Danny Elfman
Film composer Danny Elfman is now best known for his fruitful film collaborations with director Tim Burton, but to new wave music fans he is the front man for the band Oingo Boingo, and to TV buffs he is the creator of the themes for The Simpsons and Desperate Housewives. Born in 1953, Elfman spent many hours at the movies as a child, then dropped out of high school to join his brother Richard in France. The two performed in a theatre group, and Danny went on to travel in Africa. After a bout of malaria he returned to the United States and formed a band with Richard - The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, later shortened to Oingo Boingo. The group recorded the soundtrack for Richard's 1980 movie Forbidden Zone and continued to release music through the mid-1990s. Tim Burton was an early fan of Oingo Boingo and asked Danny Elfman to compose the score for Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. Despite no formal music composition training, Elfman excelled at the task, and has scored the music for every Tim Burton movie except Ed Wood. Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Mars Attacks, Batman (for which he won a Grammy in 1989) and The Nightmare Before Christmas (for which he sang vocals as well) rank among his masterpieces with Burton. Elfman averages about two film scores a year, and has also written the music for non-Burton projects such as Good Will Hunting, Dick Tracy, and Men in Black. Recently, Elfman has branched out to classical music with Serenada Schizophrana, a commission from the American Composers Orchestra which debuted at Carnegie Hall in 2005.
