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Michael Price

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Michael Price is an English composer and pianist. He is the son of physics and biology teachers and studied music on the Tonmeister course at Surrey University, where in 1990 he won the PRS composition prize. Before becoming a composer he worked in film and television music as a producer, arranger and music editor, much of it alongside the film composer Michael Kamen. His first film work was in 1996, when Kamen asked him to programme and orchestrate the electronic sounds for Event Horizon. This grew into a five-year collaboration, with concerts in Berlin, New York, San Francisco and Geneva.

Music and breakthrough

As a music editor he worked on The Lord of the Rings by Peter Jackson, Love Actually and Nanny McPhee, and in 2001 he won a Golden Reel Award for The Fellowship of the Ring. As a composer he wrote the music for thirty-one films and for television series such as Unforgotten. Together with David Arnold he composed the music for all thirteen episodes of the BBC series Sherlock, from 2010, and in 2015 for Jekyll and Hyde. He also wrote music for the documentaries The Possibility of Hope and The Shock Doctrine by Alfonso Cuarón.

Influence

His first work outside film was in 2012, a collection of string quartets, A Stillness, on Erased Tapes. The albums Entanglement in 2015, Diary in 2017, thirty improvisations for solo piano, and Tender Symmetry in 2018, recorded at seven National Trust locations, followed. In 2021 The Hope of Better Weather was released, with reworkings by, among others, Yann Tiersen. In this way he moved between the television studio and modern classical music.

Listening

Listening tip. Listen to a piece from Diary and notice the loose, free-flowing piano music: how can you hear that it is improvised, and which mood persists?

Discography

Studio albums

Categories: Artists