Ariel Marx on The Tale, A Small Light, Candy and Throwing Pottery

July 16, 2024

Soundtracks, Scores and More Staff

As a composer, she is known for her work scoring films from The Tale and Shiva Baby to Sanctuary and Birth/Rebirth, as well as her work in TV, including Candy (Hulu), A Friend of the Family (Peacock), and episodes of Black Mirror and American Horror Stories.  Recently, Ariel received an Emmy nomination for the NatGeo miniseries, A Small Light.

BY JASON LAZARCHECK

 

Most of Ariel Marx’s proficiency is on the violin. She plays on some of the scores she composes, and her solo album, Luthier, is a love letter to string quartets. She can also play guitar, piano, flute, and she grew up singing. Ariel is known as a multi-instrumentalist, but throughout her life, she’s practically been a multidisciplinary artist, from her childhood beads to the shadowboxes she constructed as a teen to pottery.

After a day spent composing in her music studio, she loves using her hands to do something else, something a little simpler than writing or performing a film score. 

I wasn’t one of these kids who grew up knowing I wanted to be a professional musician and went for it and studied it from the get-go. I always loved music. And I always loved playing it, and it just happened to be that most of my friends were musicians growing up.

I love ceramics! I love it so much because it’s so physical. I mean, pottery on the wheel. It’s so physical and you have to be so present, and it’s so reactive and you can fuck up something you’ve spent two hours on just by, like, looking somewhere and jabbing your arm into it. It’s really fun and physical in that way… Basic physical things. Making something. I just like generating stuff.

As a composer, she is known for her work scoring films from The Tale and Shiva Baby to Sanctuary and Birth/Rebirth, as well as her work in TV, including Candy (Hulu), A Friend of the Family (Peacock), and episodes of Black Mirror and American Horror Stories.  Recently, Ariel received an Emmy nomination for the NatGeo miniseries, A Small Light.

I wasn’t one of these kids who grew up knowing I wanted to be a professional musician and went for it and studied it from the get-go. I always loved music. And I always loved playing it, and it just happened to be that most of my friends were musicians growing up.

Initially, Ariel thought she would study psychology. She attended Vassar but dropped out after a semester. Teenage Ariel wasn’t ready to be away from home and wasn’t ready to be in school. She took a semester off. Then she enrolled in Hampshire College, which is unique in that there are no grades and they also allow you to design your own major. 

It’s really good for people who are multifaceted and pulled in a lot of different directions. I went to Hampshire thinking I’d study plant biology, and then, while I was there, I was surrounded by musicians. Most of my friends were musicians, and they were studying music formally there. And I became more and more courageous. They made me more and more courageous about actually focusing on that.

As Ariel’s courage and love of music grew in college, so did her love of folklore and mythology, as well as her love of fine art. She was no longer studying plant biology, but she was cultivating and propagating different artistic passions. She decided to pursue music as a career, but she didn’t know what that looked like or how to pursue it.

I loved being swept away in books and in films and in pieces of art, and I realized I was more inspired by reacting to something creatively rather than creating it for music’s sake. I didn’t really think about film and TV scoring as something I would do, but I did realize I really love [asking], “What if I look at that painting and I compose something in reaction to that? And what if I made my own animations, stop-motion animation?” 

She made shadow boxes. They’re really deep frames, four inches deep, inside which the creator can make three-dimensional pieces of art. Ariel would create a series of shadow boxes that she would then write the music for.

I think back on this now, and I was like, “How could it not have been more clear what you wanted to do?”

Her mom is a painter and a designer, so Ariel grew up trying every kind of arts and crafts imaginable. And she’s still very crafty. Knitting, beading, painting, and pottery, especially, still keeps her grounded. Through the shadow boxes and other hands-on forms of artmaking in college, Ariel found a multifaceted approach to composing music. Rather than be pulled in a lot of different directions, she found her own way to bring artistic disciplines together. Still, Ariel needed some convincing from one of her college musician-friends to pursue film scoring.

It took one of my friends to be like, “Your music is really cinematic or filmic. It lends itself to narrative stories.” And that just clicked for me.

