Five Composers Vie for World Soundtrack Awards' Discovery Prize

The World Soundtrack Awards has named five composers for its Discovery of the Year prize, including Paris Hurley for Kristen Stewart's "The Chronology of Water" and Kangding Ray for Oliver Laxe's "Sirāt." The award has a strong track record: Gustavo Santaolalla ("21 Grams"), Michael Giacchino ("The Incredibles") and Nicholas Britell ("Moonlight") all won it before reshaping the modern film score. Recent winners Daniel Blumberg ("The Brutalist") and Jerskin Fendrix ("Poor Things") look set to follow.

Mari Fukuhara is nominated for "Little Amélie or the Character of Rain." She started piano at three and studied classical music at Toho Gakuen School of Music while playing in jazz and pop bands on the side. "Looking back, I don't think I followed a straight path toward becoming a composer," she says. "Rather, all these different musical experiences naturally led me toward film."

In 2020, French producers approached Fukuhara about licensing one of her recordings for a new film. Within months she had instead signed on to compose the original score for a pilot project that became "Little Amélie." "Being involved from such an early stage allowed the relationship between the film and its music to grow over time," she says. The score, she explains, aimed "to express a child's perception and imagination, and what 'reality' means to a child." Looking ahead, she hopes to pursue projects "driven more by images, atmosphere and feeling than by a clear narrative."

Paris Hurley, trained as a classical violinist from an early age, earned acclaim for her autobiographical live project Object as Subject before turning to film. "I'd been told over and over that my music is very cinematic," she says. After working alongside Clint Mansell on "Love Lies Bleeding," she handled "The Chronology of Water" alone, pursuing the project after tearing through the source memoir. "I read it in a weekend, and my whole body shot through with fire," she recalls. "I immediately knew I was supposed to score the film."

Hurley describes music as a physical experience. "Sound is immersive," she says. "I'm always looking to hold people in the sound, whether it's hitting you in the face, inside your ear or all around you. Music physically changes you, whether you make it or listen to it."

Hannah Peel, nominated for "Midwinter Break," began with session work on violin, trombone and piano. When the Royal College of Music told her she wasn't classical enough for its film music master's, she released records built around a hand-punched paper-strip music box — an instrument that caught the attention of music advisors on projects including "Anna Karenina" and "Dancing With the Stars." Her work on the 2019 documentary "Game of Thrones: The Last Watch" earned her an Emmy nomination and an agent. "That blur between sound design and music is where I like to sit," she says. She is now scoring Netflix's "Assassin's Creed" series. "I've been able to explore instruments I can't find in sample libraries, so I can build my own sound worlds," she says.

Kangding Ray, born David Letellier and trained as an architect, made his name in Berlin's experimental scene, releasing music on Raster-Noton, the German label known for Ryoji Ikeda, Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto. His first score, for 2022's "Kiss My Wounds," caught the attention of German awards voters before Laxe invited him to score "Sirāt." Ray began work two years before the shoot, with Laxe spending five-day stretches at his Berlin studio; roughly 80% of the score was written from the script before cameras rolled. The result is about 62 minutes of music, concentrated in key scenes. "It's either fully present or not there at all," he says. He also pushed for silence, convinced the music hits harder when it arrives.

Sam Slater, a self-described "studio nerd" based in Berlin, started as a sound designer and creative engineer for Jóhann Jóhannsson, Dustin O'Halloran and Hildur Guðnadóttir, whom he later married ("which is lovely"). His work spans the Emmy-winning documentary "2000 Meters to Andriivka," directed by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mstyslav Chernov, and the PlayStation 5 game "Saros," which NME called "the stuff of nightmares." "The fact that we debate whether something is sound design or music means we've reached the strange and wonderful edges of what music is in these contexts, and I find that thrilling," he says.

Whoever wins, the shortlist signals where film music is heading: composers who build their own sound worlds at the boundary between score and sound design, often writing before a single frame is shot.