Daniel Robert “Danny” Elfman (born May 29, 1953) is an American composer, best known for scoring music for television and movies and leading the rock band Oingo Boingo as singer/songwriter from 1976 until its breakup in 1995. He is a frequent collaborator with long-time friend Tim Burton and has scored most of his films (the exceptions being Ed Wood and Sweeney Todd). He has been nominated for four Academy Awards and won a Grammy Award for Tim Burton’s Batman and an Emmy Award for his Desperate Housewives theme. Elfman was honored with the prestigious Richard Kirk award at the 2002 BMI Film and TV Awards. The award is given annually to a composer who has made significant contributions to film and television music. Elfman is famous for creating The Simpsons main title theme as well as the Batman theme, and his role as Jack Skellington’s singing voice in The Nightmare Before Christmas. He also sang for the character Bonejangles in the movie Corpse Bride. He is the uncle-in-law to actress Jenna Elfman.
Elfman was born in Los Angeles, California, the son of Blossom Elfman (née Bernstein), a writer and teacher, and Milton Elfman, a teacher who was in the Air Force. Elfman grew up in a racially mixed community in the Baldwin Hills area of Los Angeles. He spent much of his time in the local movie theatre, adoring the music of such film composers as Bernard Herrmann and Franz Waxman.
Stating that he hung out with the “band nerds” in high school, he started a ska band. After dropping out of high school, he followed his brother Richard to France, where he performed with Le Grand Magic Circus, an avant-garde musical theater group. Violin in tow, Elfman next journeyed to Africa where he traveled through Ghana, Mali, and Upper Volta, absorbing new musical styles, including the Ghanaian highlife genre which would eventually influence his own music.[citation needed] Elfman contracted malaria during his one-year stay and was often sick. Eventually he returned home to the United States, where he began to take Balinese music lessons at the CalArts. He was never officially a student at the institute, nonetheless, the instructor encouraged him to continue learning. Elfman stated, “He just laughed, and said, ‘Sit. Play.’ I continued to sit and play for a couple years.” At this time, his brother was forming a new musical theater group, The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo. The group performed the music for Richard’s debut feature film, Forbidden Zone. Danny Elfman composed his first score for the film and played the role of Satan. By the time the movie was completed, they had taken the name Oingo Boingo and begun recording and touring as a rock group.
In 1985, Tim Burton and Paul Reubens invited Elfman to write the score for their first feature film, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. Elfman was apprehensive at first because of his lack of formal training, but with orchestration assistance from Oingo Boingo guitarist and arranger Steve Bartek, he achieved his goal of emulating the mood of such composers as Nino Rota and Bernard Herrmann. In the booklet for the first volume of Music for a Darkened Theatre, Elfman described the first time he heard his music played by a full orchestra as one of the most thrilling experiences of his life. Elfman immediately developed a rapport with Burton and has gone on to score all but two of Burton’s major studio releases: Ed Wood, scored by Howard Shore, which was under production while Elfman and Burton were having a fight, and Sweeney Todd, an adaptation of the 1979 Stephen Sondheim Broadway musical. He also, more recently, accompanied Tim Burton in the composition of music for “Almost Alice”, the soundtrack for Alice in Wonderland.
Burton has said of his relationship with Elfman: “We don’t even have to talk about the music. We don’t even have to intellectualize – which is good for both of us, we’re both similar that way. We’re very lucky to connect” (Breskin, 1997).
He recalls that the first time he became aware of film music was in his youth during a screening of The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951). The music was by Bernard Herrmann, and that, he has said, was where his love of film music began (Russell and Young, 2000). Elfman purposefully nodded towards Herrmann’s The Day the Earth Stood Still score in Tim Burton’s science fiction spoof Mars Attacks!
Other film composers have also proven to be influential, such as Nino Rota and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, the former in Elfman’s playful music for Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, the latter in his much grander work, Batman. Sometimes his music has a distinctly Russian feel, inspired by the likes of Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky’s ballet music. Jazz and rock influences from his earlier career are evident in such films as Chicago and To Die For. Elfman also cited Philip Glass as a major influence in his score for Alice in Wonderland.
When asked during a 2007 phone-in interview on XETRA-FM if he ever had any notions of performing in an Oingo Boingo reunion, Elfman immediately rejected the idea and stated that in the last few years with the band he had begun to develop significant and irreversible hearing damage as a result of his continuous exposure to the high noise levels involved in performing in a rock band. He went on to say that he believes his hearing damage is partially due to a genetic predisposition to hearing loss, and that he will never return to the stage for fear of worsening not only his condition but also that of his band mates.
Elfman has recently started working in the classical world, beginning with Serenada Schizophrana for the American Composers Orchestra. It was conducted by John Mauceri on its recording and by Steven Sloane at its premiere at Carnegie Hall in New York City on February 23, 2005. After its premiere, it was recorded in studio and released onto SACD on October 3, 2006. The meeting with Mauceri proved fruitful as the composer was encouraged then to write a new concert piece for Mauceri and the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra. Elfman composed an “overture to a nonexistent musical” and called the piece “The Overeager Overture.” He also continues to compose his film scores in addition to these other projects.
In November 2010, it was reported that Danny Elfman is writing the music for a planned musical based on the life of Houdini.
Elfman has three children: Lola, born in 1979; Mali, born in 1984; and Oliver, born in 2005. On November 29, 2003, Elfman married film actress Bridget Fonda. In 1997 he scored A Simple Plan – his only score for one of her films to date (although he did compose a cue for the film Army of Darkness, in which Fonda has a cameo). He is the uncle of actor Bodhi Elfman who is married to actress Jenna Elfman, known most notably in her role as Dharma in the TV series Dharma and Greg. —Wikipedia
