Arranger of darkness – Newspaper Kommersant No. 232 (7433) of 12/14/2022

Angelo Badalamenti, one of the most famous and successful composers in the history of world cinema, has died at the age of 85 in Lincoln Park, New Jersey. He is known to the general public primarily as the author of music for the films of David Lynch and his TV series Twin Peaks.

The biography of Angelo Badalamenti reads like a novel by Mario Puzo. He was born in Brooklyn, and his family comes from Sicily, from the resort town of Cinisi, not far from Palermo. My father owned a fish market and collected records of operas. And the son began to master the piano at the age of eight and soon began to earn extra money playing in hotels. Interest in jazz awakened in Badalamenti thanks to his older brother, who played the trumpet and often improvised in the company of other musicians. Angelo even leaned into wind players himself – he only preferred the French horn. He studied at the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester and at the Manhattan School of Music, next door to Columbia University. After receiving a master’s degree, he went to teach, but at his leisure he wrote songs in the spirit of Kurt Weill.

His first full-fledged piece of music was a musical written for his own students for Christmas 1970. The musical was shown on a local television channel, after which Badalamenti was hired by a small music company, where he composed radio jingles and arrangements for performers ranging from Welsh star Shirley Bessie to country singer Mel Tillis.

It was the successful work with the vocalists that subsequently became the key to Badalamenti’s Hollywood success.

The composer began his career in cinematography in 1973. The first film to feature his music was Gordon’s War, directed by Ossie Davis, a story about a Vietnam War veteran who decides to restore order in his hometown upon his return from the front. Badalamenti’s name was not in the credits, there was a certain Andy Badale – under this pseudonym he teamed up with Al Elias in the funk duo Badder Than Evil, which created most of the music for the film, including the track “Hot Wheels – The Chase”, which actively sampled by musicians of subsequent generations. Badalamenti did not reveal his real name in the credits of the comedy Law and Disorder (1974), on the music for which he also worked in tandem with Elias.

Both films were not commercially successful, and Angelo Badalamenti was well into his thirties. And it took another decade for fate to bring him together with David Lynch, a director for whom the combination of grace and anxiety contained in Badalamenti’s music would become part of the creative style. On the set of Lynch, Badalamenti came not as a composer, but as a vocal teacher: he was hired to make a singer from Isabella Rossellini, the leading lady in the film Blue Velvet (1986). It took the composer four hours to prepare, together with the actress, the film’s title song, a 1950s hit.

Lynch was delighted. He asked Badalamenti to help him with one of the central themes of the tape – “Mysteries Of Love”. In place of this song was supposed to be “Song To The Siren” by Tim Buckley performed by This Mortal Coil with Elizabeth Fraser at the microphone. However, Lynch could not afford the rights to the song, and he and Badalamenti came up with the song “Mysteries Of Love”, for which they needed the same fabulous, elvish voice as the lead singer of Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil. And then Badalamenti suggested Julie Cruz, whom he knew from his work in Broadway theaters.

“He found this angelic sound in my voice,” recalled Cruz, who passed away in the summer of 2022. “If not for Angelo, my career would not have developed at all.”

David Lynch has referred to the creative alliance with Badalamenti as his “second best marriage”. The composer returned to him while working on the film “Wild at Heart”, and during the same period the shooting of the series “Twin Peaks” began. Lynch’s work with Badalamenti began in the pre-production period of the film with conversations at the piano, continued on the set, and did not end even when the film had already been shot. The composer said that Lynch often built the rhythm of acting, starting from his music. Badalamenti hadn’t seen practically a single frame of the Twin Peaks pilot when he wrote his themes: everything came from Lynch’s words, from the atmosphere in front of the camera.

The “Twin Peaks Theme”, which has become one of the most recognizable screen tunes in history, was born inside the Blue Velvet workshop of Lynch, Badalamenti and Julie Cruz. The melody was held on four notes played on a low-pitched electric guitar. Under the name “Falling”, it formed the basis of Cruz’s debut disc “Floating Into The Night” (1989): Badalamenti wrote the music for the album, Lynch wrote the lyrics. However, the composer received the Grammy precisely for the original, instrumental version.

Subsequently, Badalamenti wrote music for the entire “Twin Peaks universe”, including the third season of the series, which was released in 2017. The “Twin Peaks Theme” has been replayed and remixed many times, and in 2016 the American band Xiu Xiu recorded an entire album dedicated to rethinking the music from the series.

At the same time, for music lovers, Angelo Badalamenti was not a “composer of one melody.” Lost Highway themes create a mesmerizing, immobilizing effect no worse than in Twin Peaks.

In addition to Lynch, Zhene and Caro (“City of Lost Children”), Jane Campion (“Holy Smoke”), Danny Boyle (“The Beach”) and the creator of Andrei Chikatilo’s first film biography “Evilenko” David Greco turned to his services.

In 2010, Badalamenti even agreed to compose the music for Fyodor Bondarchuk’s film Stalingrad (2013). According to the composer, in this work it was important for him to preserve his corporate style, but at the same time to compose something more powerful than his usual film works, massive, epic, including with Russian national flavor.

But epic scope combined with dark grace was also found in Badalamenti’s non-film work, such as Booth And The Bad Angel, a collaboration with James frontman Tim Booth, and Marianne Faithfull’s A Secret Life.

Despite his active work in the cinema, in Hollywood Badalamenti was practically not known by sight. He lived in New Jersey and was most inspired by golf. They say that he wrote best with a club in his hand. There, in Lincoln Park, he ended his life, surrounded by loved ones. As for what melody will be played at his funeral, no one has any doubts.

Boris Barabanov