Interview: Composer Nathan Barr Discusses Using a Human Bone Trumpet and Historic Pipe Organ to Create the Music for Season 1 of CARNIVAL ROW

A blend of Victorian elegance, forbidden romance, and otherworldly fantasy, the Amazon series Carnival Row taps into multiple genres and could be a daunting task for a composer creating the show's musical tone, but for a musician who owns a bone trumpet and a historic organ that's nearly 100 years old, it's just another day at the office. With experience working on multiple Eli Roth movies and comedic Broken Lizard projects, Barr is no stranger to creating music for a wide range of genres, and with the first season of Carnival Row now on Amazon in its entirety, we caught up with Barr to discuss working on the ambitious series, his previous projects with Roth, and preserving movie studio history by restoring and using the Fox studios Wurlitzer theatre organ.

Congratulations on Carnival Row. That's probably keeping you pretty busy these days.

Nathan Barr: Yeah, thanks, it's actually off my plate for now until season two, which I think we'll start up on next year. It was definitely a year and a half process of scoring it—one of the longer projects that I've worked on.

How did you initially get involved with that? Did someone know you that liked your stuff, or was it an audition process?

Nathan Barr: It was just one of those things. Two of the picture editors on the season had both worked with me before, one on True Blood and one on a film years ago. They both kind of together said, "We should get Nate to do this." I met with the folks and they loved the direction and we went from there.

It's funny how it's kind of a small world that way, where one job leads to another once you get in there.

Nathan Barr: Exactly. It's a good reason to do as much as you can early on in your career, because you never know where things are going to lead.

Carnival Row has this really interesting blend. It has a Victorian vintage feel to it, but it also has this otherworldly fantasy vibe going on. As a composer, how did you approach that blend of genres?

Nathan Barr: Yeah, practically speaking there are some elements of the score which are rooted in an electronic sound, which I think plays to a bit of the steampunk feel of the show. [I brought in a ] choir and this large pipe organ that I have played for the more classic fantasy elements that the show is plugging into as far as the different species of creatures and in the larger story about the oppression and all that.

Interesting. You actually have a pipe organ that you used for the music on the show?

Nathan Barr: I bought the Wurlitzer theatre organ that was built for the scoring stage at Fox studios in 1928 about eight years ago. I had it meticulously restored. I built a 10,000 square foot building for the instrument, which is now my studio. It occupies six rooms. This is the organ you hear in the movie The Sound of Music, Empire of the Sun, Patton, Star Trek, The Day the Earth Stood Still. Everyone from Bernard Herrmann to John Williams to Alex North used it during its time at Fox. It was at Fox from '28 to '98.

It's an incredible piece of history. I used it quite a bit in the show. The main title for example is just organ, choir, and fiddle. I'd say 80% of that main title is the organ. You can hear just how many sounds it's capable of making that far supersede what people would think of as a classic pipe organ sound.

It was pulled out of Fox in '98 and I bought it seven years ago. I had it restored over the course of four years while I built this building for it. It's actually in six rooms in this building.

That is amazing. It's like your own Phantom of the Opera set that you have. That's really cool that you're able to preserve that part of history.

Nathan Barr: Yeah, it's an important piece of film music history that was largely forgotten about. Most of these studios all had pipe organs back in the '20s. Warner Bros. had the sister to this organ. Universal had one. Paramount had one. If you were recording music at a studio back in the early 20th century, there was an organ there for use if required.

Do you know what happened to the other studios' organs? Are they still around?

Nathan Barr: No, they're not. Not really. The Warner Bros. organ was broken up and I believe exists in a couple of different theaters around the country now. The Universal organ is, I know, slowly rotting away and it was removed in the '80s, I think, from Universal. This is the last one. I gave it a world-class restoration. It sounds spectacular and I kind of use it in everything. I used it in The House with a Clock in its Walls last year.

I use it wherever I can. Again, because it's not just pipes. It has 1,366 pipes, but it has a lot of percussion, too. It has a marimba, glockenspiel, xylophone, an actual piano. Those are all part of the organ.

Did you have creative freedom when you came on to Carnival Row? Were there any preexisting guidelines that they wanted you to follow?

Nathan Barr: No, no, it was total creative freedom. They temped the show with a lot of my stuff, but as I usually like to do, I didn't really pay attention to the temp too much because I was trying to find something new. Most filmmakers want that. It was very much a big sandbox to play around in and they were totally game for hearing whatever I wanted to try.

You said you're already looking ahead to season two. Do you have anything that you want to expand on, themes that you created for the first season or any musical direction you want to take it in?

