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When it comes to soundtracks, it's Alfred Newman who comes to mind with this surname, widespread in the United States and linked in Hollywood with the name of a prestigious family of musicians. Thomas is Newman's youngest son, born of marriage to his third wife, Martha Montgomery Newman. His younger brother, David, is also a famous composer, and his sister Maria, a violin soloist, is also a composer in her spare time.

Alfred's reputation is well established, as an eminent composer of the "Golden Age", he is also musical director of major Hollywood firms. His brother Lionel Newman was a famous conductor (and composer) who, between the 50s and 70s, led the 20th Century Fox orchestra for John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith and Dominique Frontiere.) In the family chapter, his godchildren are Joey Newman and Randy Newman, well-known composer/singer of "Toy Story", "Cars" and "A Bug's Life".

Alfred or Al Newman, will be universally renowned for his sharp, vibrant lyricism, his musical panache and his mythical brassy, martial Twentieth Century Fox fanfare; he made the Click track process - created by Charles Dunworth - more flexible for orchestral recordings as early as 1934, a technique pioneered by Wilfred Jackson at Disney in the late 1920s, which enabled the composer during a recording session to conduct the orchestra and read his score without necessarily looking at the timer. Last but not least, his orchestration techniques still inspire many musicians today. Al Newman remains one of the great founders of the "Hollywood sound", a proud representative of a golden age that's long gone.

One of the last generation of film music creators, Thomas Newman is an American composer acclaimed for his sensitive melodies and unique, recognizable style, which oscillates between symphonic creations, refined new-age aesthetics and modern sound design. In the 80s and 90s, Newman brought about a revival with a strong, recognizable musical voice, offering a musical alternative to the great symphonic behemoths of John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith or Alan Silvestri. He is highly regarded for his modern scores, which are both minimalist and complex.

As we can see, Thomas Newman was immersed in an atmosphere where music was omnipresent from an early age; in the family, being a musician was a matter of course, although it wasn't necessarily Thomas's first wish. At the age of seven, he took piano and violin lessons, but didn't always feel at home with this instrument, and stopped after a few years, preferring the piano. As a teenager, Thomas is a child of the synthetic age, who finds it easy to assimilate the new musical directions offered by computers, playing electronic keyboards and becoming familiar with samplers and sequencers. His ability to dissociate technique from composition was a great help in his training.

Thomas was only 15 when his father Alfred died of emphysema. By his own admission, he unfortunately shared little with him and didn't see him play much, as he spent more time writing on scores than playing the piano.

At the dawn of the 70's, a period of great change in Hollywood, including in musical renewal (later called the "Silver Age"), Thomas saw his father's death as a shock. Having never before considered becoming a composer, it was partly this event that encouraged him to continue in this field, with the unconditional support of his mother, Martha (Montgomery), who encouraged him to pursue his musical training.

In 1973, again at his mother's instigation, Thomas entered the composition program at USC in Southern California for two years, studying with Frederick Lesemann and David Raksin. At the same time, on a more individual basis, he studied musical diversity and openness with George Tremblay, an eminent teacher who played a decisive role in the teaching of techniques associated with images. During this period, Thomas deepened his musical culture and, like many young students, developed a passion for 18th-century music, without neglecting the study of certain contemporary "sound explorers" of the 20th century. Thus, Newman claimed to be a follower of Charles Ives, Igor Stravinsky and Bernard Herrmann.

In 1978, without really having wanted to, he continued his training at Yale University, studying under Jacob Druckman (a pupil of Aaron Copland), Robert Moore and Bruce McCombie. However, the intellectual, haphazard and avant-garde musical orientation often imposed on him by Yale teaching did not enthuse him more than that, preferring tonal writing and accompaniment for the theater.

It was also during this period that he befriended the famous Broadway musical-hall figure Stephen Sondheim, his true mentor, with whom he staged the briefly successful musical "Three Mean Fairy Tales" in 1979.

At the age of 27, he graduated with a master's degree in composition and was ready to launch a promising career. Newman started out as keyboardist with a newwave band called "The innocents", then went on to play violin, flute and keyboards with the group Tokyo 77 in the '90s.

