Interview: Jennie Muskett – the Emmy-winning film composer seeking a new career writing music for dance

Graham Watts interviews composer Jennie Muskett – “I see myself as a storyteller in music.”

The first worldwide tour of the revived London City Ballet, under the dynamic leadership of Christopher Marney, includes Eve, a reworking of the Adam and Eve narrative in a recent collaboration between Marney – as choreographer – and composer Jennie Muskett.

This is Muskett’s first foray into dance although her international reputation as a composer for film and television is eye-wateringly impressive, having written scores for Miramax, Paramount, Disney and the BBC. Muskett has won two Emmys and received five Emmy nominations for her music in natural environment documentaries; her score for the TV series, Spooks, received two BAFTA nominations; and she was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2023 King’s Birthday Honours for services to music. Despite these accolades and achievements in compositions for the big and small screen, when we met in her Highgate studio, Muskett told me that dance has now opened up a new creative passion for her music.  

Our interview began with Muskett playing the score for Eve and her explanation of the narrative relevance of each sequence bore testament to her enthusiasm for creating music that tells a story. The voice of Eve is themed through the violin while that of the devil/serpent is taken up by the cello: other inputs arrive through piano, trumpet, voices, and nature in the sounds of rain, birds and wind-blown trees (Muskett showed me how this was achieved by recording the movement of rustling leaves in a huge potted tree that dominates one end of her studio).

The connection between Muskett and Marney was facilitated by Yukiko Tsukamoto of Fabula Collective, following a chance meeting at lunch; and Eve was initially made for a one-off Fabula performance, entitled Momentum, at Sadler’s Wells in September 2022. It may never have been seen again if not for Marney’s revival of London City Ballet, which has been the work’s saviour by bringing it into the new company’s repertoire.

Although she had not specifically worked for dance before, Muskett explained that “when you’re scoring for a film, you’re informed by the way that people move and talk.” As a composer for film, she explained that other creatives might be involved in the project for years, but the composer is often engaged at the last minute. “It’s lovely when the director brings you in earlier,” she explained, “because they might then shoot scenes around the composer’s ideas.”

In the case of Eve, Marney started the process by sending a short email describing the story that he wanted to tell within an overall duration of twenty minutes. “It was a shape and a structure,” she explained. “He wanted a minute of this and two minutes for a pas de deux, for example.” “He was lovely to work with,” she continued, “because he is really open to ideas, and we had a wonderful dialogue about each character. So, for example, we talked about the serpent as an arrogant man who is too handsome for his own good; a bit of a bully but quite weak inside at the same time.”

“Both the serpent and Eve are completely alone in the world,” she continued. “Eve is just a tiny girl with no one to advise her and she meets this odd creature pretending to be lovely and they have this strange pas de deux while they are sizing each other up. It’s beautiful but distasteful at the same time!”

Another important issue was to create music that recognised the prehistoric time in which the story is set. “I didn’t want it to sound either synthesized or orchestral, so that’s why I chose to use actual wind instead of portraying wind musically.”

Muskett’s current projects include writing a piece of music inspired by Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, a book about fungi and how they rule the world. “It’s about the beginning of evolution,” she explained. “That’s why I bought this gong called the volcano because it makes sounds that seem to come from the bottom of the earth.”

Muskett has an amazing collection of gongs and other fascinating instruments. She shows me one that she recently purchased from an instrument maker. “It’s called a swinging cymbal, which is rather prosaic, but I call it a bell frog because I once woke up at dawn on Mount Meru in Tanzania, overlooking Kilimanjaro, and as the sun rose there were all these little frogs making the sound of tiny bells (she helps by imitating the sound) and they’re everywhere.” What she was doing on the mountain is another story since she made music for films by the late Hugo van Lawick, the cameraman and husband of Jane Goodall. “He was the other half of all that chimpanzee research, and they would take me to all these amazing places, which is where the bell frog comes in. These cymbals make the closest sound to that morning chorus.”    

