Our 2023 Annual Report turns its attention to the world of film with the announcement that Ludwig Göransson is our Composer of the Year. Keep it locked here as our annual report continues throughout the month as we highlight the best music, film, and TV of the year. See it all here.
Listen to Ludwig Göransson’s Oppenheimer (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) via Apple Music.
In the world of film, most composers start work on a project during the post-production phase. But when Christopher Nolan began shooting 2023’s Oppenheimer, Consequence Composer of the Year Ludwig Göransson had already composed two or three hours of music for the film.
That didn’t mean his job was done, though. Far from it, in fact. “When he was shooting scenes, sometimes I’d get an email or a phone call from Chris and it’s like, ‘Hey, we’re shooting the scene now, and I noticed that this piece of music that we talked about for this theme ends with the down note. Can we end it on a more heightened positive ending, or add a couple more minutes?'” Göransson tells Consequence.
It was all part of the long process towards making one of the year’s most compelling film scores, a violin-driven ode to scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), whose greatest discovery would shake the world literally and figuratively. Nolan, a famously detail-driven director, worked intimately with Göransson on the music beginning early in the process, because as Göransson says, “He is constantly thinking about the music when he is shooting. It’s playing in his head.”
Göransson’s road to Oppenheimer might not begin where you’d expect: His first professional job as a composer was the cult favorite TV comedy Community. Working on a show famous for its experiments with genre meant that not only was he able to record with a full orchestra — something that “was out of the norm for a lot of sitcoms, a lot of TV show music,” he says — but “it was almost like being a student, and my teachers were Dan Harmon and Joe Russo. Dan would have these very in-depth realizations and bring up music from different movies — a lot of very in-depth musical references that I had never heard about.”
His rising profile from Community helped Göransson expand his connections with music supervisors, music editors, and showrunners, eventually leading to work on shows like Happy Endings and New Girl. However, while Göransson was making strides as a TV composer, moving into film was a challenge: “If the show creators were going to go on to make a big film or something, they would hire a film composer, not a TV composer.”
