Garth Neustadter, a composition student at the Yale School of Music, has been nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for his score for the PBS documentary John Muir in the New World.
Among other awards, Neustadter’s work has earned him a 2010 ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Award and first prize at the 2007 Turner Classic Movies Young Film Composers Competition, which resulted in a commission to compose an original score for a restoration of the 1923 silent film The White Sister starring Lillian Gish.
Garth Neustadter
According to a Yale School of Music press release announcing his Emmy nomination, Neustadter’s score for John Muir in the New World “was recorded at Yale with members of the Yale Philharmonia, the Yale Symphony Orchestra, and the Linden String Quartet.”
Neustadter studied violin and voice at the Lawrence University Conservatory of Music, from which he earned a bachelor of music degree in 2010, and, in 2012, will earn his master’s degree in composition from the Yale School of Music, where he studies with Christopher Theofanidis and serves as assistant director of the Yale Jazz Ensemble.
As an undergraduate, Neustadter said he did a lot of performing, as a violinist, vocalist, and saxophonist. He started writing for various jazz ensembles, but, at the time, “never really thought about writing film scores.” Then, a college professor got him interested in film music, and, around the same time, Neustadter saw an advertisement for the Turner Classic Movies Young Film Composers Competition.
Being commissioned to compose an original score for the restoration of The White Sister, he said, was like enrolling in a “film-scoring boot camp.” Composing more than two-and-a-half hours of music, Neustadter said, was an “intense process” and an “amazing opportunity.”
“You’re really responsible for telling all of the story with music,” Neustadter said about scoring The White Sister, a process he completed in 2008. “It’s almost like writing an opera of some sort.”
With John Muir in the New World, Neustadter said he wanted to heighten the effect different scenes had on audiences on “some sort of a subconscious level … so it all feels part of one experience.”
Winners of Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards, a category that includes nominees in the field of music, will be announced at a September 10 ceremony in Los Angeles.