A 19th-century seaside resort, the mind of a trained killer, the natural beauty of the world’s largest animals – these are just a few of the many soundscapes Emmy-nominated composer Ruth Barrett (Music 1994) has conjured for film and television across her career.
With her extensive CV spanning action series like Bodyguard and The Terminal List, period dramas like Sanditon and Victoria (for which she was nominated for an Emmy), the wildlife documentary Big Beasts and multiple feature films, you have likely heard Ruth’s music playing on your screens.
Ruth’s three latest scoring projects – Netflix’s recently released superhero epic Old Guard 2 (co-composed with Steffen Thum) and the upcoming Amazon dramas Dark Wolf (a prequel to The Terminal List) and The Girlfriend – all continue to showcase her talent for generating thoughtful, creative and original compositions that enhance these story worlds.
“Music tells a story and can let you into a character and also a world,” she says. “You’re creating a world that the film or TV show can exist in and that allows people to access it in ways they maybe didn’t know. It could be called manipulation, but it’s an enjoyable form of manipulation. You’re holding hands with the audience.”
Finding the right sound to ‘manipulate’ audiences often leads Ruth down unexpected paths. She initially struggled to pinpoint the musical identity of one of the leads in The Girlfriend, which will explore the conflict between a mother and her son’s girlfriend. Experimenting and pushing the creative boundaries, however, paved the way to a unique soundtrack.
Ruth says: “I realised that when a character seems a little severe, you don’t need to do a severe or serious sound; there could be a wacky side to them. The show should be playful but is also like a Greek tragedy, so I kept the skeleton of the Greek tragedy sound and reinvented it with a Latin- and Rolling Stones-style percussion put together with a witchy, shamanic vibe.
“I was trying to create what a particularly female kind of war would sound like, and a shaman drum with a tribal vocal was a fun way to delve into that. Collaborating with director Robin Wright, who also stars in the show, unlocked it and helped nail the sound of her character.
“But there are two completely different sound worlds – one is acoustic and one is electronic. It was really cool to bounce them off each other so that it all feels like the world of The Girlfriend.
“That’s what I like about doing this. You’re making a fabric and you don’t know what the whole thing is going to look like. But when you finish it, it feels like the show. It’s like being a musical magpie, going along and looking for little gems that could be anywhere. You can’t leave any stone unturned.”
Above all, Ruth wants her scores to make audiences feel closer to the action, to the characters and their feelings. This musical appeal to the emotions is what first fascinated Ruth as a child when hearing film scores. She singles out the 1980 space opera Flash Gordon as particularly inspiring for its use of bass and an incessant beat to build tension in its audiences.
“I love how music can really affect people on a visceral level,” she says. “It’s a medium that can transcend language and it’s human and it’s something we don’t completely understand. The frequencies vibrate in your body and produce a response – but how do you trigger that response? I’ve always been obsessed with that.”
The Old Guard 2 is now available to stream on Netflix. The Terminal List: Dark Wolf will air in August and The Girlfriend in September, both on Amazon Prime Video.
