The Apple TV series “Down Cemetery Road” is extremely difficult to categorize. The story of two women (Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson) who team up to find a missing child and unearth a complicated political conspiracy, it’s a mystery show with wild tonal shifts that swing from quirky comedy to chilling horror to bittersweet poignancy. That the series pulls it all off and feels cohesive is a credit not only to the two stars and showrunner Morwenna Banks, but to Oscar and Emmy-nominated composer Laura Karpman, who ties it all together with a score as varied and satisfying as the plot’s twists and turns.
The audacity of tone that makes “Down Cemetery Road” such a pleasure for the viewer is also one of the things that attracted Karpman to the project. “It switches tone frequently and without warning,” Karpman told IndieWire, noting that the stylistic shifts required a daring approach to the music. “The music has got a classical feeling to it, but with the edge of an indie rock score.” To find an unconventional sound for an unconventional show, Karpman began with the percussion.
“My wife Nora [Kroll-Rosenbaum] and I just started messing around in our recording booth with all of our instruments,” Karpman said. “One is this Vietnamese wood block that makes a scraping sound. I started playing these things really slowly because I’m not a percussionist, and through the miracle of electronics we sped them up. There were all these instruments around the studio, plus a drum set, and we started recording themes based on the quality of the instruments. There were woods, there were metals, there were felt — there were all these kinds of textures. And I just started playing grooves.”
Karpman found the percussive instruments malleable and easily manipulated, allowing her to discern distinct musical voices for each character. “In a tense scene, the percussion can drive the action, but it can also be funny,” Karpman said, adding that along with the “percussive underbelly” were major orchestral themes of the sort one would typically associate with emotional, dramatic material. Because much of the series revolves around a connection between Wilson’s character and a missing child, Karpman looked to a Hollywood classic with a similar premise.
“I talked a lot about ‘Laura,’” Karpman said, referencing Otto Preminger’s 1940s film noir about a detective obsessed with the woman whose murder he’s investigating. “It’s a classic Hollywood movie where the character is a sort of fantasy construction, so I played with those kinds of swirly circle-of-fifths things.” The 1940s feeling evoked by “Laura” also worked for the show, given that the character of Emma Thompson’s husband — who vanishes from the series early on but, like the kidnapped girl, hangs over the show like a specter — was obsessed with jazz.
“Part of the problem is that he goes away,” Karpman said. “He’s another ghost. So how do you create that connection to him and keep him going through Zoe’s pursuit, which is driven by her regrets and mourning of him?” Karpman said she saw much of the show in pairs, and Zoe (Emma Thompson’s character) and her husband were one of them. “It was about finding a percussive sound for the two of them, but also a love theme that works in retrospect and drives her. She’s not just avenging his murder, she’s trying to make up for her own denial of him.”
Karpman was particularly influenced by Thompson’s performance, especially since the idea of a series with a heroine in her sixties was another factor that drew her to the series. “She’s funny, and she’s subtle,” Karma said. “Music needs to not get in the way, but also to do its job, which is to take you to that place of humor, take you to that place of grief, take you to that place of anxiety. The opportunity to score a woman who’s my age doing heroic things, I loved it. She deserved hardcore action music, which she got — there’s nothing wrong with that when the time calls for it.”
The complexity and scope of Karpman’s score — there’s a lot of music over the course of the show’s eight episodes — is all the more impressive given the time constraints television often imposes. “I can’t remember how long these episodes were to turn around, but it wasn’t that long,” Karpman said. “Maybe a week or two max.” Luckily, the producers gave Karpman something she considered extremely valuable: room to fail. “I tried a lot of really cool stuff. Some of it made it, some of it didn’t.” Karpman added that as tough as TV schedules can be, they do have an advantage.
“I think it makes you bolder,” Karpman said. “It makes you get out there and start recording, which I love. I’d sit down and improvise something at the piano, and it’s very much a handmade score in the sense that my hands are literally playing a variety of musical instruments — as well as also hiring excellent musicians who came in.” In keeping with that handmade approach, when there are unusual vocal sounds in the score, they typically originate with the composer herself. “That’s me singing and shrieking and scatting.”
Karpman is exceptionally prolific — in addition to “Down Cemetery Road,” she currently has Marvel’s “Marvel Zombies” (which she scores with Kroll-Rosenbaum) on the air, and an ESPN “30 for 30” documentary on the way — but seems determined not to repeat herself. She’s currently directing a short film about the lost instruments of the Palisades and Altadena fires, and says that kind of work helps keep her fresh as a composer. “I have to say, giving myself a sonic break from episodic scoring, it’s really important,” Karpman said.
“Listen, it’s always good to work, and I’ve been so fortunate, but I’m also glad to have this time to clear my head out,” she concluded. “You need to do that, because otherwise, there is the fear that you might fall into the things that come easily. You have to discipline yourself not to. To take the time to rejuvenate, to read, to write, to do other things — I think it’s really important.”
“Down Cemetery Road” is currently streaming on Apple TV.