In 1983, John Williams, composer and friend of the Newman family, entrusted him with the orchestration of a key scene in Richard Marquant's film "Return of the Jedi" (Darth Vader's death passage). It was in 1984 that he really made a name for himself as a film music composer, following his synthetic composition for James Foley's film "Reckless", starring Aidan Quinn and Daryl Hannah, for which he was hired as a supervisor.
In the 80s electronic music movement, Thomas was offered "Real Genius", "Revenge of the Nerds", "Jumpin Jack Flash" or "The Man with one red shoe", "Desperately seeking Susan", minor scores from his debut, but which already testify to a certain mastery of synthetic atmospheres with a delicate, personal lyricism.

Less than Zero" (1987) will undoubtedly go down as one of the best scores of this period, and is still much appreciated by the composer's fans. The eighties period was brought to a close with the sympathetic score of "Cookie" (1989), a film starring the inimitable Peter Falk. Key scores from these years include "Desperately Seeking Susan", "Less Than Zero", "Cookie" and the particularly fairytale-like "Santa '85" episode of the TV series "Amazing Stories".
The following decade was marked by other fine scores, such as "Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael", "The Linguini Incident", "The Player", "Scent of a Woman", "Flesh and Bone", "Threesome", and so on. Newman was then regularly engaged on intimate dramas and dramatic comedies such as "Men Whose Leaves" and the very fine "Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael" and "Fried Green Tomatoes".

By the early 1990s, his work was gaining in character, and a highly recognizable style was rapidly emerging: Thomas Newman's distinctive style became easily identifiable. The composer regularly plays with a blend of American classicism in his symphonic writing, minimalism in the playing of solo instruments and the electronic touches that are so dear to him. Harmonically, Thomas Newman's style oscillates between classicism and avant-gardism, between tradition and modernity.

Thomas is well acquainted with his father's Hollywood work, and has a real admiration for certain classics such as those by Max Steiner, which he remembered when writing "Little Women" (by Gillian Armstrong) in 1994, which would become his "Gone with the Wind".

For this sumptuous, wonderfully performed film, Thomas composes a plethora of romantic and poetic themes in a display of lyrical savoir-faire that seems to stem directly from family tradition. This genuine masterstroke was to be repeated in the beautiful films "How to make an American Quilt" (1995), again with Winona Ryder, and "Oscar and Lucinda" (1997) by the same Gillian Armstrong. In the words of the latter:

"His work is full of atmospheres, tensions and layers like no other composer I know [...] Above all, he thinks about narrative, about how music can have subtle, unconscious meanings."

In the 90s, Thomas Newman would also offer us some of his great classics such as the poignant "The Shawshank Redemption" (1994) or the memorable "Little Women" (1994), and "The Horse Whisperer" (1998) without forgetting the intimist "Oscar and Lucinda" and "Meet Joe Black" (1998) with their poignant romantic lyricism. Another highlight was "American Beauty" (1999), which marked the beginning of Thomas Newman's collaboration with director Sam Mendes. Newman concluded the decade with Frank Darabont's monumental "The Green Mile" (1999), extending the style he had begun a few years earlier with "The Shawshank Redemption", notably in his highly recognizable, minimalist orchestral writing.

In the 2000s, Newman's career took a turn for the more dramatic and diversified: films such as "Erin Brockovich" (2000), "Pay it Forward" (2000), the deeply moving "Road to Perdition" (2002), "Cinderella Man" (2005) and "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events" (2004), a score brimming with whimsical ideas, plus a score of his own, Steven Soderbergh's "The Good German" (2006), a film in which Newman outright pastiche the Hollywood Golden Age, paying homage to some of his past masters (including Max Steiner and Korngold, as well as his father Al Newman). Other films by Sam Mendes include "Jarhead" (2005) and "Revolutionary Road" (2008).

With "Finding Nemo" in 2003, Thomas Newman showed a sudden interest in cartoon music, a genre as yet unheard of in his filmography if we exclude WALL-E in 2008, which proves to be a lighter, more playful and whimsical score; in "Finding Nemo", Newman also tries his hand at Hollywood action music, something rather exceptional given that the musician has always shown a real disinterest in this subject. With a few exceptions, Thomas Newman hardly ever opens his films with fanfare, preferring discreet, intimate entrances so that the music gently emerges in the film.

On this subject:

"There are many ways to enter the film, and everything can be subject to inspiration," he confides.

Thanks to his collaboration with Franck Darabont and Martin Brest, Thomas is accustomed to the sentimental and intimate register, but his collaboration with Sam Mendes on the film "American Beauty" in 1999 offered him the opportunity to compose in a very personal and once again minimalist register.

