Brian Tyler's first film scores date from the late 90s but his career has clearly taken off since then and it is no surprise that he quickly progressed to A-list films. Part of that success may well be due to his retention of traditional musical values. While a lot of modern film music has become generic background wallpaper with interesting things removed (such as melody and melodic delevopment), Tyler is well-schooled in the traditional musical skills of counterpoint and harmony. The result is a score which supports the action but is also intrinsically interesting in a musical sense, so the whole experience is better rounded, the film is more memorable and an added bonus is that the isolated soundtrack is also interesting to listen too. But beside the A-list films Tyler has contributed to smaller budget productions and "shorts", and also a number of Television series such as "Terra Nova", "Transformers Prime", "Sleepy Hollow", "Hawaii Five-0" and "Scorpion". The composer has worked previously on a couple of episodes from the series "Star Trek: Enterprise" so he is not a stranger to the Star Trek Universe.
Brian Tyler has never been too far from the entertainment business - his grandfather Walter Tyler was an art director receiving 9 oscar nominations for his role on a number of golden age movies. He learned Piano at an early age, and has become well-versed in Guitar, Orchestral Percussion, Cello and Bass. He graduated from UCLA and Harvard and moved straight into film scoring. One of his first film scores was "Six String Samurai" which allowed Tyler a certain degree of latitude in this offbeat tale. He then has a spell scoring a series of movies in the horror or thriller genres such as "The 4th Floor", "Terror Tract" and "Frailty" with the occasion comedy thrown in for good measure and the humour of "Bubba Ho-Tep" mixing genres. Meanwhile he has continued to work on a number of television productions with "Children of Dune" in particular allowing him the opportunity to paint a multi-faceted world filled with different societies and people. Musically this series has been a particularly successful canvas for Tyler, one which we hope will lead to better opportunities in the future.
More recently Tyler has scored a number of blockbuster movies (frequently full of action), including many films from various series - "The Fast and the Furious", "Aliens vs Predator", "Final Destination", "The Expendables". In the case of the "Fast and Furious" and "Expendables" franchises Tyler has stayed with the film series through several sequels. The immediacy and melodic engagement of Tyler's music has meant that it is much in demand for short theatrical trailers, and it has featured on trailer for "Cinderella Man", "The Aviator" and "The Da-Vinci Code". With Iron Man 3 Tyler then joined the ranks of composers scoring movies from the Marvel stable. Hot on the heels of his score for "Iron Man 3", the composerr was quickly commissioned to score another Marvel movie - Thor: The Dark World and then Avengers: Age of Ultron alongside Danny Elfman as co-composer. Now with The Mummy, Tyler has helped to kick off Marvel's new concept "Dark Universe" so we can perhaps expect more Brian Tyler scores in one or more of Marvel's worlds.
The official Brian Tyler website is at www.BrianTyler.com.
A number of Tyler's film scores are available from online stores including the following, and the music from the "Children of Dune" mini-series is highly recommended.
Here is a few CD covers signed by Brian Tyler. Our thanks to Petr Kocanda for permission to use his collection of autographed CDs. Click on any thumbnail below to see a full size version of the image in a separate window.
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