Breton Vivian returned to Deadline’s Sound and Screen Television after presenting the score for Taylor Sheridan’s 1923. This time around, he conducted the score for another Sheridan drama, Paramount+’s The Madison. For the new series, which centers on the story of a widow, played by Michelle Pfeiffer, taking her family from New York to Montana, Vivian composed a much subtler score than his previous Sheridan Western.
“She’s almost in this dream-like haze of grief,” Vivian said in front of the packed house at UCLA’s Royce Hall. “It’s Michelle Pfeiffer and she’s incredible. The last thing I need to do is be like it’s all about me — listen to my music. It was about being restrained.”
Vivian composed the main theme first, then the theme for family patriarch Preston (Kurt Russell). He was hired after production wrapped and was able to watch the entire season.
“For whatever reason, Preston’s character for me spoke a real homegrown folk tune,” he said. “That also helped in the scene because it was like a procession. They’re walking off to bury their husband, their father. I just started it with this very simple drone which is very common in a lot of Irish music. And just the melody. It was very important to just get that melody right and then just play it a lot.”
L-R: Sarena Hsu, Breton Vivian and Alex Mansour at Sound & Screen Television
JC Olivera
The landscape informed Vivian’s music as much as the characters.
“There are all these roads that snake across this landscape,” he said. “Rivers snake across. What if we had the sound of strings sliding in and out? It became a really helpful tactic to tell her story in this roller coaster of grief and emotion she’s swinging from these lovely memories with Preston to just gone. It became this thing that helped tell this story about grief and her almost dreamlike haze of being in this beautiful landscape but can’t even enjoy it because she’s suffering loss.”
To be sure, what viewers hear was not Vivian’s first draft. Sheridan pushed him further.
“I spent a long time trying to get that main title and I sent it to him. He’s like, ‘I don’t think it’s here,’” Vivian said. ”I had to go back and really, really think about it and sit at the piano. I didn’t even turn my computer on. I just try and figure what this theme was. Really what it was was just doing something really simple.”
The Madison has already completed filming Season 2 and has been renewed for a third season.
Check back Monday for the panel video.