After she graduated from Hampshire College, Ariel studied with a private professor, a jazz composer named Felipe Salles, and another composer named Peter Roe. After two or three years of study, she felt ready to apply to graduate school for film scoring.

Because I hadn’t had formal-formal music training yet, and I felt like I needed that and wanted that. And so I got into the NYU masters in music film scoring program. And that’s where the beginning of my professional career started.

Ariel really wanted the foundational technical knowledge, and the NYU program was two years of training. She learned what she needed to know, on a practical level, to feel prepared to enter the industry: all the software a composer needs to use, delivery standards and specifications, and the ability to produce, mix, edit, and record.

She had a technological toolset, but she also emerged from grad school with 50 short films under her belt. Ariel collaborated with dozens of young filmmakers to score their shorts, actively using the new tools in her kit to tell compelling cutting-edge stories.

That was really also my formal education in communication. Collaboration. I was working with filmmakers just at the beginning of their careers. And short films are so wacky and amazing and a lot times it’s people’s first stab at things, and I wrote in so many different kind of genres and worked with so many different personalities.

The people Ariel met during that time remain her best friends today, and she learned enduring lessons about the collaboration between composer and filmmaker by doing it so many times. She thinks working with young filmmakers is probably the best training an emerging composer can get, because the more developed an artist gets over time, the more they can identify what their style is. They have a better sense of self, and they know what they want.

But when you’re working with really young artists, you’re all really trying everything. So in a way, it was a great bootcamp in terms of navigating “how do we zero in and how can I guide this” so we can both feel like we’re communicating about the same thing, musically.

Upon graduation in 2015, Ariel was basically catapulted into the entertainment industry, and her collaborations evolved from emerging filmmakers to working with Hollywood veterans. As she sought her first big commercial project, she landed a part-time position assisting Marcelo Zarvos on shows like The Affair on Showtime. Ariel was excited for a window into the process of a busy composer. Although the job was only a few months, she was really grateful for the exposure.

 

I had done so much film work, short films, I was really craving to be infused into an environment where I could see how someone at a much more advanced scale was working… It was during a time when he was really busy, so he was kind of asking for other help. And it was an awesome experience. I learned so much about his creative process and also how to manage a team and how to manage multiple projects at once. 

Right around this time, Ariel put her own creative process to the test on her very first feature. The Tale is a 2018 drama film written and directed by Jennifer Fox and starring Laura Dern, Ellen Burstyn, Elizabeth Debicki, Jason Ritter, and Common.

You gain a certain confidence in yourself and trust in yourself after you’ve accomplished something, right? And so things that felt uneasy or uncertain or scary before no longer feel that way. So having accomplished a feature was a really big new experience for me and I felt confident and excited to keep doing that.

This opportunity came to Ariel, not via her new Hollywood connections, but rather through the creative connections she formed working on those many independent short films in New York. A producer on one of the very first indie shorts Ariel scored was now a producer on The Tale. The film didn’t have a large budget and the producers were open to explore newer voices, so this particular producer, Reka Posta, named Ariel as an option. Ariel demoed for it and got the job. She could not have predicted that one little short would lead to this, but Ariel was working on her first big feature film.

It was sort of an out-of-body experience, because it was all of a sudden. I was assisting, staying up very late at night. That was a very different life. Then all of a sudden, getting this film and “holy shit, Laura Dern is on my monitor and Jason Ritter and Ellen Burstyn.” This amazing cast. The weight of being given that opportunity was really overwhelming. But once I pushed through that, and this is what I think I’ve learned to do so much more is, regardless of the project or the people or the amount of money involved, you just gotta remember that your art is what is wanted and to try to be detached from these external forces that might intimidate you. So I got into a moment where I was like, “OK, I just need to write a piece of music. This doesn’t need to be any different from anything I’ve done before.”

The subject matter of The Tale is dark and difficult. The writer-director, Jennifer Fox, had previously been a documentarian, and in this scripted narrative film, she explored a personal story about how a rowing coach molested her as a child.

Laura Dern plays this woman who has always framed this relationship and these memories as something else. As love and not harmful. But she, as an adult, is reckoning with these memories.