Nathan Barr: Yeah. I like the sound that we created so far, so I think it would be more of that. There are a lot of themes that I really feel good about. The love theme between Vignette and Philo, I look forward to developing that further. I love the Sophie and Jacob theme. I love the Imogen and Agreus theme. It's a very classically thematic, heavy score. It's going to be really fun to continue to expand on that.

We have a nine-person women's choir come to my studio to record. That really gave a beautiful element to the score. I think the organ and the choir and the solo violin are really central to the entire score.

You mentioned The House With the Clock in its Walls. I know you've worked with Eli Roth for many, many years. You were on Cabin Fever, you did The House With the Clock in its Walls. What's that journey been like for you to work with Eli on all these different movies?

Nathan Barr: I was really pleasantly surprised that Eli was brought in to direct House with a Clock in its Walls. For Eli and me and anyone of our age, those sort of classic Goonies, Gremlins films that we grew up with were a big part of our early experience with film. The fact that Amblin brought Eli on board to go ahead and direct that was really exciting and that he asked me to do it, too. If you go look at something as violent as Hostel and then you look at House With a Clock in Its Walls, obviously there's a huge difference in what a scare feels like in Hostel versus what a scare feels like in House with a Clock in Its Walls. It's the kind of collaboration that one hopes will yield many different things. We're all captive to whatever the industry brings us at any given time. It was just a really exciting pivot in terms of what he was doing.

It was nice that the collaboration and the shorthand we had on Hostel and those movies kind of continued into this. He wanted to do something totally different as the director, and wanted me to do the same as a composer: something different. It just came together really quickly. It was honestly one of the easiest scores I've ever written because I have so many of those scores inside me that don't always get a chance to be revealed because of whatever I'm working on at the time.

You've also worked with Broken Lizard a few times, including Club Dread. Was that something that just came about organically? Did you know any of those guys?

Nathan Barr: Yeah, I didn't know any of those guys. I just went in and met on that gig, I think because of Cabin Fever. I think because Paul Soter, one of the guys in Broken Lizard, was a fan of that and said, "We should get that guy in." I met with Paul just before they started shooting Club Dread. That was a fun one.

Throughout your career you've gotten to work on different parts of franchises. You did Lost Boys: The Tribe, you did the Flatliners remake. As a horror fan, was there any franchise that you've been a part of that you were just geeking out over because you really liked it when you were a kid?

Nathan Barr: Flatliners was a re-scoring gig that Sony asked me to come in on. I was really excited. That's a film I definitely remember as a kid watching, and so it was exciting to do that again. I was sad to see it did so little business, but it was still a fun process.

Daily Dead talked to you back in 2013, and you talked about how you owned a human bone trumpet. I'm just curious, have you added anything like that to your arsenal since then? Do you have any other instruments that are really out there, that are really morbid or anything like that?

Nathan Barr: Not morbid, but I've added a hoard of instruments since we last spoke. They are all really strange and unusual, but nothing made of human bone. I use that in Carnival Row. It's highly processed, but yeah, I used that a bit. The big thing that's occupied my time obviously for seven years was just getting the pipe organ restored and the building built for it.

For your upcoming projects, you worked on The Turning [based on the Henry James novella The Turning of the Screw]?

Nathan Barr: Yeah, I worked on The Turning and I worked on The Hunt as well.

Yes. I'm hoping we get to see that sometime soon.

Nathan Barr: Yeah, I hope so, too. I hope so, too. I think all the controversy about it was really sort of silly. I think the film is fun and in a funny way, it's very balanced. I hope the world gets to see it because I think most people are going to feel rather silly that this was a film that—there are many films, any given year, which I can imagine truly being controversial, and this is just not one of them. It's such a parody. I always have a problem with people judging something before they even see it. I just think it's really inappropriate. Hopefully it'll be seen at some point.

The Turning was my second time with Amblin and first time with Floria Sigismondi, who's the director and she's really just a wonderful director. She is just such an amazing visual player for how she makes movies, and that was a really fun project as well.

Do you have anything else coming up you wanted to mention or any dream projects you want to do or anything like that?

Nathan Barr: Yeah. I have a hoard of stuff coming up, which is great. I have a lot of different stuff coming out. I'm doing Ryan Murphy's new show called Hollywood, which is a 1940s period piece that takes place in the Golden Age of Hollywood. You'll definitely be hearing the organ more in that. I also have a period piece for Hulu that takes place in 18th-century Russia called The Great, which is about Catherine the Great. It's with Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult. I have a beautiful film Alan Ball just wrote and directed called Uncle Frank, which stars Paul Bettany. I'm really enjoying the end of this year because each project is a really quality project and they're all completely different from one another. That's really exciting.