"Vivek's artistic vision is striking, cinematic, and beautiful..."
-Tom Karsch, Turner Entertainment
Vivek Maddala is an international award-winning composer and multi-instrumental performer. His music blends melodic symphony writing with syncopated jazz idioms and ethnic textures--from 19th-Century Romanticism to Afro-Cuban, modern rock to French Impressionism--resulting in an emotive frenzy of percussion, brass, woodwinds, and strings.
In 2000, at the age of 26, Vivek won the first Grand Prize in the national Young Film Composers Competition and he was invited to study in the prestigious ASCAP Film Scoring program two years later. In July of 2002, Vivek was one of five composers featured in TCM’s Tribute to Great American Composers. In October of 2006, Vivek served as the guest conductor for the Third Angle New Music Ensemble, performing his work as part of their 2006-2007 concert season.
Vivek’s film scoring background has been diverse: over the past six years, he has composed and orchestrated several acclaimed music scores for Turner Classic Movies, ranging from his 74-minute dramatic Ace of Hearts (2000) score, to his 90-minute lush score for the Greta Garbo film, The Mysterious Lady (2002); he composed the anthemic score for The Flag (2002), and the 80-minute orchestral score for the Marion Davies comedy, The Patsy (2004); recently, Vivek began scoring the restoration of Alfred Hitchcock’s, The Ring, and in late 2006 he completed a new 90-minute orchestral score for the suspense-thriller Wild Oranges.
Independent films have become a primary medium for Vivek’s music: he composed the Indian-influenced rock score for Equation (2002); the jazz-infused romantic score for Martha's Bakery (2003); and a unique brand of Carnatic Indian music for Gidoo's Cosmic Crisis (2005). In the past two years, Vivek completed scores for Omar & Fiona (2005), Moon Chasing (2005), Mother (2005), Portland at Play(2006), Catch Up (2006), Grasshopper (2006), Walking Tall (2007), They Turned Our Desert Into Fire (2007), and Whispers from Poland (2007)--all containing Vivek’s signature sound. In addition to film work, Vivek has written music for national TV spots as well as songs for pop/rock and jazz-fusion CD releases. Further, his music has been featured in news stories by NPR, the Associated Press, CNN, Variety, and Entertainment Tonight.
When scoring films, Vivek goes beyond the primary functions of movie music--i.e., of supplementing and strengthening the visual and emotional components. He speaks with his own personal style, his own musical voice. He supplies a product that is not just background music, but that characterizes and frames the pictures--above all, serving the dramatic vision of the director. Elegant musical motifs, careful orchestration, and a wealth of instrumentation all combine to give Vivek's music a distinctive flavor that moves gracefully between tradition and innovation; with equal parts euphoria and introspection; frantic while elegant; drunken yet precise; and utterly human.
You can find entire scores of Vivek's music, both audio CDs and DVD videos, at the Maddala Music web site.