The Tale premiered in January 2018, so the film was being produced and distributed during the dawn of the #metoo movement. It was an amazing time to be involved with a project like that, for Ariel and everyone who worked on it. The creative team was determined to give the story dimension and depth.

The score for that was very much about not committing to the predatory nature of it, but rather how can someone have love and fondness and compacted feelings towards an abuser. So it was very much about memory and nostalgia and the fabric, the very densely woven fabric of trauma. And so the music, it was light and it was textural and it dreamlike and it was very innocent at times and it was much darker at times. But the main brief for that was to have a sense of warmth and compassion and understanding for how someone could misunderstand this. And so to not demonize him from the start but to really show the journey of how someone reconciles with that.

It was a guitar-based score, and Ariel worked with a player named John Benthal. Ariel recalls how beautiful his performance was, nylon melodies and textures, and she herself played some strings on it. The Tale was intimate and personal, telling the filmmaker’s own true story, but it resonated universally. The film went to Sundance, where it was bought by HBO, and it received lots of positive attention and had genuine social impact. As the composer, throughout the process, Ariel maintained a close and unique collaboration with Jennifer Fox.

It was so biographical, and then to have access to the filmmaker like the access that I did was incredible and pretty rare. Because you don’t usually have it. When a docuseries is being made or a dramatization is being made about something that’s happened, you often don’t have direct access to people who experience it, and I did. And that was a really powerful experience.

Each project teaches an artist something, and The Tale not only strengthened and sharpened Ariel’s creative tools as a composer, but the film did the same for her confidence. Ariel completed a feature, and not just any feature but a film as powerful as The Tale. Once she did that, she knew she could do it again. As simple as that sounds, it’s powerful too.

You gain a certain confidence in yourself and trust in yourself after you’ve accomplished something, right? And so things that felt uneasy or uncertain or scary before no longer feel that way. So having accomplished a feature was a really big new experience for me and I felt confident and excited to keep doing that.

She went on to do several other indies, which led her to a film called Shiva Baby. In 2020, this cringe-inducing dramedy set at a Jewish funeral service wound up being a breakout for both Ariel and the director, Emma Seligman.

That movie was so much, like completely the opposite of The Tale. It was very improvisational and harsh and textural and it was just me on strings and a percussionist, and it was dissonant and experimental. And what was so fun was that I got to be so crazy on that and Emma just wanted me to go as bonkers as possible. I’m so grateful to her and that film and that experience, because that has been a calling card for me for a lot of future projects after that, where it kind of gave me permission to be bolder and wilder in my approaches and pursuits.

Ariel could never have known that this small movie would be such a big step forward in her composing career, but she credits Emma Seligman’s vision and one of her professor’s at NYU who heard Ariel’s music and knew that Ariel had been working in the indie film community and made the recommendation. Ariel admits you just can’t plan this stuff, but once again it began with one of those dozens of short films and collaborations with emerging filmmakers.

Shiva Baby was an indie darling, and Ariel’s distinctive score contributed greatly to the storytelling. When others producers and filmmakers saw the movie and heard Ariel’s work, it inspired them to trust her with the soundtracks to their stories. She contributed more bold and wild music to films like The Catch, 13 Minutes, So Cold The River, and Next Exit, as well as her first major TV project, a docuseries, Ted Bundy: Falling for a Killer.

The bold and wild aesthetic of Shiva Baby has always been in Ariel, and fortunately for her career and for the many stories she’s helping tell with her music, she’s been able to let that sound out, be herself as a composer, and avoid being pigeonholed. Ariel’s education and prior scoring work prior to Shiva Baby didn’t exactly show this side of her, but the breakout score truly resonated with people.

I was so grateful to have more traditional experiences and then this very bold score that people really appreciated. And it really just gave me the keys to be able to do that with future projects. So anyway, that was a course change for me for sure. I mean, it was a teeny tiny indie film, and I think the beauty of that was I think that no one answered to anyone. They did whatever they wanted. And people loved it.   

Shiva Baby was a real experience for the people who worked on it and anybody’s who’s seen the compelling claustrophobic little film. Ariel is proud of her work and especially proud of the writer-director, Emma Seligman.

