Siddhartha Khosla (‘Only Murders in the Building’ composer) on ‘going down the rabbit hole’ to find the music of ‘The White Room’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
“There was still so much mystery and tension, and I found myself scoring more than I ever scored before in the show with all the new characters,” reveals Siddhartha Khosla. The Emmy-nominated composer returned for Season 3 of “Only Murders in the Building” to expand the sonic identity of Hulu’s comedic murder mystery. “On a show like this, we don’t have tons of time, so we get the cuts, score them, they’re in,” remarks Khosla, “And especially since the score is sort of baked into the identity of the show, the themes and the ideas have to be there sort of early on.” Watch the exclusive video interview above.
“I’m a singer songwriter before I was ever a composer for TV and film. So I think of everything like these little songs,” says Khosla of his approach to composing. He constructs a theme for each character, complete with a musical “hook” which helps define their presence on screen.
One of the many new characters the composer had to construct themes for was Loretta, the Broadway actress portrayed by Meryl Streep. “For Loretta, there was a sadness to her character,” he explains. When it came time to match Streep’s performance with an instrument, Khosla could only hear a French Horn playing in his head, which he used to bring life to Loretta’s theme. “It felt elegant, sophisticated, beautiful, classic and emotive,” he says.
Khosla usually hears specific instruments in his mind as he is writing his score, which makes him extra grateful to be able to work with a full orchestra on “Only Murders in the Building.” He believes that the large group of musicians helps to reflect that fabric of The Arconia, the New York apartment building at the heart of the series. “There’s a history, it’s a pre-war building. It’s a deep history. And so a chamber ensemble orchestra felt sort of appropriate,” he describes. “There’s sort of like an expectation that composers can make any sounds they need to make from the little keyboards we’ve got, and it’s going to be great. And it’s just not the case. When you have live players, it changes everything.”
In Season 3, the memorable “White Room” sequences whisk one character away from his usual musical themes. Charles-Haden Savage (Steve Martin) finds himself in this blank mental space whenever he makes an attempt to sing the diabolical tongue twister, “Which of the Pickwick Triplets Did It?” Martin appeared so disheveled after the comedic moment that Khosla admits “we had to transport you so far outside the show, it couldn’t sound like anything that you’d ever heard on the show. And it was this very sort of weird psychedelic in a way sort of space he entered in.” Showrunner John Hoffman pushed the composer to experiment with the sound. So Khosla made many passes for the score, incorporating everything from drums, to lip-smacking “raspberries,” to the “boing” of a coiled doorstop.
Khosla admits that the score for “Only Murders in the Building” feels second nature to him at this point, and he can normally whip up appropriate music on the spot. So the White Room provided a thrilling challenge of experimentation. “I had to stretch, I had to think way outside. And so it was very new to the show,” he reveals, “And sometimes the best stuff comes from your 10th pass. And so I’m all for going down that rabbit hole.”
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