Stephen James Taylor is an American composer best known for his film and TV scores with four Emmy nominations, two Annie nominations, and a DVD-X Award on "Best Original Score to date. His style is a blend of pop, classical, jazz, world music and experimental surround sound genres.
Unusual notes
One of the ways he achieves his sound is by working with a larger palette of notes rather than those allowed on conventional instruments. He introduced microtonality to the vocabulary of film music with his score for The Giving composed solely using a scale with 58 tones per octave, unequal. Other Taylor scores incorporating microtonal cues include Why Do Fools Fall in Love, Gregory Nava, The Lion King's Timon & Pumbaa, Mickey Mouse Works, The Final Insult, Powers of Time, A Question of Faith, The Glass Shield, Black Panther, The Eames Aluminum Chair, and A Gathering of Elephants.
Filmography
Taylor has written the scores to most of the feature films of Charles Burnett including To Sleep with Anger, The Glass Shield, Selma, Lord, Selma, Oprah Winfrey's The Wedding, and , for which he won best score at the Kuala Lumpur International Film Festival. For director Robert Townsend, he has scored several projects including Holiday Heart for Showtime and Phantom Punch. Other credits include the HBO film, Boycott, directed by Clark Johnson, the 2004 Disney animated theatrical release Teacher's Pet, as well as a number of television, cable and direct to video movies including the 2016 film Southside with You, which dramatizes the first date between President Barack Obama and his future wife, Michelle Robinson, and the documentary Maya Angelou and Still I Rise.
Television
His prime time music career began in 1981 when he joined the composing team of Mike Post and Pete Carpenter writing and orchestrating for such shows as Greatest American Hero, The A-Team, Magnum, P.I. and Hunter. He co-wrote the theme to ABC’s Gideon Oliver in 1988 and in 1993 he was hired by David Chase to write the music for the 2nd season of NBC's I'll Fly Away resulting in Taylor's 2nd Emmy nomination. Another historically significant network show was Under One Roof for which he wrote the main title song and underscore for the first few episodes. This CBS show was the last primetime black family show on a major, non-cable network.
Commissions
In 1996, he was commissioned to write and conduct an orchestral suite, with Mark Watters, for the Atlanta Symphony to perform at the Opening Ceremonies for the Olympics for which he received a BMI Olympic Tribute Award. In 2007, he was also hired to create world music for the lobby of the World of Coca-Cola museum in Atlanta as well as do some surround sound design for one of the permanent installations there.
Animation
Taylor’s experience in writing music for animation began with Hanna Barbera and Ruby-Spears in 1980, runs through Spielberg's Tiny Toon Adventures in 1990 and several series for Disney TV animation in the 1990s such as Jungle Cubs and Raw Toonage, up through the present with the recent release of the Black Panther for Marvel. He was hired in 1991 to write a new theme for , for which he also provided the score for 2 seasons. He composed the underscore and main title song for all 3 years of Mickey Mouse Works with a 12 piece band that included homemade instruments and fretless guitar. This show represented the first time the core Disney characters had been animated for television in 50 years. In 2006, he composed The Adventures of Brer Rabbit.
Study
He received a bachelor's degree in music composition from Stanford University, after which he continued his studies in classical composition and conducting privately with Henri Lazarof, Dr. Albert Harris, and microtonality with Erv Wilson. In recent years he has been expanding his music composition skills into the visual arena via a multimedia programming language known as Max/MSP. As a "music oriented content provider", he has redefined himself as a 21st-century composer/artist.
