Movie music can be insanely operatic, which is why some composers have been able to perform their fan-favorite scores in concerts. Daniel Pemberton, who has been known to do some very dramatic tunes that easily lent themselves to movie trailers, has piggybacked his recent announcement of his U.K. tour with a tour in the United States. The composer has contributed to the abstract and moody tone of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse: Live in Concert will be web-swinging into concert venues in the U.S. starting with Nashville, Tennessee on September 1. For more U.S. tour information, visit the official website, beginning at 10 a.m. ET today. The performances will feature a live-to-picture performance of Pemberton’s mold-breaking orchestral and electronic score. A scratch DJ on turntables and a designated whistler will be performing to add two of the score’s most unique ingredients. Additionally, and at a certain number of events, you might even get to catch Pemberton himself playing on guitar and a number of other instruments, including his own face.
Pemberton told THR, “I always thought it’d be impossible to do live, because they jump between so many different ideas and genres. But a long time ago, I did a couple of cues at a one-off film music festival, and I was really surprised at how effective it worked. So that got my brain thinking about trying to do the whole film live, and we did a couple of tests that went down phenomenally.”
The composer also credited the films’ producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller for allowing the directors’ distinct vision for the animation, which gave him some outside-the-box inspiration for the score, “One of the things that I love about these movies is that I’m given creative freedom that often doesn’t seem to exist so much in live-action. And because the Spider-Verse films look like nothing else people had seen before, it allowed me to try and make something that didn’t sound like anything people had heard before. The difficulty with live-action is that a lot of live-action looks like live-action you’ve seen before, and so there’s a pressure to make music that sounds like stuff you’ve heard before.”