 

 

She has this new film coming out named Bottoms and it’s completely different. It shows an amazing breadth of talent that she has, and it shows that she’s not just an indie darling. She can do anything. And she can also bring her amazing voice to it. And those, “indie” and “commercial,” are not mutually exclusive. You can have something that’s on a much larger, wider scale and also have your voice come through. And I think I’ve been able to do that too. 

Shiva Baby led Ariel to the next phase of her composing career: scripted television. She scored a stand-alone episode of American Horror Stories entitled Drive In about a forbidden film, which seems appropriate given her indie movie background, and she also scored her first scripted miniseries, Candy, for Hulu. Starring Jessica Biel, the show is a true crime story is centered around 1980s housewife.

Ariel already knew how daunting the pace of TV can be. She’d learned that from her time assisting Marcelo Zarvos. Compared to the indie film world she came up in, she remembers how busy he was, juggling multiple projects at once, and how intimidating that seemed in her few months working there.

The schedule seemed so fast. I think with short films I was so used to mulling over something for months and months and months and months, and when you jump onto a TV show, and you’re like, “Hold on. I just have two weeks to do this?” It’s a different creative process. So that was eye-opening, for sure.

Clearly, Ariel’s got the job done on American Horror Stories, since she was brought back the next season to do another episode. This also led to an episode in the 6th season of Black Mirror called Mazey Day. Meanwhile, after Candy, she went on to score another true crime miniseries, A Friend of the Family for Peacock. 

It’s much more about internalized misogyny and oppression and postpartum and this false sense of domestic bliss. It’s much less about the murder and much more about the psychological zeitgeist of the time.

These shows seem to share a lot of DNA, as human dramas with dark horror tones that explore oppression and sexuality, often with female protagonists and antiheroes. This lineage traces all the way back to her first feature films, The Tale and Shiva Baby, and many of the indie shorts that came before those. Ariel acknowledges that there are these commonalities to all the projects, but none of them are the result of deliberate choices she made in terms their themes or tones. She thinks the biggest connective tissue is the collaborations themselves.

With each of these projects, they desired a bespoke-ness to the score, they didn’t need it to be anything else. For a lot of these [TV] projects, it was only ever temped with my music. I was involved with preproduction. I was part of the creation of the show. I wasn’t an afterthought, having to get it done, you know, two hours before the mix. There was a lot of deliberate care to bring me in.

Ariel wrote about ten themes for Candy before they shot. Her music was part of the storytelling language as much as the set design and the hair and makeup and the costuming. There was no outside aesthetic, and she and her music felt more a part of the series because of that.

And to know that Jessica Biel had heard this music before she performed and how that informs her performance. It doesn’t get better and more collaborative than that. That was just the dream, of it being so integrated into the process. And so respected too. 

Executive producers Nick Antosca, Robin Veith, and Alex Hedlund really encouraged this creative process, and that kind of collaboration is rare even in feature-making. Typically, TV composers get brought on late.

The cut is locked. It’s six weeks before the dub. What are you going to do? And people end up moving mountains during that time. But it’s so much more rewarding when you’re brought on earlier.

In addition to the collaborative process, Ariel also sees a connection within her TV series in terms of their narrative story. Each of the stories has a complex point-of-view. On its surface, Candy is true crime melodrama about a 1980s housewife who ends up murdering her best friend, but it’s tonally complex with deep layers.

It’s much more about internalized misogyny and oppression and postpartum and this false sense of domestic bliss. It’s much less about the murder and much more about the psychological zeitgeist of the time.

Similarly, Ariel’s most recent scripted series, A Small Light on NatGeo, is a complex, layered drama about true story of the woman who risked her life to shelter Anne Frank’s family.

A Small Light was less about the Holocaust and more about allyship and more about how do you survive and how you continue to make jokes and find joy and continue to live your life under these conditions. And how ordinary people can do extraordinary things. So while yes, it was a Holocaust drama, it was not. Each of these projects has had a very specific small window of focus that the music latched onto. So I’ll say the commonalities are [there] but more so a desire to really cling to a very specific point-of-view. And try to do so as uniquely as possible.

