Film Composer - Mason Daring tells the story of how he met author and movie director John Sayles and started composing music for his films.
A Separate Peace - Daring says the actual composing for film starts with 'spotting,' or going through the film with the director, such as Peter Yates for A Separate Peace.
Opposite Of Sex - For The Opposite Of Sex, Mason Daring talks about writing for a humorous film with a sophisticated main character.
Lone Star - Mason Daring describes two pieces he wrote for Lone Star, entitled "Paper Trail" and "Sam and Pilar."
First person accounts from some
of 1999's Best Original Score hopefuls
Music of the Heart: "We did all the scenes at Carnegie Hall on a three-day shoot with legendary violinists Mark O'Connor, Issac Stern and Itzhak Perlman and 4,000 extras. It was my privilege to record them for the Bach Double, which is the finale...
Though most film composers are keyboard players with classical backgrounds, occasionally an intrepid guitarist finds success writing scores. James Rotondi spoke with Mason Daring about what it takes.
Lost Issue: Mason Daring Interview
Mason Daring's nearly 20 years as a professional composer have yielded truly diverse credits. He is in the enviable position of being the composer of choice for one of America's premiere filmmakers, the independent writer/director John Sayles. For Sayles, he most recently scored Lone Star, whose screenplay is nominated for an Oscar this year. His other recent feature credits are the Disney release Prefontaine and the thriller Cold Around the Heart...
Anyone who knows the films of John Sayles will have heard a lot of Mason Daring's music, though perhaps without realising it. This isn't because Daring's scores are colourless or undistinguished - quite the reverse, indeed. But as a composer, he displays the chameleon ability to feel his way into an amazingly wide range of musical idioms, adopting their stylistic qualities with uncanny fluency...
Luna Kafé Interview: Mason Daring
Though Mason Daring's extensive work on almost forty films, including the Oscar-nominated Lone Star, TV's acclaimed miniseries From The Earth To The Moon and the highly anticipated The Opposite Of Sex, would make anyone think of him as a cinematic veteran, not a ripple of recognition floats through the crowd at a Boston-area cafe on a particularly busy night. Indeed, the role he plays in film is not that of weather-beaten leading man, but in a role behind the camera you're supposed to notice only as you would notice underlined text. His particular talent is that of music, helping compose and select the music that best fleshes out the action on screen.
Overlooking the Atlantic shoreline in picturesque Marblehead, Massachusetts, Mason Daring's project studio couldn't be more visually stimulating on the outside. The guts deliver an eyeful as well.