Foxcatcher (soundtrack)

Foxcatcher (Soundtrack from the Motion Picture) is the soundtrack album to the 2014 film Foxcatcher directed by Bennett Miller starring Steve Carell, Channing Tatum, and Mark Ruffalo. The soundtrack featured music composed by Rob Simonsen, West Dylan Thordson and Mychael Danna, and also featured songs from Bob Dylan, Arvo Pärt amongst several others. Madison Gate Records released the soundtrack on November 11, 2014.

Development
Foxcatcher featured musical score composed by Rob Simonsen who recorded most of the film's music at the AIR Studios in London; he added that the film has a sensibility of sparseness as "the notes or colors that do show up have a greater impact". After he listened to Jacob Cohen's cello performance at a subway stop platform, Simonsen eventually brought him to record the cello solos.

Susan Jacobs, the film's music supervisor selected samples from several composers to be included as placeholders for the temp music. Recordings from film composer West Dylan Thordson were included in the film which Miller liked, and Thordson met Miller in New York City, the following year. At first Thordson thought on attempting the temp score, and eventually relocated to New York for the same. But he eventually involved as one of the co-composers. Mychael Danna, whom Miller worked with in Capote (2005) and Moneyball (2011), assigned to complete the finished score. However, Simonsen would receive the credit for the principal composer.

According to Thordson, the film had a similar intimacy to the melodic voices that the three composers gravitate towards. While Danna and Jeff evoked a sophisticated quality, Thordson incorporate a rough and handmade sound, "which is much more from the world of a slightly out-of-tune farmhouse piano".

Reception
Justin Chang of Variety wrote "Rob Simonsen’s score is spare and beautifully ominous, while the exceptional sound work often alternates feverish background noise with silence to highly unsettling effect." Matt Patches of IGN wrote "Rob Simonsen's delicate score strings an elegy across a Hell of dampened interiors and blue-hued vistas." Matt Goldberg of Collider wrote "Rob Simonsen's lovely score is distant and melancholy." Ty Burr of The Boston Globe wrote "the score by Rob Simonsen throbs with discreet strings." Ryan Lambie of Den of Geek described it as a "minimal score" and Brad Brevet of Comingsoon.net called it as "elegiac". William Fanelli of Flickering Myth called it as a "limited but wonderful score".