Composer Christopher Young has been presented with the 2023 International Film Music Critics Association Awards for Composer of the Year, Composition of the Year, and Best Original Score for a Horror/Thriller Film, by IFMCA member Jon Broxton. Young’s wins were for his score for The Piper, a music-themed horror film directed by Erlingur Óttar Thoroddsen and starring Charlotte Hope and the late Julian Sands.
The other nominees in Composer of the Year category were Lorne Balfe, Laura Karpman, Bear McCreary, and John Williams. The other nominees in Composition of the Year category were “Can You Hear the Music?” from Oppenheimer by Ludwig Göransson, “Found” from Society of the Snow by Michael Giacchino, “Helena’s Theme” from Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny by John Williams, and “Leaving Spacedock” from Star Trek: Picard by Stephen Barton and Frederik Wiedmann. The other nominees in Horror/Thriller category were A Haunting in Venice by Hildur Guđnadóttir, The Last Voyage of the Demeter by Bear McCreary, M3GAN by Anthony Willis, and The Nun II by Marco Beltrami.
Young was also presented with the Kyle Renick Special Award in recognition of his new score for the classic 1922 German expressionist horror film Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie Des Grauens directed by F. W. Murnau. The award is named in honor of Kyle Renick, the film music journalist and theater producer from New York who was a member of the IFMCA until his death in 2019. Young was commissioned to write a new score by the Europäische FilmPhilharmonie to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the film, and it had its world premiere performance in February 2023 at the Tonhalle in Zürich, Switzerland, conducted by Frank Strobel. The score is utterly spellbinding, with those who attended the performance commenting that it was a “horror masterpiece” that ranks among the greatest scores of his entire career.
Young wrote a huge Gothic horror score for the full orchestra and various specialty instruments, most notably a pipe organ, which adds a significant religioso element to the work as a whole, while also offering a throwback to the way silent films were accompanied back in the 1910s and 20s. The work is anchored by a dark main theme for strings that drips with brooding romance. Rampaging action sequences enhance the threat posed by the evil vampire at the core of the story, and moments of extreme dissonance enhance the horror. In a career that has overflowed with outstanding work in the horror genre the IFMCA felt that Nosferatu was worthy of special recognition as one of the great works of contemporary horror scoring.
These are the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth IFMCA wins of Young’s career; his previous wins were for Urban Legend in 1998, two for Drag Me to Hell in 2009, The Rum Diary in 2012, The Monkey King in 2015, and The Monkey King 2 in 2017. This is Young’s first win for Composer of the Year; he was previously nominated in 2000 and 2009.
Young was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, in April 1958. He graduated from Hampshire College in Massachusetts with a Bachelor of Arts in music, and then completed his post-graduate work at North Texas State University, where he was a jazz drummer. Young resolved to be a film composer while still a teenager, after being exposed to Bernard Herrmann’s scores for Alfred Hitchcock films; to pursue this dream, he moved to Los Angeles in 1980, where he studied at the UCLA Film School under famed film composer David Raksin. Having made contacts at UCLA, Young made his film music debut in 1982, aged 24, working on the low-budget horror film Pranks (also known as The Dorm That Dripped Blood) for his classmate, director Steve Carpenter.
Following the releases of A Nightmare on Elm Street Part II: Freddy’s Revenge in 1986, and Hellraiser in 1987, Young quickly became well-known as a composer of popular horror and thriller films: during the 1980s and 1990s, Young scored such successful genre films as The Fly II (1988), Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988), Jennifer 8 (1992), Copycat (1995), Species (1995) and Urban Legend (1998), while also scoring box office successes in other genres, notably the powerful courtroom drama Murder in the First (1995), the political thriller Murder at 1600 (1997), the gambling drama Rounders (1998), the action thriller Entrapment (1999), and the moving boxing-themed racial biopic The Hurricane in 1999.
Since the turn of the millennium, Young’s career has gone from strength to strength, allowing him to embrace music in multiple different arenas, ranging from jazz and blues, to comedy, modern symphonic action scoring, as well as his famed and popular horror music style. His most commercially successful projects since then have included Swordfish (2001), The Grudge (2004), The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), Ghost Rider (2007), Spider-Man 3 (2007) and Tyler Perry’s A Madea Family Christmas (2013), as well as fan favorites such as Bless the Child (2000), The Core (2003), and Priest (2011).
Young has been nominated for a Golden Globe, for The Shipping News in 2000, and two Emmy Awards, for the dramas Last Flight Out in 1990, and Norma Jean and Marilyn in 1996. He was honored with the prestigious Richard Kirk Award at the 2008 BMI Film and TV Awards, which is given annually to a composer who has made significant contributions to film and television music. A dedicated mentor, Young has taught classes at USC, served as an advisor for the Sundance Institute’s Film Composers Lab, was a two-term president of The Film Music Society, acted as the president of the Madrid Film Music Festival in Spain, and created an innovative residential development to house aspiring composers in Los Angeles.
Regarding The Piper, IFMCA member Jon Broxton stated that the score was “sensational… an encapsulation of everything that has ever made Young’s music great… a huge Gothic horror score for the full orchestra, choir, and various specialty instruments which is endlessly creative, compositionally and intellectually, and as well as being scary and chilling, also packs an emotional punch.” Likewise, IFMCA member Conrado Xalabarder described the score as “a powerful creation with symphonic and choral music for adults and children… it is deceptively innocent, it is macabre and insane, it causes madness and death… another of Christopher Young’s dazzling creations”.
See below for the acceptance speech and video interview conducted by Broxton:
Click on the thumbnails for larger photo images:
With special thanks to Jason Kutchma, Erik Woods, Holly Broxton, and Peter Hackman of Different Direction Management.