Danny Elfman

At 69 years old, Danny Elfman has this physical status:

After returning to Los Angeles from Africa in the early 1970s, Elfman was asked by his brother Richard to serve as musical director of his street theatre performance art troupe The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo.: 22

Elfman was tasked with adapting and arranging 1920s and 1930s jazz and big band music by artists such as Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Django Reinhardt and Josephine Baker for the ensemble, which consisted of up to 15 performers playing upwards of 30 instruments. He also composed original pieces and helped build instruments unique for the group, including an aluminum gamelan, the 'Schlitz celeste' made from tuned beer cans, and a "junkyard orchestra" built from car parts and trash cans.

The Mystic Knights performed on the street and in nightclubs throughout Los Angeles until Richard left in 1979 to pursue filmmaking.: 15  As a send-off to the group's original concept, Richard created the film Forbidden Zone based on the Mystic Knights' stage performances. Elfman composed the songs and his first score for the film, and appeared as the character Satan, who performs a reworked version of Calloway's "Minnie the Moocher" with ensemble members playing backup as henchmen.

Before the release of Forbidden Zone, Elfman had taken over the Mystic Knights as lead singer-songwriter in 1979, paring the group down to eight players, shortening the name to Oingo Boingo, and recording and touring as a ska-influenced new wave band. Their biggest success among eight studio albums penned by Elfman was 1985's Dead Man's Party, featuring the hit song "Weird Science" from the movie of the same name. The band also appeared performing their single "Dead Man's Party" in the 1986 movie Back to School, for which Elfman also composed the score. Elfman shifted the band to a more guitar-oriented rock sound in the late 1980s, which continued through their last album Boingo in 1994.

Citing permanent hearing damage from performing live and conflicts with his film-scoring career,: 137  Elfman retired Oingo Boingo in 1995 with a series of five sold-out final concerts at the Universal Amphitheatre ending on Halloween night. On October 31, 2015, Elfman and Oingo Boingo guitarist Steve Bartek performed the song "Dead Man's Party" with an orchestra as an encore to a live-to-film concert of The Nightmare Before Christmas score at the Hollywood Bowl. Elfman told the audience the performance was "20 years to the day" of Oingo Boingo's retirement.

As fans of Oingo Boingo, Tim Burton and Paul Reubens invited Elfman to write the score for their first feature film Pee-wee's Big Adventure in 1985. Elfman was initially apprehensive because of his lack of formal training and having never scored a studio feature, but after Burton accepted his initial demo of the title music and with orchestration assistance from Oingo Boingo guitarist and arranger Steve Bartek, he completed his score to great effect, while paying homage to his love of early film music and influential film composers Nino Rota and Bernard Herrmann. Elfman described the first time he heard his music played by a full orchestra as one of the most thrilling experiences of his life.

Following Pee Wee's Big Adventure, Elfman scored mainly quirky comedies in the late 1980s, including Back to School starring Rodney Dangerfield, Burton's Beetlejuice and the Bill Murray vehicle Scrooged. Non-comedy work included the all-synth score to Emilio Estevez's crime drama Wisdom and the big band, blues-infused music for Martin Brest's buddy cop action film Midnight Run.

In 1989, Elfman's influential, Grammy-winning score for Burton's Batman marked a major stylistic shift to dark, densely orchestrated music in the romantic idiom, which would carry over to his scores for Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy, Sam Raimi's Darkman and Clive Barker's Nightbreed, all released in 1990.

With Batman, Elfman firmly established a career-spanning relationship with Burton, scoring all but three of the director's major studio releases. Highlights include Edward Scissorhands (1990), Batman Returns (1992), Sleepy Hollow (1999), Big Fish (2003) and Alice in Wonderland (2010). In 1993, in addition to writing the score and ten songs for the Burton-produced stop motion animated film The Nightmare Before Christmas, Elfman also provided the singing voice for main character Jack Skellington, as well as the voices for side characters Barrel and the Clown with the Tear-Away Face. In 2005, he wrote the score and songs for Burton's Corpse Bride and provided the voice of the character of Bonejangles, as well as providing the score, songs and Oompa-Loompa vocals for Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that same year.

In addition to frequent collaborations with Burton, Raimi and Gus Van Sant, Elfman has worked with esteemed directors such as Brian De Palma, Peter Jackson, Joss Whedon, Errol Morris, Ang Lee, Richard Donner, Guillermo del Toro, David O. Russell, Taylor Hackford, Jon Amiel, Joe Johnston, and Barry Sonnenfeld. His scores for Sonnenfeld's Men in Black, Van Sant's Good Will Hunting and Milk, and Burton's Big Fish all received Academy Award nominations.

Since the mid-1990s, Elfman has expanded his craft to a range of genres, including thrillers (Dolores Claiborne, A Simple Plan, The Kingdom), dramas (Sommersby, A Civil Action, Hitchcock), indies (Freeway, Silver Linings Playbook, Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot), family (Flubber, Charlotte's Web, Frankenweenie, Goosebumps), documentary (Standard Operating Procedure, The Unknown Known), and straight horror (Red Dragon, The Wolfman), as well as entries in his well-established areas of horror comedy (The Frighteners, Mars Attacks!, Dark Shadows) and comic book-inspired action films (Hulk, Wanted, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Avengers: Age of Ultron).

