"Vivek's artistic vision is striking, cinematic, and beautiful."
-Tom Karsch, Turner Entertainment
Vivek Maddala is an international award-winning composer and multi-instrumental performer. His music blends melodic symphony writing with syncopated jazz idioms and modern ethnic textures -- from European neo-Romanticism to South Asian raga; from modern rock to French Impressionism. The result has been described as "an emotive frenzy of guitar, percussion, brass, woodwinds, and strings."
In 2000, at the age of 26, Vivek won the first Grand Prize in the national Young Film Composers Competition and he was invited to study in the prestigious ASCAP Film Scoring program two years later. In July of 2002, Vivek was one of five composers featured in TCM's Tribute to Great American Composers. In 2005, Vivek's score for The Patsy won the JPF award for Best Soundtrack Album of the Year. In October of 2006, Vivek served as the guest conductor for the Third Angle New Music Ensemble, performing his work as part of their 2006-2007 concert season. Last year, Vivek's score for the James Franco film Grasshopper was nominated for a Film & TV Music Award. His scores for Grasshopper and Wild Oranges received gold medals and an audience award in 2008 at the Park City Film Music Festival.
In addition to film scoring, Vivek has written music for national TV spots and songs for pop/rock and jazz-fusion CD releases. Further, Vivek's music has been covered in feature news stories by NPR, the Associated Press, CNN, Crossfader, Variety, and Entertainment Tonight.
Earlier this year, Vivek was commissioned by the internationally renowned dance company BodyVox to compose the score for their modern ballet, Horizontal Leanings. The work explores diverse themes, such as community survival and cultural identity, while contrasting our fragmented world of friction and alienation with a cohesive world of collective effort. The production fuses innovative choreography with Vivek's postmodern music composition, and will premiere to live audiences beginning May of 2008.
Vivek has always sought to write music in the service of achieving social progress -- to comment on the world as it is, and hopefully to affect it positively. His score for They Turned Our Desert Into Fire blends North African percussion with shadowy string textures and haunting vocals to illuminate the film's story of the ongoing genocide in Darfur and the associated humanitarian crisis of refugee camps on the continent. His brooding, passionate score for Ace of Hearts invokes the broken social and economic structures that promote poverty and injustice here in the US (and elsewhere around the globe). Accordingly, Vivek continues to seek out projects that lift the human spirit -- to challenge the function of war and elucidate the human condition.
When writing music for visual media, Vivek speaks with his own personal style, his own musical voice. His scores supplement and strengthen the narrative and emotional components, characterizing and framing the picture -- above all, serving the dramatic vision of the director. Elegant musical motifs and careful orchestration combine to give Vivek's music a distinctive flavor that moves gracefully between tradition and innovation; with equal parts euphoria and introspection; frantic while elegant; drunken yet precise; and utterly human.
You can find entire scores of Vivek's music, both audio CDs and DVD videos, at the Maddala Music web site.
