Music Mavens: 15 Women of Note in the Industry

Music Mavens: 15 Women of Note in the IndustryMusic Mavens: 15 Women of Note in the IndustryMusic Mavens: 15 Women of Note in the IndustryMusic Mavens: 15 Women of Note in the Industry
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Music Mavens: 15 Women of Note in the Industry

Music Mavens: 15 Women of Note in the IndustryMusic Mavens: 15 Women of Note in the IndustryMusic Mavens: 15 Women of Note in the Industry
  • Home
  • Meet the Music Mavens
  • Order the Book
  • About the Authors
  • Book News & Events
  • Readers' Resources
  • Educator Resources
  • Contact Us
  • Kaoly Asano
  • Maria Elisa Ayerbe
  • Katarina Benzova
  • Regina Carter
  • Janet Dacal
  • Sylvia Massy
  • Nami Melumad
  • Lia Mice
  • Kaila Mullady
  • Nova Wav
  • Valérie Sainte-Agathe
  • Macy Schmidt
  • Kate Schutt
  • Joanne Shenandoah
  • Vân-Ánh Vanessa Võ

“How did I choose short film projects when I was getting started? It’s the director, it’s the characters, it’s the type of music that I maybe didn’t work in before. So it gave me a new canvas or a challenge…You have no budget, but you still make something amazing and great.”


Nami Melumad, Film, Television, & Video Game Composer

Chapter 7 - Nami Melumad: Cinematic Scoring

     Film composer Nami Melumad’s phone buzzed. It was her agent, Maria, calling with a new project.

     “There’s a spotting session tomorrow, and you’re going,” said Maria. “You’re scoring an episode of Star Trek: Short Treks.”

     A lifelong Trekkie, Nami gazed at her miniature starship Enterprise figurine while the Star Trek theme played in her head. This was a dream come true.

     The next day, Nami met the show’s producer, Alex Kurtzman. Together, they watched the episode (titled “Q&A”) in which young Ensign Spock, on his first day aboard the USS Enterprise, gets trapped in the turbolift (a rapid transport device) with the ship’s first officer. Every few seconds they stopped the playback to discuss how the music might best underscore the characters’ reactions.

     Alex explained what he wanted musically, and Nami boldly offered her own ideas. By the end of the meeting, she had a detailed road map for composing the score. That map would take her where no woman had gone before.

     But how did a girl from Israel become a film composer in Hollywood, anyway? It’s a tale worthy of its own soundtrack.


So begins our chapter on the life of Dutch-Israeli film composer, Nami Melumad, a rising star in Hollywood film music.


(Want the whole story? Read Nami's chapter in Music Mavens.)

Photo Gallery

Nami Melumad on the red carpet at the Catalina Film Festival, 2021
Photo by Kathy Hutchins/Shutterstock

    VideoS

    The Future Is Female Concert: New Zealand's Guide To Tessering by Nami Melumad

    Nami conducts the Hollywood Chamber Orchestra performing her composition “New Zealand’s Guide to Tessering” for The Future Is Female: A Concert for Women In Film. She says the piece was inspired by her adventures in New Zealand and by Madeleine L’Engle’s novel, A Wrinkle in Time, which features tessering (“a form of traveling in the fifth dimension”). The composition also “celebrates the energy of nature, love, and hope.”

    Luminarias - Animated short film by Catherine Chooljian; music by Nami Melumad.

    In 2017, Luminarias won Best Score for a Short (out of 908 entries) at Fimucite, the Tenerife International Film Music Festival, and it won Best Featurette Score at the Idyllwild Festival of Cinema.

    Over The Wall - Dramatic short film by Roy Zafrani; music by Nami Melumad.

    An Israeli boy meets a Palestinian boy and discovers the truth isn't what he's been told.

    Music From Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (Season 1 Episode 5)

    Says Nami Melumad, the composer for the series, “In our entire show, we pay homage to the original series. All the other elements in the episode, such as costumes, production design and acting, do that. It only made sense that the music would do this callback as well. We always have to address the current setting, which is this mind box. It's a dream that intensifies over time. It starts kind of okay, but then it goes into this terrible battle between Spock and himself. The motif from Spock and Kirk’s fight scene in the episode ‘Amok Time’ from the original series was used in the music to help escalate the drama of what’s on scene. I modernized it. I kept the melody and some of the harmonies, but there's a lot of other stuff that I did to give the audience a new sense of scoring.” (From a September 2022 interview on Your Classical website)

    Spotify Playlist

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    Music Mavens: 15 Women of Note in the Industry

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