The arrival of Mendes in the James Bond 007 franchise in 2012 enabled Thomas Newman to tackle the music for the 22nd opus in the saga: "Skyfall".

While it seemed unlikely that such a musician would be involved in the music of a James Bond film, his score is astonishing, confirming the composer's ability to produce hard-hitting, suspenseful action music. However, he manages to retain his own musical style, while adding the inevitable "bondesque" touches and modern sound design, while occasionally taking a cue from David Arnold in the style of "Casino Royale" or "Quantum of Solace" (musical continuity oblige!). "Skyfall" is a taut, fun, modern score that shakes up the rather intimate world of his work, and he seems ever ready to venture into ever more diverse areas of musical expression.

Newman reunites with Sam Mendes for "Spectre" (2015), the next Bond, which renews the approach by including trendy but fatally more impersonal electronic percussion. Newman's approach on "Spectre" varies little from that of "Skyfall"; let's just say it's complementary and in the same spirit, so there are no surprises on the horizon.

In 2019, Sam Mendes takes Thomas Newman to the trenches of the war film with "1917". The composer's approach to the theme is not without a certain sonic counterpoint, with powerful symphonic passages and modern sound design provoking significant but assumed anachronisms.

It's a far cry from the usual martial music for this kind of film, but the musician often has the intelligence to let his deep intuitions dictate what will be musically right for the film. So, whether he's appreciated or not, Thomas Newman is often willing to take risks that lead him to write things that are surprising, original and different from what we're used to hearing in cinema.

His original approach to timbre is a major characteristic of his style. His particular atmospheres of musical tension, his spellbinding layers of sound, his distinctive minimalism and his taste for the purity of solo instruments are quite unique in the world of film music.

Newman's cerebral approach to setting a film to music may not suit all ears, but his sensitive lyricism hooks and marks the film in a concrete way, sometimes making it unforgettable (we all remember those heartbreakingly melancholy piano notes in the finale of "Road to Perdition" that seem lost in eternity).

For a director, collaborating with a composer such as Thomas Newman means choosing a unique and highly identifiable style, and the assurance of obtaining original music that adheres perfectly to the images.

The son of an immense composer who brought excellence to Hollywood, he seems to be both a worthy successor and an innovative composer, quite representative of his era. Although often destabilizing in their original approach and technique, his latest works for the big screen are remarkable in many respects. Thomas Newman progressed in the cinema in the manner of his father, faithful to a particular style between tradition and modernity, while following a musical continuum punctuated by remarkable coups d'éclats.

A unique composer with a vast musical culture, Newman is also an inexhaustible source of ideas, and his most recent compositions demonstrate more than ever that the musician is capable of writing anything and everything with a constant passion that is constantly renewed; witness the tense, mysterious atmosphere of "The Debt" (2011), which turns out to be quite a complex score, or the dynamism, action and freshness of "The Adjustement Bureau" (2010). The gripping musical tension of "The Iron Lady" is followed in 2017 by the excellent "Victoria & Abdul", a luminous score with rich ethnic sounds. Tolkien" in 2019, a score with almost mystical overtones, is undoubtedly one of his finest achievements.

In 2021, he composed the highly atmospheric "Operation Mincemeat", an intelligent score that wonderfully reflects military strategy, followed by a fun, social score for "A Man Called Otto" (2022) and "Dog" (2022), a fresh piece of music that remains unreleased to this day.

More recently, Newman composed the music for "Elementary" (2023) for Pixar/Disney Studios, a score that is both traditional and experimental, a kind of dynamic, inventive musical melting pot that reflects a passionate composer happy to have the opportunity to freely express his musical ideas.

Newman has also composed for TV series such as the mini-series "Angels in America" (2003), which earned him a Grammy Award nomination in 2005; in 2001, he wrote the theme for Alan Ball's series "Six Feet Under" (Grammy Award 2003) and then the mystery theme for the series "Castle Rock" in 2018.

Thomas Newman is a key composer in Hollywood, having been nominated for numerous Academy Awards without yet winning the prestigious statuette, yet he remains one of the most talented and appreciated musicians in American cinema today.

Thomas Newman has also completed several commissions for concert works, including "Reach Forth Our Hands" for the Cleveland Bicentennial in 1996, a "Concerto for double bass and orchestra" commissioned by the Pittsburgh Symphony in 2001, "It Got Dark", commissioned by the Kronos Quartet in 2009, and another commission by the Los Angeles Philharmonic for a version of "It Got Dark" adapted for string quartet and orchestra.

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