Monthly Archives: August 2014

Silvestri wins two Emmys for COSMOS

Cosmos composer Alan Silvestri won for both Music Composition for a Series and Main Title Theme Music at Saturday night’s Creative Arts Emmy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles.

Predictable, maybe, but also well-deserved. Here’s a look at just how he did it, over several weeks at the beginning of the year.

The other big winners included David Arnold and Michael Price for the final installment of this year’s Sherlock series on PBS, and veteran pop-rock artist Don Was as music director for the Beatles special The Night That Changed America.

A rundown of the Emmy winners in all five categories is here.

Emmy music nominees 2014

Every year I create a full-page chart for Variety that looks, in shorthand form, at all of the nominees in the five Emmy music categories. It never comes out well online — it’s designed to be a chart!

Luckily, our friends at Variety created a large-scale version, which debuted last night at the annual reception for nominees, co-sponsored by the Television Academy and the Society of Composers and Lyricists. Here it is:

VarietyTVchart2014

And here is the original story I wrote after the nominees were announced July 10.

Just what is the “music direction” category?

There are five music categories at the Emmys. Four are pretty straight-ahead: music composition for a series; for a movie, miniseries or special; theme music; and song. The fifth is a little mysterious for many, so my editors at Variety asked for a story about it, and along the way I talked to several of the nominees.