Richard Wolf - Emmy Winning Television Music Production and Composition

Emmy Winning Television Music Production and Composition

Over the span of nearly two decades, Wolf's musical creations have been featured in thousands of television episodes including top rated shows such NCIS, NCIS: Los Angeles, The Good Wife, ER, The X-Files, Fox Sports and ABC News' 20/20.

Wolf's introduction to branding music for television came when Fox asked him to write original music for its Health Net cable. Then in 1999, he was asked to write original themes and identification music for the Fox Sports Network. The Hollywood Reporter explained, "it's his job to come up with two-minutes pieces of music that are flexible enough to work with sports as diverse as golf and beach volleyball, and distinctive enough to work as a branding device for the network". Since 1999, Fox has used Wolf's themes for almost two dozen network sports programs. The wide variety of Fox Sports themes & underscore cues that Wolf has composed have been played on thousands of sports broadcasts ranging from Major League Baseball, NASCAR and NFL to women's volleyball and golf.

Wolf's animation experience from Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase project led to his job composing for the Warner Bros. top rated Saturday morning show Static Shock — a project that would earn him various awards. "The beauty of doing a show like this is that you can draw on a broad spectrum of styles," Wolf says, "Superhero animation tends to be music-driven, and it can be a virtual playground for composers... The breadth of creative self-expression is truly liberating, especially after coming from the field of record production, where you're invariably pigeonholed into a single genre". The score combined hip-hop and electronica with a traditional orchestration and brought an edgy urban soundtrack to Saturday morning cartoons. The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences recognized the originality of the score by awarding Wolf Daytime Emmy nominations two years in a row and as well as an Emmy Award for Outstanding Music Composition and Direction in 2004.

Another one of Wolf's impressive television credits comes from Tyra Banks' hit television series, America's Next Top Model. For over fourteen seasons the show has relied heavily on Wolf's original music for everything from hip-hop tunes to themes for judging and elimination sequences. In 2008, a special issue of The Hollywood Reporter honored the 100th episode of ANTM and cited Wolf's musical contributions, explaining how the "music elevates the drama among competitors".

Working from his boutique music production and publishing company, The Producers Lab, Inc., Wolf continues to write and produce music for long time projects such as NCIS, 20/20 News, Fox Sports, ABC News, and ANTM as well as a variety of others.

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