#Luca soundtrack series#

“I’ve been playing accordion for 20 years now, which is a shock to me because I’m still pretty bad at it,” he says with a laugh. The composer, an old-school rock ’n’ roller, had never owned a nylon-stringed classical guitar but bought one for “Luca.” He plays many of the guitar and accordion parts in the score.

#Luca soundtrack series#

Romer managed to score “Luca,” his biggest feature to date, while maintaining weekly scoring chores on several TV series including “Superman and Lois,” “The Good Doctor” and “Atypical.”

The song is a cover of Gene McDaniels’ 1963 “It’s a Lonely Town (Lonely Without You).” Mina’s recording, released the same year, appealed to the director as “a wonderfully melancholic song that felt right” for the moments after the characters’ goodbyes. Casarosa decided to conclude the film with “Città vuota” by the hugely popular Italian singer Mina. There’s also a smattering of Puccini, Rossini and several popular Italian tunes of the period scattered throughout. “A lot of string sections for those classical Italian scores were fairly small.” And he wanted to replicate the sound of such legendary Italian composers as Nino Rota (“La Dolce Vita”), Nicola Piovani (“Life Is Beautiful”) and Luis Bacalov (“Il Postino”). “I wanted a slightly smaller sound than a lot of other big movies,” he points out. Recording took place in mid-March under strict COVID guidelines: Strings, brass, woodwind and percussion sections - a total of 82 musicians - were all recorded separately and mixed together later. Romer first saw a “rough animatic” of the film, “all drawings, no animation,” in late 2019, prior to the pandemic, and he began composing in July 2020. The town of Portorosso, where most of the action takes place, is “where we wanted to lean into the romantic Italian-score side,” reports director Casarosa. “I ended up writing this rhythmic, melodic figure that was a call and response between the two instruments.” “We thought it would be fun to have two low instruments that kind of bumbled back and forth,” Romer explains. Luca’s meddlesome parents are voiced by a bass clarinet and tuba. Luca’s conveyed “a sense of longing and wonder,” Alberto’s had “a rousing ‘let’s go!’ kind of feeling, and Giulia’s was “the most Italian, with a more homespun regional feel.” Because the youngsters dominate the story, he made sure that all three themes were harmonically compatible and could work in counterpoint during scenes that involved two or three at once. “Each kid has their own theme,” notes Romer. The story follows Luca and Alberto - who discover that they appear human when out of the water - and their summertime adventures in a seaside town, where they befriend a girl, Giulia are plagued by an obnoxious older teen and must avoid not only water but also Luca’s parents, who have come onshore looking for their missing son. Italian colors were only a part of Romer’s assignment. Here's every track in Pixar's latest movie, Luca. “When I score a film that invokes the music of another culture, I like to dig in very deep and live and breathe that music so that it becomes second nature.” “There’s no doubt those songs influenced my writing,” he says. The composer took inspiration from a playlist Casarosa gave him that consisted of classic Italian film music as well as folk and pop music from the era. The film was directed by Enrico Casarosa (in his feature directorial debut ), produced by Andrea Warren and written by Jesse Andrews and Mike Jones from a story by Casarosa, Andrews, and Simon Stephenson. At his multimedia performances and in his recordings, strongly experimental electronic music meets pure, ethereal and simple-seeming piano playing that nevertheless relays deep emotions.Romer has no Italian lineage, but, he says, “I grew up in Brooklyn, so Italian Americans have been a huge part of my life.” Luca is a 2021 American computer-animated coming-of-age fantasy film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. The experience he has gained as a theatre musician has increased his interest in the relationship between sounds and spectacle he has composed music for ballets and films and accompanied installations and experimental art productions (Atelier de Lumières - Paris, Carrières de Lumières - Baux-de-Provence, Kunstkraftwerk - Leipzig). His works reveal a strong interaction between classical and contemporary music. Born in 1976, Longobardi studied classical music in Italy and New York and went on to earn his doctorate in digital audio restoration in Rome in 2011. Italian composer and pianist Luca Longobardi represents the generation of classically trained musicians who incorporate the language of contemporary electronic music into their pieces, which are furthermore strongly connected to the multimedia arts.