Another recent passion is to explore how music and sound can help in terms of human well-being: helping people regain their speech after a stroke; or Parkinson’s sufferers with their movement; or to alleviate depression and anxiety. “Sound can produce magical effects,” said Muskett. She now runs “Sunday Evening Relax” sessions from her Highgate studio, “using these natural sounds to help calm people by shutting down their thinking brain. I don’t know exactly what it does. It’s a mystery but it’s magic. It’s a new path for me. I can’t speak authoritatively about it, but I do have an instinct for it,” she explained.

Muskett is keen to do more work in dance. “I see myself as a storyteller in music and I think that Eve shows that I can do this for dance.” While Muskett’s contact details are widely known in the film and TV world both in London and Los Angeles (where she was based for many years), she has yet to find the same traction in dance. She is in the process of remixing the Eve score for release via her website since nothing will sell her capability as a composer for dance better than the product itself.

Most choreographers declare that they are inspired by the music and here is an inspirational composer that deserves to gain as much acclaim in dance as she has already achieved in film and TV.

London City Ballet performs Eve in York (6-7 Sept); London’s Sadler’s Wells (11-14 September) and New York’s Joyce Theater (17-22 Sept).

You can find out more about Jennie Muskett’s work at www.jenniemuskett.com

Listen to Eve

https://www.jenniemuskett.com/news/eve-a-ballet

Jennie Muskett – biography

Jennie Muskett MBE is a multi-award-winning composer of music for film, TV, ballet and concerts – with a passion for telling stories in music.

She grew up in a musical family, and summer holidays were spent exploring some of the more remote parts of Eastern Europe following her father’s passion for virtuoso folk instrumentalists. This was translated into concerts at the South Bank with Jennie taking part as a regular performer.

She was later awarded a scholarship at the Royal College of Music to study ‘cello, singing and piano.

During her early career as a ‘cellist on the London music scene, a chance visit to the Kalahari Desert began a deep and life-long relationship and passion for the natural world, which has inspired so many of her compositions. She has composed countless scores for natural history documentaries for companies including National Geographic, Discovery, BBC Natural History Unit and IMAX.

Jennie is equally adept at writing for romantic comedy, period drama or fast-paced drama (she composed the music and title theme for SPOOKS, so synonymous with this hit series). She has a passion for telling stories in music, no matter the genre and the astonishing variety of colours she creates is a hallmark of this gifted composer.

Jennie’s passion for story-telling came to the fore recently when she was invited to collaborate with Christopher Marney, artistic director of London City Ballet, to create EVE – a re-telling of the Adam and Eve myth. London City Ballet will be performing EVE at Sadlers Wells from the 11th to 14th September 2024. Book here.

Jennie broadened her experience even further through spending several years in Los Angeles where she developed many rewarding relationships, notably with director Martha Coolidge for whom she composed several projects for film and TV.

Jennie has received Emmy awards and BAFTA nominations for her work and she was honoured to receive an MBE for Services to Music on June 4th 2024.

She has a beautiful studio in Highgate where she records her own music and, driven by her passion for connecting people with live music, welcomes leading chamber artists and audiences to concerts in this intimate relaxed space.

There is a wealth of growing evidence of the almost magical benefits of music and sound.  Following her fascination with this aspect Jennie has been developing music for expectant mothers and their babies as well as offering Sound Meditation sessions for all at her studio.

Graham Watts

Graham Watts is a freelance writer and dance critic. He writes for The Spectator, Tanz, Shinshokan Dance Magazine (Japan), Ballet Magazine (Romania), BachTrack and the Hong Kong International Arts Festival and has previously written for the Sunday Express, Dancing Times, Dance Europe, DanceTabs, London Dance, the Edinburgh International Festival and Pointe magazine (USA).  He has also written the biography of Daria Klimentová (The Agony and the Ecstasy) and contributed chapters about the work of Akram Khan to the Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet and on Shobana Jeyasingh for the third edition of Routledge’s Fifty Contemporary Choreographers.

He is Chairman of the Dance Section of The Critics’ Circle and of the UK National Dance Awards and regularly lectures on dance writing and criticism at The Royal Academy of Dance, The Place and (until the war) for Balletristic in Kyiv.  He was a nominee for the Dance Writing Award in the 2018 One Dance UK Awards and was appointed OBE in 2008.