden World of Girls: Stories for Orchestra," a musical and audio exploration of female lives from around the world. The 90-minute piece is based on the popular radio series created for NPR by Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, the producing team known as the Kitchen Sisters, with music by four composers led by Laura Karpman.

"The original idea was to try to figure how these stories could be adapted to work as an evening's entertainment," Karpman said during a recent phone interview. "The Kitchen Sisters have these fantastic stories, but they're finished pieces. The question was how to keep what they do intact, and still bring that work into the context of a symphonic culture."

The solution was to assemble a collection of radio stories and stand-alone orchestral pieces, stitched together communally after the manner of a quilting bee. Karpman, who has extensive experience writing music for film and television, wrote new orchestral scores for 10 of the existing radio segments, designed to be performed live.

Then she and Alsop tagged three younger female composers - Alexandra du Bois, Clarice Assad and Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum - to write orchestral pieces in response to a particular story of their own choosing.

"The idea was for them to each write a piece that was kind of programmatic, but not really," says Karpman. "We decided we wanted to give them an opportunity to respond musically to these stories, without taking on the burden of a traditional storytelling underscore."

The music that emerged spans the globe, from the Iranian desert conjured up in du Bois' "Beneath Boundaries" to the mass graves of El Mozote, El Salvador, treated in Assad's "The Disappeared." Kroll-Rosenbaum's "Double Adventures" takes listeners into the expanses of outer space.

Karpman's contribution, "Portraits for Orchestra and Samples," found its inspiration from photographs taken in the prisons of Louisiana by Deborah Luster.

"She takes these amazing photographs that are like frozen moments in time. They're choreographed by the prisoners themselves - dressing up and showing themselves with chosen objects - and they're always the opposite of what you'd expect. The project is just drenched in humanity."

Karpman, 53, has pursued a multifold career for years, ever since graduating from the Juilliard School in New York. She's won four Emmys for her scores for the PBS series "The Living Edens," and been nominated for her work on the science fiction series "Odyssey 5." She's written music for video games and political campaigns.

But she's also been an active composer of concert music - most recently "Ask Your Mama," a large orchestral setting of Langston Hughes' poetry premiered in 2009 by soprano Jessye Norman. Future plans include a number of film documentaries and an opera based on the 1973 Battle of the Sexes tennis showdown between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs.

"Hidden World," she says, drew on her various compositional skills in a new way.

"This piece called on me to wear both my hats, as both a film composer and a composer of concert music. That doesn't mean I changed the way I write music - I didn't.

"But the function of music changes, and that's important. In TV or film, it's secondary; it's the background. But in symphonic music, it's the whole thing. To go from one to another is no big thing, but to have to do both in the same evening - that I've never done before."

Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music: 8 p.m. Saturday, 1 and 8 p.m. Sunday. Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium, 307 Church St., Santa Cruz. $30-$50. (831) 426-6966. www.cabrillomusic.org.

Alliance for Women Film Composers Head Leads By Example Jon Burlingame @jonburlingame

For film and TV composer Laura Karpman, versatility isn’t merely about alternating between comedy and drama. Her landmark concert work “Ask Your Mama,” based on poetry by Harlem Renaissance figure Langston Hughes, is just out on CD. Her multimedia piece “Siren Songs,” a symphonic tone poem about the relationship between women and the oceans, was unveiled last month by the Pacific Symphony.

She is just starting work on “Underground,” WGN’s new series about the Underground Railroad starring Christopher Meloni, and on a children’s opera based on Oscar Wilde stories for New York’s prestigious Glimmerglass Festival for next year. And she’s founder and president of the Alliance of Women Film Composers, which is helping to promote her fellow female composers by calling widespread attention to their work in films, TV and video games.

“I live a beautiful life of daily musicmaking,” she says in her compact, efficient studio just steps from the beach. “It is not genre-specific. Today it’s working on a choral piece for the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, plus finishing up some jazz cues for (PBS’) ‘Craft in America.’ Then doing another documentary for the Jewish Film Festival and a theater piece with a fabulous Chinese artist named Sa Dingding.”

Karpman is a four-time Emmy winner with nearly 100 credits, mostly in TV. But in the past decade she’s also scored several videogames (“EverQuest,” “Kung Fu Panda 2”) and features (“Black Nativity”) while maintaining an ongoing career of concert commissions and theater pieces.

