Documentary
Documentary scores
Scores for documentary film — where the music holds the human weight of a true story without ever overplaying it.
Documentary asks a different kind of restraint from a composer: the people on screen are real, the stakes are theirs, and the score’s job is to carry feeling without ever reaching past the testimony. These films run from orchestral spectacle to the quietest kind of grief.
Damien Puckler · 2007
Dodging Bullets
A documentary of near-misses — the accidents, illnesses, and disasters that came within a breath of a life and then, somehow, didn’t. I scored it to hold the line between dread and reprieve, keeping the music restrained and human rather than reaching for action-film menace, so the weight stays with the people telling their stories.
Kris Koenig · 2011
Tears of My Mother (Lágrimas de mi Madre)
A talking-head documentary on gang violence in Northern California, told through the mothers and families left in the aftermath. The subject is grief, not spectacle, and the score stays with it — spare, unhurried, and careful never to sentimentalise testimony that speaks for itself.
PBS · London Symphony Orchestra · 2009
400 Years of the Telescope
A PBS science special marking four centuries of the telescope, scored for the London Symphony Orchestra and recorded at Abbey Road. It remains one of the projects I’m proudest of — there’s a fuller account, with session photographs, on its own page.