Among his franchise work, Elfman composed the scores for all four Men in Black films (1997–2019) and all three Fifty Shades of Grey films (2015–2018). Elfman scored Raimi's Spider-Man in 2002 and Spider-Man 2 in 2004, themes and selections from which were used for Raimi's Spider-Man 3, though Elfman did not compose the score. Danny Elfman's theme for Spider-Man was incorporated into the MCU film Spider-Man: No Way Home composed by Michael Giacchino. In 1996, he also provided the score for the first film in the Mission: Impossible series, adapting themes for the original television series by Lalo Schifrin as well as composing his own.

For several high-profile sequel and reboot projects in the 2010s, Elfman incorporated established musical themes with his own original thematic material, including the DC Extended Universe's Justice League, The Grinch, Dumbo and Men in Black International.

Elfman was featured in the 2016 documentary Score, in which he appeared among over 50 film composers to discuss the craft of movie music and influential figures in the business.

Elfman's first piece of original concert music, Serenada Schizophrana, was commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra, who premiered the piece on February 23, 2005, at Carnegie Hall. Subsequent concert works include his first Violin Concerto "Eleven Eleven", co-commissioned by the Czech National Symphony Orchestra, Stanford Live at Stanford University, and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, which premiered at Smetana Hall in Prague on June 21, 2017, with Sandy Cameron on violin and John Mauceri conducting the Czech National Symphony Orchestra; the Piano Quartet, co-commissioned by the Lied Center for Performing Arts University of Nebraska and the Berlin Philharmonic Piano Quartet, which premiered February 6, 2018, in Lincoln, Nebraska; and the Percussion Quartet, commissioned by Third Coast Percussion and premiered at the Philip Glass Days And Nights Festival in Big Sur on October 10, 2019. 2022 saw the first performances of three works. A Cello Concerto for Gautier Capucon launched in Vienna in March and was then taken to Paris in May that year.The San Francisco Symphony give the US premiere in November 2022. 2022 also saw the first performance of a Percussion Concerto for Colin Currie, initially in London's Royal Festival Hall with London Philharmonic Orchestra, and later at Soka University of America in California, with Pacific Symphony. The summer of 2022 saw the long-awaited pandemic-delayed premiere of Wunderkammer, a commission from the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, who toured the UK with the 20-minute work, culminating in a performance in London's Royal Albert Hall as part of the BBC Proms, with national radio and TV broadcasts.

In 2008, Elfman accepted his first commission for the stage, composing the music for Twyla Tharp's Rabbit and Rogue ballet, co-commissioned by American Ballet Theatre and Orange County Performing Arts Center and premiering on June 3, 2008, at the Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center. Other works for stage include the music for Cirque Du Soleil's Iris in 2011, and incidental music for the Broadway production of Taylor Mac's Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus in 2019.

In October 2013, Elfman returned to the stage for the first time since his band Oingo Boingo disbanded to sing his vocal parts to a handful of The Nightmare Before Christmas songs as part of a concert titled Danny Elfman's Music from the Films of Tim Burton, featuring suites of music from 15 Tim Burton films newly arranged by Elfman. The concert has since toured internationally and has played in Japan, Australia, Mexico and throughout Europe and the United States. Since 2015, Elfman has appeared near annually in a Hollywood Bowl Halloween concert featuring full orchestra performing the Nightmare Before Christmas score live to the film projection.

It was announced that Elfman would be taking part in Coachella 2020 with a set titled "Past, Present and Future! From Boingo to Batman and Beyond!" Elfman clarified on his Instagram page that this would not be an Oingo Boingo reunion, writing "I’m creating a live mix of my last 40 years— both film music and songs... that includes my Boingo years, my composer years and a few things I’ve been working on for the last year or so, which will be world premieres." The festival was canceled in 2020, and again in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but Elfman would go on to perform as part of the 2022 lineup.

In addition to his music for film, Elfman has also penned themes for The Simpsons, Tales from the Crypt, The Flash and Desperate Housewives, which won Elfman his first Emmy. He also adapted his original themes for the animated versions of Batman and Beetlejuice. Occasional forays into serial television include episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Amazing Stories and Pee-wee's Playhouse, as well as the miniseries When We Rise, co-composed with Chris Bacon.

He has composed music for animated shorts, including Sally Cruikshank's Face Like A Frog and Tim Burton's "Stainboy" internet series.

Elfman provided background music for Luigi Serafini's solo exhibition il Teatro della Pittura at the Fondazione Mudima di Milano in Milan, Italy in 1998 and for the Tim Burton exhibition at MoMA in 2009.

In the 1990s, Elfman composed music for advertising campaigns for Nike, Nissan and Lincoln-Mercury, and in 2002 wrote the music for Honda's "Power of Dreams" advertising campaign, which was the first cinema commercial to be shot in the IMAX format.

In 2013 he composed the music and provided the English-language vocals for the Hong Kong Disneyland attraction Mystic Manor.

On October 31, 2019, the MasterClass online educational series released "Making Music out of Chaos," presenting 21 compositional and career lessons from Elfman's four decades of experience primarily in the film industry.

Elfman scored the 10-minute video "Joe Biden," which introduced Joe Biden's acceptance of the presidential candidacy nomination at the 2020 Democratic National Convention.

In October 2020, Elfman released a surprise single, "Happy," on Anti- Records and Epitaph Records. From January 2021, he released the five following singles "Sorry", "Love In The Time of COVID", "Kick Me", "True", and a reworking of a song from his time in Oingo Boingo, “Insects”, from the album Nothing to Fear, on the 11th date of each month. An album, Big Mess, was released on June 11. On August 11, 2021, Elfman released a remix of “True” with lead vocals shared between Elfman and Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor.

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