Interview with Laura Karpman
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About Laura Karpman
Composer for film and television, Oscar-nominated for American Fiction, with scores for The Marvels and Lovecraft Country, and founder of the Alliance for Women Film Composers.
Source: Score: The Podcast on YouTube
These answers are taken from #7 | Laura Karpman (American Fiction) | Full Episode on Score: The Podcast's YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
What drew you to a career as a composer?
When I started out, I thought I would be a professor and write new music in New York City, and that would be my life. And then I found that it didn't fit me so well as a person and as an artist, and that this film music thing was a better fit.
One day Milton Babbitt called me on the phone and he said, "I have an opportunity for you." I thought he was going to recommend me for a teaching job, which is what he would do for his students. At that point the Sundance Institute was by invitation only, and David Newman was running it. He said, "I want to recommend you to Sundance." And I went out there, and I was like the New York new music person. Shirley Walker was there, and she mentored me, and I wrote really weird music for the movies that we were doing, like 12-tone. I really was excited by composing music to film.
What do you enjoy most about composing?
What's so beautiful about being a media composer is that you listen to other people's music and then you filter it through your own brain, and then it takes on its own thing, and sometimes it teaches you about the music.
I had this incredible experience a long, long time ago. I was working on a television movie, and the director said there was not enough money, so we're going to do it all solo piano. He'd temped this one thing with Debussy, but he wanted it to be jazzier. So I started playing it and I thought, oh my God, this feels like Bill Evans. Thinking about jazz through the lens of French music was revelatory for me. Those Debussy solo piano preludes: there's so much of his playing and his harmonic language that comes out of that. I never made that connection between Bill Evans and Debussy, but it was so strong.
What was a great moment for you as a composer?
The other night we played the family theme for the ACLU's 100 years. I haven't played piano in public for a really long time. It's one thing to record: you can do it over, you can do two bars at a time. But playing it in public is a big deal. The other night I decided I would play the whole thing, and I pushed myself. I was out there with Elena Pinderhughes, this flutist. She's 28 years old, she's a genius musician, and this wonderful young bass player who's 23 years old. Before we got on, I was nervous, and I said, if I screw up, we'll just make it work. And Elena said, that's what Herbie says. There are no wrong notes. You just lean into it if you screw up.
All the other nominees are so excellent. I'm just thrilled to be nominated. It's beyond my wildest dreams, seriously. But yes, I do want to go for it.
How did your career as a composer unfold?
I had finished my doctorate, and I was assisting Milton Babbitt, who was my teacher, at Juilliard. And then I had five freelance jobs, which everybody did in New York. I was assisting a pianist, I edited eighth-grade music textbooks at Holt, Rinehart and Winston, I taught for Lincoln Center Institute, I did my commissions, and I would play jazz a little bit here and there.
At Sundance, I was very used to being the only woman in the room. Afterward, Stan Milander, who was my very first agent, came up to me and said, "You didn't ask any questions." And I said, "I just don't feel that there's room for me here. I think I'm just going to go back to New York." And he said, "Come to LA, give me a call." So I came, and he took me on. I said, I'm going to give it one year and see what happens.
Much of my career was in television movies, the first part of it.
What advice do you have for new composers?
I never find that recording is ever a mistake. It's always the right thing to do, and it does nothing but help you and help the people you're working with. And things always find a home, even if they don't in that project.
People have this real misunderstanding that agents get you work, and they rarely really do. It's hard to do that. You have to build your own relationships. And then what's nice, when it works well, is if you're going out for something and you have a nice relationship with somebody, but maybe you don't have a relationship with the studio or with the producers, and the agents happen to know those people. Then you can go at something from two angles, and that helps to make things happen.
How do you keep communication clear with directors and music supervisors?
Cord is a first-time director, and I felt all the demos really needed to sound good, because with jazz it's very, very hard to demo that stuff. So I didn't play anything for them that didn't have recorded elements in it, with me playing piano, and I had a sax player, I had Elena playing flute, and I would use sampled bass and sampled drums, to be replaced later. I knew that it had to sound right. I think that was actually a really, really good decision on my part, because it made it immediately understandable to them whether it was going to work or not.
If I found out, oh my God, I needed a better solo between bar one and three, then I would go back and send it out again and say, hey, can you redo this, or let's do this with a breathier, more Stan Getz style sax.
Who is your favorite composer, and why?
