Purcell alumna, Mica Levi has been nominated for Best Original Score at the 2017 Academy Awards and Best Original Music at the 2017 EE British Academy Film Awards for her work on Jackie, the biopic about former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
Mica studied at The Purcell School from the age of nine, and then went on to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. She has enjoyed critical and commercial success with her band, Micachu and the Shapes, and the score for Jackie is her second movie soundtrack, having already scored Jonathan Glazer’s sci-fi horror Under the Skin for which she also received a BAFTA nomination in 2014.
Music critic and culture writer, Claire Lobenfeld, describes Mica as ‘one of the most innovative composers working in film right now’. Of the score for Jackie, she reflects that Mica’s ‘recurrent interest in warped compositions’ projects ‘the sweetness and composure of a First Lady struck by the tragedy of the assassination of her husband, President John F. Kennedy, and the grim reality of having witnessed your beloved being shot to death.’ Mica has said in an interview with Lobenfeld that she used glissandos, a ‘glooping and distortion and morphing’ of sound, to show the transitions between blissfulness and grimness throughout the film.
The 89th Annual Academy Awards will take place on 26th February 2017, and the EE British Academy Film Awards will take place on Sunday 12th February 2017.
For more information about Mica and her award-nominated score, read Lobenfeld’s full interview here.
