Ryan Murphy’s upcoming FX series “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans” boasts one of the greatest casts of the TV season. But it has also broken new ground on the music side: a father-daughter team providing the musical score.
It’s believed to be a first for music in films and TV. Emmy winner and 15-time Oscar nominee Thomas Newman has written the theme, but his daughter Julia Newman, in her first major outing, has composed the score for the entire eight-hour miniseries.
Julia Newman, 29, earned a master’s degree from the University of Southern California’s screen scoring program in 2020 and has since worked on short films, documentaries, games and web series. But “Feud” was a massive new challenge, and, she says, “my dad and [executive producer] Alexis Martin Woodall allowed me the opportunity to spread my wings.”
The series (which debuts Jan. 31) takes place between 1955 and 1984 and depicts a literary and personal scandal involving writer Truman Capote (Tom Hollander) and his powerful socialite friends Babe Paley (Naomi Watts), C.Z. Guest (Chloe Sevigny), Slim Keith (Diane Lane), Lee Radziwill (Calista Flockhart), Ann Woodward (Demi Moore) and Joanne Carson (Molly Ringwald).
“It’s elegant, it’s gorgeous, it’s New York high society,” says the composer, who sought to “capture a gilded age utterly lost… desperately wanting to hold onto something that’s slipping through your fingers. Underneath the backstabbing and the beautiful clothing is a story about human connection, a profound human-ness.”
She worked for five months to write and record nearly three and a half hours of music, some of it with cellist Cameron Stone, guitarist George Doering and woodwind player Steve Tavaglione, along with considerable music generated electronically in her own Los Angeles studio.
With the elder Newman busy finishing the Pixar film “Elemental,” he had time only to write a main title theme — a compelling one, with fast-moving piano figures and a 40-piece string orchestra — leaving daughter Julia to focus on the storytelling needs of the eight episodes. She scored them sequentially, beginning with episode 1.
There are themes for Capote and for “the swans,” his famous women friends, and the overall sound, she concedes, is not unlike a Thomas Newman score. “I think my dad’s harmonic sensibility is deeply embedded in me,” she says.
Julia Newman credits her apprenticeship with her father, including observing the scoring process with such directors as John Madden (“Operation Mincemeat”) and Marc Forster (“A Man Called Otto”), with giving her “insight into how to stay really flexible [while] always striving for excellence.”
Julia Newman is part of the third generation of the Newman dynasty that has been involved with music for movies since 1930. Her grandfather Alfred Newman was the longtime head of music at 20th Century-Fox; Thomas is his youngest son, active in films since 1984. He earned an Emmy for the theme for “Six Feet Under,” and his 100-plus film scores include “The Shawshank Redemption,” “American Beauty” and “1917.”
She calls her time on the “Feud” series as “probably one of the greatest learning experiences of my entire life.”
