Select a review:

Review of the "Wild Oranges" Score—Film Music Magazine

NPR Interview with Vivek Maddala

"Wild Oranges" Performance with Third Angle--The Oregonian

Review of "The Patsy" Score—Film Music Magazine

"Ace of Hearts" Review Excerpt—DVD Verdict

Excerpt from "The Silent Treatment"—
The Oregonian

Comments on "The Patsy" — Salon.com

Comments on "The Patsy" — National Film Preservation Foundation

Local Composer Scores Silent Film— Gainesville Sun

Excerpt from "The Patsy" Review—San Francisco Examiner

Silent Films Tempt Soundtrack Composer—India-West

Local Composer Scores Silent Film
by Bill DeYoung, Sun Entertainment Editor

Gainesville Sun, October 24, 2000

In 1921's "The Ace of Hearts," Lon Chaney plays a violent vigilante whose resolve is tested by true love. It's a corny movie, broadly acted and predictable as are most films from the era. The fact that it's a silent movie makes "The Ace of Hearts" a tough sell in today's world. No dialogue, no music--all you've got is Chaney's black-and-white over-emoting and a storyline that's almost impossible to follow.

Enter Vivek Maddala. The 26-year-old musician, who grew up in Gainesville, was given the daunting task of composing an all-new score for "The Ace of Hearts." Turner Classic Movies will air the results tonight at 10 PM. "It was stressful, but I knew I could do it and I knew that I could do it well," Maddala says. "I tend to hear inside my head exactly what it's going to sound like."

"Every detail of the orchestration, exactly what the oboe's going to do, how the percussion is going to fit in . . . that takes 1 percent of the time. The rest of the time I spend realizing what I hear in my head onto tape or onto paper."

Maddala, a 1990 graduate of Buchholz High School, began playing piano at age 3, and before his teens he could play guitar, drums, bass and several other instruments. His early years were spent studying the classics.

A lover of '50s bebop jazz and Big Band music, the son of University of Florida professor of economics G.S. Maddala spent a summer at the Berklee College of Music and studied orchestration at Georgia Tech.

"I think there's certain music, for musicians when they're developing, that gets indelibly etched in their minds and their hearts, and becomes a part of them," he says.

"For me, I could be writing Baroque music, or medieval peasant music, or Asian music, or whatever, and there are certain aspects of '50s and '60s jazz that are always going to creep in there."

After graduating from GT with an engineering degree, Maddala moved to the Pacific Northwest, where he worked with singer Gino Vannelli, and spent three months working closely with the rock band Boston.

He also stood in for bandleader Tom Scholz during rehearsals and soundchecks.

"They hired me because I was an engineer, and I was also a musician," Maddala says. "They needed someone who had a pretty solid background in math and physics, and in engineering. And so I designed a lot of their stage gear for the tour."

Maddala stops short of saying he was a member of Boston, though. "I was sort of a miscellaneous guy," he shrugs. "I don't know that I really had a designated job function." Currently he works at the legendary Dolby Laboratories in San Francisco, where he develops new technologies in sound for cinema. He spends a lot of time in Japan.

Turner's Young Film Composers' Competition caught Maddala's eye; to enter, composers were asked to download a brief scene from a silent film and write a period score. Maddala chose a Valentino tango scene; and his work was chosen from several hundred entries (although he was required to submit a full, printed score for 22 instruments before he was named as the grand prize winner).

His music for "The Ace of Hearts," Maddala explains, echoes "early 20th-century music--it's got Stravinsky, Ravel and Brahms all mixed into it." Plus a little bit of John Coltrane and Bill Evans.

"I had to take a leave of absence from Dolby in order to complete the job," he says, "so I ended up having about six weeks to conceive and complete a 74-minute orchestral score. "My daily routine was about 8 a.m. to 4 a.m., 20 hours. Then I'd sleep for four hours, get up again and immediately begin working again. And I did that for seven days a week straight. By the time I was done, I had written about 3,500 pages of music."

He recorded most of the score at home, using samples of symphonic instruments on Midi computer files; subsequently, the recordings were supplemented with real strings at an L.A. studio and synched to the movie.

Scoring a film--especially one requiring wall-to-wall music--is a daunting task, Maddala says. "But so much of engineering is problem-solving. With hard work and creativity, problems get solved."

With Maddala's music, "The Ace of Hearts" breathes with life, 79 years after its creation. There are a lot of composers in the world who've got the chops and the theory, but they have nothing to say, musically, of

interest.

"Being able to identify and empathize with characters on the screen and to interpret what's happening, to really have a feel for drama and emotion, these are things that I think are pretty key, that are more important than the actual knowledge of how to write cello parts."