Hollywood and Vine: local composer hits the big time in L.A.

El Verano’s Aaron Drake has scored 25 movies now, some small, some not. The latest is about beloved comedian Robin Williams.|

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.

‘There was no question in my house about whether you’d be practicing today. My mom was a hard ass.” Composer Aaron Drake

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.

Aaron Drake performs for his peers in the El Verano Elementary School multipurpose room. (submitted photo)
Aaron Drake performs for his peers in the El Verano Elementary School multipurpose room. (submitted photo)

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.

Aaron Drake at a childhood recital, staged every month by his Sonoma piano teacher Gwen McKeithen. “I can only think of maybe two performances--out of hundreds--that turned out how I had planned,” he told the Index-Tribune. (submitted photo)
Aaron Drake at a childhood recital, staged every month by his Sonoma piano teacher Gwen McKeithen. “I can only think of maybe two performances--out of hundreds--that turned out how I had planned,” he told the Index-Tribune. (submitted photo)

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.

Robin Williams in 2013. A new documentary about the comedian is being released this week. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP, File)
Robin Williams in 2013. A new documentary about the comedian is being released this week. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP, File)

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.”

Composer Aaron Drake. (submitted photo)
Composer Aaron Drake. (submitted photo)

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.

The film had no dialogue, just emotion and sound, and Drake’s idea for the music was complex. “It was based off this slightly esoteric form called a mensuration where you multiply the rhythm factors by two, and four, and eight, and so on,” Drake explained. “It was a three-part mensuration canon, and then it’s got this guitar that comes in. It sounds like indie rock, but then it’s got this old form to help reinforce the character’s growth and expansion. I’m still very proud of that score.”

Drake’s work is precise but he’s not a perfectionist, though he does write every note by himself. “There are studios that have teams where the composer will write the tag or the theme, then pass that off to someone who does the orchestration,” he said.

But for Drake, that model felt inherently wrong. “Once you come up with an idea, you want to take the idea for a walk,” he said. “I try to get the score good enough where I’m not overly critical, to be able to listen to the work and allow the imperfections to just sort of wash over me. I like deciding where the imperfections will go because I think without imperfections, the music becomes less of a human experience.”

For “Robin’s Wish” in particular Drake banked on the nuanced colors little mistakes can allow. “I’m glad to hear them,” he said. “Robin Williams was an incredible mind, an incredible genius, but also an imperfect human with flaws. In one scene he’s talking about his sobriety and losing it on a film in Alaska, and the fragile nature of that can really only be expressed by an imperfect performance.”

Drake still comes back to Sonoma every now and again, and is always surprised by the changing face of the town. “All those random weird markets on the outskirts are no longer there. Everything’s been remodeled and glossed-up. When I grew up there, Sonoma was a farming town,” Drake said with some sadness. “I guess that’s the way of life.”

And so the composer adds to his quiver, observing the constant evolution of places and the people within them. His parents both passed away before their son found success, but one likes to imagine they saw it coming.

"There was no question in my house about whether you’d be practicing today,” Drake said, acknowledging that the discipline opened the door to his life. “I love being a composer. I love reading the script or watching the film and thinking about the character to come up with meta-narratives that reinforce what’s happening in the story, tracks with different emotion to get the sound I’m looking for. “

The search for those sounds is disciplined and systematic. Inspiration, Drake said, is way overrated, a finicky and uncertain muse. “I’ve tried to stop waking up in the night with ideas because it’s not useful,” he said. “What’s useful is keeping a solid schedule. Show up, and the ideas are going to come. You’ve got to just sit down and go to work.”

Contact Kate at kate.williams@sonomanews.com

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