Clinton Shorter – versatile Canadian composer (+ playlist and Notes) – Planeta21vek

Shorter was asked to score Blomkamp’s 2009 sci-fi film District 9 as “something ‘gritty and dark’ but still retaining its African roots.” The resulting music has been described by reviewers as “rhythmic” and “gorgeous”, as a “mournful ethnic composition”, and as having a “pseudo-exotic atmosphere, and a post-modern theme of loss”. The soundtrack was released separately on CD. In 2014, Shorter wrote the music for the action film Pompeii. He subsequently wrote music for the television series The Expanse and Colony.

Clinton Shorter is a Canadian film composer. He was recently named one of the “young composers to watch” by The Hollywood Reporter. His original score for the blockbuster District 9 was described by film critic Kirk Honeycutt as “magnificent music.” Shorter has worked on over 300 episodes of television, numerous commercials, indie films and original music for the Olympic Games. Clinton Shorter currently resides in Vancouver and Los Angeles.

The award-winning Vancouver native developed a love for music at a young age. While in high school, he discovered a new school that had a recording studio, so he was transferred there and spent all his free time in the studio. Clinton attended college as a music major in jazz studies, but left to pursue a career in writing music with an experimental rock trio. Clinton Shorter said his love for film music began when he heard the score for Never Cry Wolf, written by Mark Isham. “It changed my life and made me want to go down the path of film scoring.”

Shore then went back to college to study music composition and synthesis. His first breakthrough came while working in a music store when a Canadian composer came in to buy equipment, with this equipment the young composer began to hone his talent.

It was several years before he began to gain recognition on his own, with a Christmas party where his sister brought friend Geoff McPherson. McPherson, a director who was in the final stages of editing his first feature film, saw all the equipment and asked what he was doing. Shorter said he was a composer, which led to McPherson hiring him to score his film Come Together.

Shorter began recording digital shorts for friend and director Trevor Cawood, who worked in a computer graphics studio. Cawood introduced Shorter to a young director named Neill Blomkamp. Blomkamp later hired Shorter as a composer for advertisements and short films. “Neil was only 22 years old at the time, but everyone in the office saw his talent and felt that he would one day become a superstar,” Shorter said.

One of these collaborations was the short film Live in Joburg, which served as the catalyst for District 9. Academy Award-winning director Peter Jackson watched the short and produced it, with Blomkamp directing. “When he called in late 2008 and asked if I would write his first feature, I was thrilled,” Shorter explained.

On District 9, Shorter worked closely with Blomkamp: “I spent the first few weeks experimenting with all the African instruments I could think of. We incorporated African male vocals with percussion from that region combined with other elements to give the film a dark feel that required an edge. From the very beginning I knew that I was going to use a hybrid score of live and synthesized instruments. There’s a kind of ‘mutation’ in the film and I wanted that to be reflected in the music.” Peter Jackson called Shorter’s music a “brilliant score”.