Last year’s creation of the Alliance of Women Film Composers, however, has placed her in a leadership role. Just two months ago, she was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Women songwriters have long been in the music branch, but rarely if ever has a femme film composer been tapped. (Acad membership rolls are secret.) Karpman’s female colleagues aren’t exactly an endangered species — they range from the established (Rachel Portman) to the experimental New Guard (Mica Levi) — but compared to their male counterparts, they are very much under the radar.

“Laura is a bold, strong and fearless advocate,” says Emmy-winning composer Lolita Ritmanis. “Her tenacity as president of the Alliance has led to several victories this year, including opening doors that in the past were closed, most often due to lack of awareness that this talent poolof exceptional women composers even exists.”

Karpman has always moved in several directions at once. “It may just be who I am,” she says. “You never know where things will lead you in a career.” Case in point: “Ask Your Mama” combines jazz, classical, blues, gospel, hip-hop and more, earning raves after its 2009 Carnegie Hall debut with Jessye Norman and the Roots. “You want to be able to deliver a satisfying experience to all kinds of people,” Karpman says. “You want an orchestra subscriber of 20, 30 or 40 years to enjoy a symphonic concert, but you also want to engage a younger audience who is used to, and expects, a richer multi-media experience.”

“Ask Your Mama” led to her collaboration with Raphael Saadiq on the 2013 musical film “Black Nativity” (and now also on “Underground” also with Saadiq). “It’s surprising how working on ‘Ask Your Mama,’ and becoming so enmeshed in the history of America as told through the lens of the African- American experience, has influenced my commercial career,” she admits.

As for the Alliance for Women Film Composers, Karpman says it is about to launch a website with a roster and lists of credits; is planning a concert; and continue holding networking events, both public and private.

“There is sexism, a lack of information, a smell of exclusivity,” says Karpman. “We hear, all the time, ‘there are no women composers.’ We do exist and we do have credits.”

Grammy-Winning Composer Laura Karpman talks Undergound and Music as American History By Shannon M. Houston | March 9, 2016 | 3:56pm TV FEATURES

At Paste we’ve always been concerned with—and excited by—the relationship between music and television. We’ve celebrated the use of soundtrack and score in shows like Mad Men, The Sopranos and many others. But I can safely say that nothing has quite prepared us for the musical trip that WGN’s Underground will be taking us on, as it premieres tonight.

To say that Grammy Award-winning composer Laura Karpman had a difficult task in composing for the series, alongside Raphael Saadiq, would be an understatement. But to say that she accomplished a great feat would be an even bigger one. In a series that promises to offer endless twists, turns, complications and nuances, the music must somehow speak to the motivations of its characters, the 19th century setting, and—perhaps most importantly—the contemporary relevance of a slave narrative. Karpman and Saadiq worked together as co-composers to provide the musical backdrop, one of the most important elements and—according to creators Misha Green and Joe Pokaski—characters on the series. Paste caught up with Karpman to talk about her collaborative history with Saadiq, the cinematic stylings of the series, and how she believes Underground will change the way we talk about race in America today. (We strongly believe that too). Light spoilers follow.

Paste: I got to screen the first four episodes of the show, and one of the hardest things has been sitting around, and not being able to talk about it.

Karpman: Well, for me the show really begins in episode four, in a way. So wait till you see where it goes.

Paste: I can’t wait. Can you tell me a little about how you first got involved with the project, and what the beginning stages were like for you?

Karpman: It’s kind of an amazing story, because you never know what’s going to take you from one place to another place. I wrote this piece called Ask your Mama, which was the setting of an epic Langston Hughes poem and we got two Grammy Awards for it. Through a series of convoluted, wonderful things coming together, it lead to me scoring with Raphael Saadiq on Kasi Lemmons’ Black Nativity. And Raphael and I just really loved working together. I come from a very classical background, playing jazz and classical music. And Raphael comes from growing up in Oakland, playing in the church, and playing gospel and R&B music. So coming together was this great thing. I knew I wanted to continue to do stuff with him, so I basically pitched us to Sony. We met with the executive producers on the show, and then John Legend came aboard and that’s how the whole thing came together.

Paste: Once John got involved and you found yourself working with him, along with [creators] Misha Green and Joe Pokaski, what was the process like?

Karpman: The hardest part was finding the language for the show. There are lots of songs on the show, and there’s lots of score, but then there’s this middle ground of song-y/score pieces. That’s the thing we really hashed out with John, Misha and Joe—where we’d be using song, where we’d score, and where we’d be in this kind of intermediary world. Then it was a matter of just doing the work, and continuing to find that voice.