A Small Light certainly achieved that specificity, complexity, and deep human drama, and for Ariel’s contribution to the storytelling, the original dramatic score, she was nominated for a 2023 Emmy: Outstanding Music Composition For A Limited Series.

Ariel is Jewish, so she has a very personal connection to the inspirational and tragic story of A Small Light and the risks people took during the Holocaust. Her father’s family is Polish and Germany, and her grandmother is first-generation American in New York. Her mother’s family is from Germany and Denmark, and those are the biggest percentages. Ariel’s Jewish lineage goes back generations, and the connection is not just ethnic and cultural but musical too. 

I come from a line of seven cantors, which are religious singers in the Jewish religion, and back many generations, there’s documentation of this being the lineage of our family. So obviously I didn’t meet any of them but there was always a strong appreciation of music in my family. 

Ariel did not know this when she first began pursuing music. She only learned this later. But she believes her family line of Jewish singers has to be influential to her. What the seven cantors would make of Shiva Baby and Ariel’s bold wild score, we can’t be certain. But Shiva Baby is a Jewish story too, a contemporary one, with a specific and claustrophobically small window of focus that Ariel connected with and her music latched onto. As different as Shiva Baby and A Small Light seem, they not only share a connection to Jewish people, but they each have layers of complexity and a precise point-of-view. And no one else could have composed their scores but Ariel Marx.

Although she never met her cantor ancestors, both of Ariel’s parents were very musical. Her dad was in a bluegrass band when he was in college, and her mom was a pianist. Neither played professionally, but music was very important to them. Her dad was constantly singing, and her mom played piano very well and also had a great voice. So Ariel grew up singing a lot of music with them. They would play during holidays and do family singalongs when they went to camp.

Both my parents are really great at singing over a song and harmonizing with it, and so I always had exposure at a young age to harmony and not just absorbing the melody and singing along, but “How can I create a part that’s complimentary to what we’re listening to?” And my grandpa on my mom’s side, he played a lot of ragtime piano. It was always in me, around me.

Crosby, Stills, and Nash always bring Ariel back to warm memories of growing up: Helplessly Hoping, You Don’t Have to Cry, Judy Blue Eyes. Listening to them sing in harmony and joining in with her own voice as a child was foundational to her musical process today, how she does everything by ear.

Ariel also went to a Waldorf School, where they integrate music at a really young age, so she was playing instruments as long as she can remember. 

We all started off on some annoying recorder. But ours were not plastic recorders. They were these beautiful wooden recorders, and I still have them, and they actually are really gorgeous. They make a great sound. I still remember my teacher teaching you how to blow into a recorder, and she’d hold a candle in front of us, and we had to blow very lightly so the flame just bent but it didn’t go out. 

Ariel played the silver flute as her first instrument in grade school orchestra. And then she played guitar and taught herself piano, although she never studied piano formally. 

And then I ultimately settled on the violin as my main instrument, and strings in general. So I am a multi-instrumentalist, but I would say most of my proficiency is on violin. I started off in the folk world and then grew into studying more jazz and classical. And then I realized I wanted to do composition.

Ariel has an extremely small team. Lately, it’s basically been just her and a wonderful assistant composer and music editor, Edith Mudge. Ariel has also worked with other fantastic music editors on TV projects: Leah Dennis on Candy and Joanie Diener was on A Small Light. 

They have been so instrumental and completely invaluable in terms of helping get music in the show, making quick changes, being the intermediary sometimes when the teams are bigger. But basically all the creativity is still in my hands, and that’s how I like it. I don’t have people helping me write. And I do have multiple projects at the same time, and sometimes I’m a mad woman, but I have been just able to successfully work it out in terms of balancing multiple projects. 

Ariel divides her days into mornings and afternoons. The creative work she needs to get done, the creation of ideas and themes, she does early when she’s fresh, and then she can devote time later in the day to polishing and cleanup. And she’ll keep her operation small, at least for now, because that’s how she can keep her hands and her voice on everything. 

