‘Sing Sing’ Composer Bryce Dessner On Defying Expectations By “Responding To The Poetry Under The Heartbeat Of The Film”

For composer Bryce Dessner, working on a film like Sing Sing was all about defying expectations in the score. Though the film takes place in a prison, the story itself avoids the usual stereotypes of violence to focus on a tale of rehabilitation. Dessner decided to focus on a sense of freedom for the score, even using opera as a jumping off point.

Sing Sing tells the true story of Divine G (Colman Domingo), a man imprisoned as Sing Sing for a crime he didn’t commit, who finds purpose as part of a theatre group, along with newcomer Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin. Since the film focuses on the power of art as a means of escape and finding peace, Dessner used an image of Domingo and Maclin looking through a window into the horizon as a major point of influence.

DEADLINE: What were some of your biggest influences for the score?

BRYCE DESSNER: The film avoids those kinds of clichés or stereotypes like a prison drama or a documentary, the obvious one being the music doesn’t really venture into the kind of violence of the prison or any of that sort of tension. It keeps this kind of distance and a sense of horizon about it. I think of the two characters, Divine G, played by Colman Domingo, and Clarence Maclin playing himself, and there’s this image of them staring out through the window that’s really powerful and we come back to it several times. And that influenced the music for me. It’s like the music is the horizon, the space beyond their feeling of being imprisoned or being without freedom, so there’s a sense of freedom or peace of mind about the music.

DEADLINE: Knowing that you wanted to avoid that stereotypical “prison” score, how did you start your process?

DESSNER: The score begins with this orchestral chorale, which we see kind of backlit Colman Domingo’s character, Divine G, and it’s very colorful and cinematic. It’s like the play within the play or it has this kind of Shakespearean feeling about it. When I first saw this, it felt like an opera. And there is a history of operas set in prisons, like From the House of the Dead, which is one of my favorites. It’s set in a prison yard. So, I think there’s a kind of almost classical archetype about it, but then the way everything unfolds doesn’t ever bend to the tropes of what you’d expect from it.

I’ve worked with these filmmakers on two other films previously, and I’m working on a fourth now actually, so they’re old friends and we have a really good creative relationship. I felt a lot of freedom with how I essentially wrote a score that was really responding to the poetry under the heartbeat of the film.

DEADLINE: When you’re scoring a film like this, do you focus more on themes for characters or the emotions of the scenes?

DESSNER: This film, again, was sort of defying those expectations of how you might normally do something. It just didn’t want to. In this case, the ways I was thinking about it were more sort of ensemble and soloists, but not specifically. Yes, the solo cello appears several times, but not specifically to any one character. The solo woodwinds, the solo saxophone is against this kind of ensemble of strings and brass…

I think if anything, the focus is on the landscape, the sense of the enclosure and the feeling of being trapped, but then this sense of looking out and seeing where there’s a lot of shots of seeing the train as it’s rolling outside the prison or seeing the forest in the distance, or when they finally get out. It was that sense of landscape. There’s that scene called the Perfect Place where Paul Raci’s character, their teacher, asks them to imagine their perfect place, and for each of them it could be a memory or a wish. It’s like, how do you let the light in? That space is where the music lives essentially. So, if the music represents a character, it’s almost this kind of horizon, like a space beyond.