Paste: In the same way that the plot of the series is completely unpredictable, so is the music and the score. Because of the contemporary sound, I’m so curious to see how people will react. Was that something that you all talked about a lot?

Karpman: All of the time. But what you’ll notice if you go back and watch the episodes again is that there’s both—there’s actually a lot of classical scoring, which is really important. It’s not just about claiming space for everything, it’s a way of saying, “This is cinema.” One of the things about the show that’s so amazing, is that this is a story about black people and white people—and those in-between—and it’s also a thriller, and it’s a historical piece that resonates today. And musically we have to show all of that. So sometimes you feel that you’re very much in a period piece, and sometimes you feel like you’re relating to it with the contemporary music. But you’re also in a place where the two are really combined.

Paste: When you’re working on finding the voice and tone of the show, how might that also apply to specific characters?

Karpman: Well, Rosalee, for example, the very first thing you hear after “Black Skinhead” in episode one is Rosalee humming in the fields. We wanted to write something very lyrical for her, but I also wanted it to be relevant for the times. I have a book of slave songs, and so that was roughly based on a traditional song. And we use it over and over again, almost like what you would hear as a score cue— and then it twists and turns. And that opening is a good example, because you start out with these fiddly strings, and then you have Rosalee’s scene, and then it turns on its ear with Raphael doing a distorted bass line, and then there’s his breathing. It all sort of turns.

Paste: Was there a scene that was particularly difficult to work on, or one that stands out among the rest?

Karpman: That opening scene was one of them. That was one that we went back and forth with Joe and Misha about. One thing that came very easily, from that first episode, is the Rosalee whipping scene. There was a clear direction—we wanted it to be this pain that goes through your skin and to your bones. Another thing I can talk about without revealing too much, is episode seven. It’s the children’s episode. So we used contemporary versions of children’s songs. We hired a children’s choir, and that episode is heartbreaking. There were no licensed songs for that episode; it fell on Raphael and I to do those arrangements and record the children’s choir. That was a really beautiful music experience. Music was a driving force on the show, and it always was, from the conception. Misha and Joe wanted the music to be another character on the show, and it is. And that made it such a pleasure to work on Underground.

Paste: The timing of this show is so important, and I feel like it’s a series that almost requires you to feel strongly about it—one way or another. On a personal level, what are your hopes for the series when it premieres?

Karpman: First of all, what’s so amazing about the show is that these are richly drawn characters. It’s just good TV. Also, we have a multi-racial, multicultural team, and that’s reflected in every aspect of the show. We have a woman composer—and that’s rare in Hollywood. And we have an African-American composer—an even bigger rarity in Hollywood. Misha’s African-American, Joe is white, and we had all these different perspectives in the room all of the time. That’s the world that we want to live in. I hope the reaction will be, “This is our history. This is why we are talking about this, still.” We are still talking about race in America, because it is in the fiber of our being as Americans. It doesn’t matter if your family came over in the 20th century, it’s in the fabric of who we are as a country. Until we really look at it—and look at it the way Underground does—in this richly drawn landscape of good and bad, and people in the middle—black and white—then we can’t even begin to have this conversation. And American Crime is a show that does similar things, though it’s a contemporary setting. I love American history, I’m passionate about it and I’m passionate about American musical history—because I think music tells the story of American history. If you look at the songs of Stephen Foster—he’s considered the first American songwriter—he wrote during the Civil War, you can see the whole landscape of America! You’ve got minstrel songs, patriotic songs, love songs, and the lyrics can make you very uncomfortable—especially the minstrel stuff. But it is our history. And it’s okay to look at it and say, these are exciting stories. And it’s okay to ask, “How is this manifesting itself in 21st century America?” And how can we change that? I think this show is one of the ways that we can. Because if Shonda Rhimes creates a post-racial society, where in some ways, we’re ten years in the future and we’ve gone beyond this, then Underground says, look at this! So what [Misha and Joe] have done is groundbreaking, and I’m just honored to be part of it. And I know Raphael is too.

Paste: I’m so excited for the premiere, and for the whole season. Thanks so much for this!

Karpman: Thank you.

For more information:

laurakarpman.com

Booking and media inquiries:

Dworkin & Company Elizabeth Dworkin, [email protected] Allison Weissman, [email protected] 914-244-3803 dworkincompany.com