Artist: Mychael Danna

Canadian-born Mychael Danna is recognized as one of the pioneers of combining non-Western music with orchestral and electronic elements in his film scores. Life of Pi marks his third collaboration with Ang Lee, having previously written the original music for The Ice Storm and Ride with the Devil.

Danna offers a strange experiment on this score to Atom Egoyan’s wistful and sinister film. He combines his familiar Celtic dirges, the nail-grating violins associated with Bartók, and some scattered traces of evil, backward-looping noises. Danna also (probably inadvertently) forges an under-explored link between New Age and the easy-listening style once referred to as “Beautiful Music.” Oddly, the most intriguing elements are the reverberant Mantovani-style strings, none of which is Danna’s own creation. He instead takes them directly from old and uncredited…

With a few notable exceptions, writer Stephen King’s horror works have more often than not been mangled by Hollywood. Oddly, it’s his gentler, more human side that’s prospered in films like Stand by Me, The Green Mile, and, more recently, Hearts in Atlantis. Underscoring director Scott Hicks’s subtly deft touch with Atlantis‘s coming-of-age tale, composer Mychael Danna has written music that seems to forge the best of Thomas Newman and Rachel Portman, fusing the former’s spare, dramatic use of space and musical longing with the…