I love Monk. He's so complicated and simple simultaneously, which is what's so kind of crazy about his composition and piano playing. For me, with Monk, the right hand and the left hand are really different. It's almost like two pianists. Monk's left hand is usually blocky and simple, super stable on seventh chords, or open sevenths without even filling in the chord, and then a super, super active right hand.
When I was studying piano, I said to my piano teacher, I think Monk plays super clean. And she heard it as dirty in a way, because of the mistakes. But there's a clarity to his musical thought, I think, which is really amazing, and very influential on me and so many other people too.
Describe your musical style.
I've always kind of marched a certain path of maximalism. I've never been a simple composer. It's never been one note at a time, except when it has been. For a lot of years, many people said, oh, you should be more commercial, it needs to sound more like this, it needs to sound more like that.
There's a massively rich legacy of jazz and film music: Henry Mancini, André Previn, Michel Legrand, Quincy. I'm not the first person to do this. I'm an experienced film composer, I know how to do that. I understand jazz, I know how to do that. But I also know how to combine them together and create something that can have the fluidity of a film score but have the authenticity of something that feels like actual jazz.
Listen to Dar-Benn's theme from The Marvels if you want to hear how you sneak jazz into a film score without anybody knowing it's jazz.
Tell me about a cue or score that was hard to get right. What was the project and why was it challenging?
[American Fiction] was temped with all classic jazz, and if you love jazz, you sit down and you hear these tunes, and it feels so good to see that music connected with images on the screen. In some ways it's what we all dream of. But it didn't work as a score, because when you're using needle drops in that way, you can't get in and you can't get out of it. It just starts and then it ends. So it needed to have a score that could work within the context of a film score but still strongly allude to all of these influences.
The hardest part was figuring out how to record it, frankly: recording everybody separately and then bringing it together and making it feel like everybody was together as an ensemble, and having that groove. Especially the family theme stuff, which is really tough, because a family theme is never quite together, on purpose. It wound up working beautifully with dialogue, because I could use Jeffrey Wright's and Erika Alexander's voices as instruments within the ensemble. He'll say something, and then there'll be a pause, so there's a moment for a little saxophone, and then she'll say something.
Tell me something I may not know from reading your credits.
This house that I am living in now, that I have lived in for many, many years, was a beach house that my parents bought for like $100,000 in 1973. The downstairs is rented out and the upstairs was open, and my dad said, just come to LA, live in the upstairs; when you can afford to pay rent, you'll pay rent. I couldn't have done it without that gift from my father. I lived up there for a couple of years without paying rent, and I was able to get my career going. Eventually I bought the upstairs from him, and then eventually I got the downstairs. The entire downstairs, where I'm sitting now, is now a recording studio, and Nora, Benny and I live upstairs. It's like living above the grocery store.
I was the only woman in composition at Juilliard. When I went to Tanglewood, I was the only woman. It was normal. But I didn't think anything of it at that point in my life.
What are some of your professional goals for the future?
I did a women's panel at Santa Barbara where I announced that it's time to end incrementalism, and I want to see 50/50 by 2030. It has taken us 10 years to get from 2% of the top 250 box office films to 14% last year, which is our biggest year, and I'd like not to wait that long. We need to be at gender parity by 2030. It's enough. Let's do it.
I think our identity defines who we are as human beings and as people. I don't think it's something to run away from, but our identity does not necessarily translate into musical genre. I think that's the distinction that's important.
Laura Karpman's Full Biography
Oscar nominated, five-time Emmy award winning composer Laura Karpman creates powerful, imaginative scores that push the boundaries of storytelling. Her bold, incandescent works span film, television, theater, interactive media and live performance, reflecting an audaciously creative, prodigious fresh spirit. Karpman collaborates with some of the most renowned filmmakers of our time, including Eleanor, Francis Ford and Sofia Coppola, Cord Jefferson, Nia DaCosta, Alex Gibney, Misha Green, Rory Kennedy, Kasi Lemmons, Laura Nix, Sam Pollard, Liz Garbus, Elizabeth Wolff, Zoe Kazan, Kevin Feige and Steven Spielberg.
Karpman is a fierce champion for DEI in Hollywood. After founding the Alliance for Women Film Composers, she was elected the first female Governor in the Music Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. During her two consecutive three-year terms, she implemented sweeping change, facilitating the admission of dozens of underrepresented voices, co-founded the Academy Women's Initiative, co-chaired the LGBTQ+ Affinity Group, helped to create the Code of Conduct, and updated the bylaws with more inclusive, representative language. Her leadership in creating opportunity and advocating for inclusion is unparalleled.
She lives and works in Los Angeles with her wife, composer Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum, their son and two dogs.