Hollywood and Vine: local composer hits the big time in L.A.
A generation ago, music lessons were a rite of passage for most children. Music was considered an essential language back then, as necessary as English, or mathematics.
Most kids suffered through those lessons with little enthusiasm, and—for a while—Aaron Drake, 43, hated them, too. But his mother, who drove the number 16 bus for the Sonoma Valley Unified School District with the discipline of a general shuttling troops to the front, insisted that her boys speak the language of music.
“In summer I would have much preferred playing in Sonoma Creek with my friends,” said Drake, who grew up on Craig Avenue in Boyes Hot Springs. “But my mom was a hard ass. I definitely had a point where I hated piano, hated practicing. It’s hard work to force yourself to concentrate for an hour, or two. Learning an instrument requires technical dexterity, but it also requires emotional depth.”
Back then, and perhaps even still, 11-year old boys weren’t generally known for their deep reservoirs of pathos.
But Drake stuck with the lessons and soon enough he was good, handily dispatching the preludes and fugues his Sonoma teacher, Gwen McKeithen, doled out. Through El Verano Elementary, Altimira Middle School, and Sonoma Valley High (1994) Drake persevered, deepening his musical skill and imagination.
Ideas swirled in his head constantly: motifs and hooks and strange chord progressions. He wasn’t just literate now, he was musically fluent. It became the fundamental language of his life.
Today, Drake writes musical scores for feature-length films out of his offices in Los Angeles. He has scored 25 movies now, some small, some not. The latest is about beloved comedian Robin Williams.
When Williams died by suicide in 2014, stunned fans struggled to comprehend how a man with such capacity for joy could suffer the kind of darkness that would make him take his own life. The answer to that question is what drives “Robin’s Wish,” a documentary about Williams’ struggle—and post-mortem diagnosis—with Lewy body dementia.
Lewy’s can only be definitively identified by way of autopsy, but it tortures its living victims with a host of strange symptoms: hallucinations and visions, spastic body movement, declining mental acuity and fluctuating powers of concentration, sleep disruption, depression, and perhaps worst of all, apathy. The afflicted know with certainty that something is wrong, but what the thing is cannot be proved.
Drake folded all of that uncertainty and fear into his score for “Robin’s Wish.”
“Robin Williams was so bombastic and gregarious, so funny, and such an incredible intellect. That’s what everyone saw. But the film follows him as he developed Lewy body dementia and the story of that is so sensitive and fragile and sad, so tragic, there was this dissonance between that and what the public was perceiving,” Drake said. “So I thought, let’s take these bombastic instruments like horn, trumpet, all the brass instruments that are usually used to signal here-comes-the-clown. Let’s play them and mic them in a way that’s fragile and soft. The music always sort of reveals itself. I have complete faith in the process.”
Talking about music with Drake requires something more than a beginner’s primer. He rattles off terminology and muses about form with the dexterity of someone who is made—in one way or another—entirely of sound.
One particularly rigid music professor at San Francisco State helped Drake realize he was destined to be a different kind of musician. “He had this very conservative view about historical authenticity and how to play, say, Bach partitas, and my opinion is that these are masterworks because they speak to generations of people,” Drake said. “At the end of the day, we’re living in the 21st century. We have 21st century ears and we’re in a different place. There’s not necessarily just one right interpretation.”
So Drake went abroad to study in Germany, and then began a masters in music at Cal Arts. The film he scored there in his final semester starred Scoot McNairy, a Hollywood A-lister with serious bonafides.
UPDATED: Please read and follow our commenting policy: