Mark Slater — Film & Television Composer

Early beginnings and education

We adapt to and reflect our environment. My first formal attempts to emulate a composer began at age 10 as a chorister at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford. My exposure to the conventions and formats of music in European culture — and the privilege of growing up in a home filled with knowledge and art from across the globe — is the earned result of generations upon generations of my ancestors who walked out of Africa and settled in what we now call England. I later studied film composition at the London College of Music.

An unexpected path into film music

My route into film scoring was anything but direct. After a Law degree, I took a chance on music while working as a support worker for ex-offenders at Norman House, London’s original halfway house. Sharing a house in Ealing, I bought a computer, a Cakewalk sequencer, an Emu Proteus/2XR orchestral module and a reverb unit, and began teaching myself to paint colour and feeling with the orchestra — transcribing scores by Rimsky-Korsakov, Brahms, Wagner, and Cliff Eidelman to learn how the masters wrote for every section.

In 1997 I came back to the stage, singing in musicals and acting in plays, and won a place on a Master’s in Composition for Film and TV at Ealing Studios, studying with Rodney Newton and Nick Ingman and mentored by Martin Ellerby. In the same year I relearned the piano well enough to perform Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with my father’s orchestra — in six months.

The first break

The first major break came from New York: the agency Tribal DDB asked me to score an interactive launch campaign for the Philips Aurea. Preparation met opportunity, and it gave me my first session at Abbey Road Studios, my music played by some of London’s finest session players. A year later I won the pitch to score the documentary 400 Years of the Telescope for the International Year of Astronomy, recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra at Abbey Road — which opened the door to a whole world of immersive media: fulldome, planetariums, and bespoke experiential formats.

First film

Questions of class and perspective run through my first feature-length film, an animated adaptation of Edwin Abbott’s Flatland.

A range of collaborations

I’ve recorded film soundtracks with the London Symphony Orchestra, the Budapest Film Orchestra, the Prague Philharmonic, and Metropolitan orchestras. Conducting the LSO at Abbey Road was a dream made manifest. I bring something personal to every soundtrack, and that voice has reached a great many people.

A style of my own

My compositions focus first on the orchestra, adding electronic and popular colours when a project calls for them. The acoustic instruments of the orchestra and the unamplified human voice — in solo or in combination — are the sounds I was immersed in for over thirty years. Synthesized sounds have their qualities, but they date quickly; every orchestral timbre, by contrast, has earned its place over centuries.

Multi-instrumentalist and former chorister

I practised the piano and cello in my youth to the level of the concerti, but chose composition over the performer’s life early on. Those years of playing — and my five as a chorister at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, singing three hours a day — gave me an ear for outlier excellence, and set the standard I hold my own music to.

Recognition

My work has been recognised at festivals and award panels internationally, and has won its share of honours — recognition I’m proud of, even as the music itself remains the point.

Music is a potent art form. It has the power to evoke feelings and emotions like nothing else. Mark Slater has harnessed this power and used it masterfully in the service of storytelling. — Robin Sip, Mirage3D

I’ve written more about the craft — and why I think film music is an art in its own right — in Film Music as an Art in Its Own Right.

Selected scores

All music & film →

Listen

A short reel of the film & TV work.

Clients