 

In addition to TV and film composing, in 2020 Ariel had her hands and musical voice on a solo album entitled Luthier. This was the first time she’d written an album of music that’s just for her, and that was much less comfortable for her. Ariel really does love collaborating with different artists, going all the way back to student films and the musicians-friends of her teens. But this solo album came at a time when she was frustrated because some of her music had been locked up in a project and she wasn’t able to release what she’d written. The solo album was basically a reaction to that.

I’d been really in a motion of just wanting to work with chamber strings and a string quintet, and I love the ensemble and string instruments will always be my first love, even though I’ve ventured on to many different palettes and whatnot. It was a response to wanting to put something out without any restrictions on it. 

The album is called Luthier because that’s the name of the person who makes the string instrument. And all of the tracks are named after either acoustic physics or the literal techniques of joining the joints of an instrument together or music theory math.

It fluctuates, it contracts from orchestra to string quartet to orchestra, and that is one of the most satisfying arrangement situations. When you have the ability to use full forces but you don’t use them all the time, and you use the detail and intricacies of a small group and then have these moments of contrast with a larger group. Because nothing beats the amazing sound of an orchestra. 

Ariel is fascinated by the mythological idea of this person in a small space, creating, cutting wood, gluing wood to minuscule measurements, creating one of the most beautiful sounds you can. There’s clearly a romanticization of the work of that person.

Well, Ariel Marx is that person. As a composer, she takes great care in what she makes, each of her creations. She uses her hands and her ears and her heart. She’s also a multi-instrumentalist who can play on her own tracks, and she loves crafting something bespoke and new. Sometimes it’s a hobby, forming clay on a pottery wheel or gardening (her interest for plant biology didn’t totally wither), and it’s just for fun. Crafting this solo album certainly meant a lot to Ariel, but that’s how she approached it, with just-for-fun exuberance.

I think I wrote it in a month, and I call it a love letter to strings and also a love letter to chamber music. I’m such a big fan of soloists and the detail you get with small groups versus large groups. I love working with orchestras but I have to say I really love the detail you get with a smaller group.

As with any of her projects, Luthier and its gorgeous music opened doors to more composing works for Ariel. Her heart will always be with a small group of players, but on a recent film, Sanctuary, she deliberately worked with a whole string orchestra for one of the pieces. The first track of the 2022 thriller about a dominatrix is aptly called She’s in Charge Now, but it’s not all orchestra, all the time.

It fluctuates, it contracts from orchestra to string quartet to orchestra, and that is one of the most satisfying arrangement situations. When you have the ability to use full forces but you don’t use them all the time, and you use the detail and intricacies of a small group and then have these moments of contrast with a larger group. Because nothing beats the amazing sound of an orchestra. 

That being said, the piece that may have inspired Ariel the most, in terms of textural work, composition, why she loves small ensembles and string quartets, and why she’s so obsessed with instrumentation, orchestration, and arrangements is the Ravel String Quartet in F. Ariel distinctly remembers her very first score study of it in school.

Each movement is just a universe of techniques and colors and textures. He has no business putting that many things in one piece and he does and it’s just gorgeous. It’s beautiful. And it’s so inspiring.

Lately, she’s also been listening to a lot of Bill Evans and Kaija Saariaho, an incredible concert composer, and she always has Ravel and Arvo Pärt on loops. She really loves the band Big Thief. And one of those musical friends from college, he always sends her down these rabbit holes of traditional American folk music. Old-time music and Irish music and Scottish music. All these beautiful folk tunes. That’s the kind of smorgasbord that Ariel has been into recently.

In addition to music, she continues to be inspired by folklore, history, and physical art-making. Ceramics and beads are expressions of how Ariel works and who Ariel is, but what inspires her the most of all continues to be collaboration. It’s her dream to continue making music and telling stories with great creators and filmmakers, whether she’s worked with them before or they’re new collaborators with specific points-of-view, as long as they’re interested in making something original, handcrafted, and not trying to replicate any other voice but that which serves the story they’re telling, and they let Ariel be her best self.

I know people might roll their eyes at this answer, but I feel like I have been already working on my dream projects. I feel so grateful and so happy and so lucky to have been able to work on the kind of stories that I have because I’ve been working with collaborators that basically just say “be you and surprise me.” And I don’t know how it gets better than that.

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