Fresh from Eva’s Diamond Music Score Final Mix.

Composer Roby Meola shares his experience composing the music for Ice Neal’s latest hard work.

“I hope I don’t sound arrogant when I say it has been a straightforward process. And I must confess all the merit goes to Ice Neal, who, from the beginning, has pushed me in the right direction. Her motto has always been: write something original that does not sound like Hollywood. She was very particular about the moods she wanted to recreate for Eva’s Diamond…”

Roby has composed different styles of music for Eva’s Diamond. 

“I have learned something new,” he said, “something I could never have thought of, like this timpani ostinato, which ended up being Miss Phillip’s main theme. I remember messing around with the keyboard while Ice Neal explained the mood and feel. For a few days, she had been asking me to use timpani, and I must admit I was not that sure about using timpani in that particular context. But who knows a character better than the one who created it? I started playing something with the timpani samples as Ice hummed a tune, then she stopped me, ‘That’s the one, that’s it!’ And there it was, the theme for Miss Phillips. One would think that music for an old lady could be strings or piano based, not timpanis… but it worked beautifully.”

“A similar thing happened when we were working on a very dark sequence of the movie. At that time, I was producing my first sample library, and I had made this out-worldly sound. Flipping through my own sound collection, Ice stopped me right at that particular sound, an evolving organic dark sound. She instantly loved it and asked me to use it for the sequence we were at. With no particular mangling, there it was; the sound was doing it all and working magically on the scene.”

The same goes for most of the cues in the movie: “Ice was giving me great suggestions for moods; she was describing feelings and emotions. It helped a lot with writing little Diamond’s theme, which worked perfectly.”

“Ice is a very hands-on director, also a songwriter. She understands music and feels it. She knows what she wants, and herbest quality is to do unique stuff without following the herd. That unleashes creativity and makes my job as a composer very challenging and ultimately very rewarding.”