David Robbins - Details

Biography

David Robbins has been immersed in music all his life. The son of Gil Robbins, a member of the folk group "The Highwaymen", David grew up in Greenwich Village, NY, in the midst of many artists and performers that lived and worked there in the 60's and 70's. By virtue of his exploratory instincts and his geographical location, David was introduced at a young age to a wide variety of classical, folk, jazz, rock and ethnic music, and to this day never passes up an opportunity to discover and learn something new from this vast musical world.

After stints as guitarist and songwriter in several rock bands in the 70's, as well as dabbling in live concert and studio audio engineering, David found his true calling. In the 80's he worked extensively in theater as composer, music performer and sound designer in Los Angeles and New York. He is the music director for the renowned "The Actors Gang" of Los Angeles for which he contributed his talents for several of their award winning productions, including "The Good Woman Of Setzuan", "Carnage: A Comedy", "Freaks", and "Mein Kampf". David has won two Dramalogue awards for his efforts in theater.

These experiences have contributed to his ample reservoir of musical styles which he evocatively weaves into his film scores and compositions. This artful diversity can be heard in movies such as "Bob Roberts" where he co-wrote the several parodying folk songs with his brother Tim Robbins, as well as composing the underscore (for his efforts he won the Georges Delerue Award for the Impact of Music On Film at the Flanders Film Festival in 1992); in "Twenty Bucks" by using a light orchestra to match the mirthful quality of the story; in "Dead Man Walking" by tempering such a serious subject with the uplifting and timeless spirituality of harmonizing western and eastern music together as one; or in "Savior" where David traveled to Yugoslavia to use the Belgrade Symphonic Orchestra, a classical choir and several folk musicians and singers from that country to create a powerful and unforgettable score to compliment an equally powerful movie.

David has also had the opportunity to do several other scores using orchestral, jazz, rock and ethnic/world music. He combined an orchestral score with a mix of traditional American folk instruments including hammer dulcimer and mandolin in Dennis Quaid's "Everything That Rises" for TNT.
David collaborated for a third time with his brother Tim on the recent Disney/Touchstone feature, "Cradle Will Rock", which centered around Marc Blitzstein's ground-breaking musical of the same name, and events that transpired in 1930's New York. In addition to writing the score which features violinist Andrew Bird and clarinetist Paquito D'Rivera, David re-created music from Marc Blitzstein's play for several performance scenes filmed for the movie. For the score, he drew upon several musical styles including 30's jazz, klezmer, Spanish, Italian, Hungarian gypsy and vaudeville to create a "melting pot" of music to evoke the feel of New York in that day, as well as harmonizing with Blitzstein's music.

More recently, David's whimsical score to the dark comedy "How To Kill Your Neighbor's Dog" starring Kenneth Branagh, Robin Wright Penn and Lynn Redgrave, stands in contrast to the mesmerizing sounds of a lone trumpet and a wailing oboe weaving over strings, vibraphone and piano in the score to "The Prime Gig" starring Ed Harris, Vince Vaughn, Julia Ormond.

This past year has been an exciting one for David. He has completed a score for the upcoming documentary "The Day My God Died", bringing to light the serious problems of kidnapping and trafficking of young girls from Nepal to India, enslaved in brothels, and the incredible on-going efforts of a few good souls to free some of them and provide safe haven. David had the opportunity to enlist the talents of violinist Lili Haydn as well as one of India's premiere flute players Ronu Majumdar. David has completed the score for the short film "The Rules Of Love" which premiered at The Woodstock Film Festival in September 2002. He also has done sound design and music composition in the recent "Actors Gang" productions of Klaus Mann's "Mephisto" for which he received an Ovation nomination, the critically acclaimed "The Exonerated" and "Alagazam!", opening October, 2002.

David continues to show that there is more than one way to score a movie and that a truly effective score can be accomplished using new and fresh ideas that don't hide in the shadows of oft-repeated formulas and musical clichés.