In the city of Los Angeles, love was greater than AIDS. Emmy-nominated composer Allyson Newman (“The L Word: Generation Q”) has released Commitment To Life (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), available now digitally. Listen to the 21-track score album on all major digital music services such as Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music!
Commitment To Life premiered at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival earlier this year, earning director Jeffrey Schwarz a Best Documentary award nomination.
Tracklist:
1. Commitment to Life
2. Hollywood
3. A lot of Stigma
4. Spirit and Warmth
5. Obituaries
6. Mother Cares
7. Mischaracterization of the Epidemic
8. Who Was in Charge
9. Joan Rivers
10. Break the Barrier
11. Political Mode
12. Quarantine
13. The Queers Mobilize
14.AIDS Walk
15. The Quilt, Pt. 1
16. The Quilt, Pt.2
17. Act Up
18. A Rubberband of Cards
19. Working on Set
20. Easy-E
21. Last Commitment to Life
Allyson Newman is an Emmy nominated composer whose work can be heard on The L Word Generation Q (Showtime), Partner Track (Netflix) and First Day (Hulu). She gained her master’s degree in composition from the Sydney Conservartorium of Music at which time she scored her first feature film Watermark that screened at the Cannes Film Festival. Shortly after this she moved to LA to study film scoring at USC. Allyson has been awarded both an Australia Council for the Arts Grant and an Australian Guild of Screen Composers Award for her work in film music. Allyson scored the multi award winning documentary feature Limited Partnership that premiered on PBS Independent Lens in 2015. Allyson then went on to score the Emmy nominated (2016) series Her Story, and in 2017 participated in the BMI Conducting Workshop. Following this Allyson scored Kusama-Infinity which premiered at Sundance 2018 and was released theatrically around the world. In 2019 Allyson collaborated with Oscar Winning directors Jeffrey Friedman and Rob Epstein to score State of Pride which opened the SXSW Film Festival. Also, that year Allyson scored A Woman’s Work: The NFL’s Cheerleader Problem which had its premiere at Tribeca, as well as Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound which premiered at Cannes. Most recently Allyson worked with the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles to score Commitment to Life for Emmy winning film maker Jeffrey Schwartz. Allyson is the co-president of the Alliance for Woman Film Composers!
Quote from Director:
“Working with Allyson Newman on the musical score for “Commitment to Life” was a dream come true. She elevated the emotional urgency of our story into a poignant and evocative score. The film is about the AIDS crisis in L.A., and Allyson came up with the idea of incorporating the Los Angeles Gay Men’s Chorus into the soundtrack. She knew it would add another layer of emotion, and it ended up working beautifully. I’ll be forever grateful to Allyson for bringing her heart and musical soul to this project”
About the project:
In the early 1980s, a young doctor at UCLA reports a strange immune disorder among gay men—the world’s first warning sign of the epidemic to come. In the decades that followed, Los Angeles would play a critical role in the battle against HIV/AIDS as doctors, movie stars, studio moguls and activists came together to change the path of the epidemic and how the world saw it. Commitment to Life documents this incredible drama—Rock Hudson and Eazy-E, Elizabeth Taylor and David Geffen, the Red Ribbon and Philadelphia, ACT UP and APLA—through the stories of those who lived through it. Using first-person interviews, rare archival and activist footage, and scenes from star-studded Hollywood fundraisers, Commitment to Life resurrects one of the epidemic’s most compelling histories—in order that we never repeat it.
