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The Best Film Scores From The Groundbreaking Composer Rachel Portman

Musicnotes

• 4 min read
The Best Film Scores From The Groundbreaking Composer Rachel Portman

With a career that spans decades and a portfolio that includes some of the most popular films of all time, Rachel Portman has earned her place as a legendary and iconic composer. With a deft touch that can evoke the deepest emotions, Rachel Portman’s film scores have left an indelible mark on the cinematic landscape.

While Rachel Portman has composed scores for a diverse range of films, all of her work shares a common thread. She has the ability to connect with the audience on an emotional level. Portman's music touches the heart because it speaks the universal language of emotion and memory.

The Portman Style

Rachel Portman has a singular ability to portray character, mood, and emotion with her music. She often uses traditional orchestration in her work and writes her scores by hand. Her frequent use of melody and theme in her scores gives her work an emotional depth that has been sought after by numerous filmmakers over the years.

While Portman has been composing since the early 1980s and continues to create original music today, her sweeping orchestration made her the go-to composer of the character-driven romantic comedies and emotional dramas of the 1990s and early 2000s. You might be surprised to find out how many of your favorite films from these decades she is responsible for scoring.

Notable Rachel Portman Film Scores

Rachel Portman’s movies span a wide spectrum of styles and genres, but she is best known for her evocative and emotional scores for period dramas and romantic comedies. Her lyric compositions are often deceptively simple and flawlessly capture the emotions of characters and the mood of a scene.

Period Dramas

  • Emma (1996) - Rachel Portman became the first woman to win an Oscar for an original score with her work on this 1996 adaptation of Jane Austen's beloved classic. Portman relied on her classical background for the score of the film, which is rich with traditional orchestration using violins and woodwind instruments. Her score perfectly captures the romantic and mischievous nature of the main character.
  • The Duchess (2008) - While not one of her best-known works, the score for this period drama showcases Portman's amazing restraint as a composer. The score is rich but spare, reflecting the composer's stated belief that music is often used too extensively in film and that its absence is often as impactful as its presence.

Romantic Comedies

  • Chocolat (2000) - Portman's score for this whimsical and artistic romantic comedy garnered her a nomination for an Academy Award. It is a flirtatious and romantic orchestration that is filled with good-natured humor and subtle innuendo, much like the film itself. This is an instance in which the composer created a score that so perfectly matched the story it is hard to imagine one without the other.
  • Benny and June (1993) - Interspersed with a soundtrack of popular hits, Rachel Portman created a score for the film that captures the whimsical and magical qualities of the lead character. Her music is simultaneously fantastical, hopeful, and sorrowful.

Dramatic Films

  • Cider House Rules (1999) - The Rachel Portman score for this blockbuster film earned her another Academy Award nomination. Viewed by some to be her finest work, Portman's score for Cider House Rules is hauntingly beautiful and heartbreaking in its simplicity. It captures the loss of innocence and the tenaciousness of hope as the main characters reveal through memory the pain and the beauty of their past.
  • Beloved (1998) - This score was seen as a departure from the usual style of Rachel Portman film scores, mostly from those who expected the classical orchestration that the composer is known for. In fact, the score was true to form; Portman embraced the mood of the story and created a score to match it. This is not an easy story to watch, and Portman's score respects the difficult nature of the narrative. The score is haunting, uneasy at times, and interspersed with global African sounds and vocalizations that harken back to the main character's roots.
  • The Joy Luck Club (1993) - A beautiful rendition of a stunning novel, The Joy Luck Club tells the complex and layered tale of a group of Chinese women who have immigrated to the United States. Interspersed with their narratives are the stories of their mothers and their American-born daughters. Rachel Portman's score incorporates traditional orchestration with the sounds of ancient Chinese instruments, just as the women and their daughters must learn to blend their two worlds.

Work Outside of Film

Although Rachel Portman began her journey with the intention to score for the stage, she found that world more restrictive than she liked and soon discovered the creative freedom she craved in scoring for film. However, Portman has created work for both television and stage throughout her career.

One of Portman's earliest professional breaks came when she was commissioned to score several episodes of the Jim Hensen TV series, The Storyteller. Her score for Bessie, a television film about the blues legend Bessie Smith, garnered her an Emmy award for Original Dramatic Score. Her work on the television film Grey Gardens received a nomination in the same category.

In 2003, Rachel Portman returned to her theatrical roots and wrote an original opera based on the classic children's novel, The Little Prince. Portman has said that she wished to create an opera that appeals to children and had her own four children in mind as she wrote it. In another venture geared toward kids and family fare, in 2008, Portman wrote an original stage musical based on The Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Both of these original works continue to be produced and performed across the country.

If you are enchanted by Portman's sweeping and intimate scores and would like to play them yourself, Musicnotes has an accessible collection of this composer's greatest works. The collection includes easy piano versions of the main title scores of Chocolat and Cider House Rules so that even beginners can master Portman's artistry. Take a look at the wide selection of sheet music and arrangements today.

Sources:

  • https://www.npr.org/2020/05/21/854974173/rachel-portman-steps-away-from-the-screen-with-ask-the-river
  • https://rachelportman.co.uk/about
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Portman
  • https://medium.com/outtake/a-chat-with-oscar-winning-composer-rachel-portman-8c259c1a9733
  • https://washingtonparent.com/opera-provides-optimum-benefits-for-children/