Minari (soundtrack)

Minari (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) is the soundtrack to the 2020 film of the same name released by Milan Records on December 11, 2020. The score, composed by Emile Mosseri, met with critical acclaim and has been nominated for numerous accolades including the Academy Award for Best Original Score and BAFTA Award for Best Original Music, among others. The soundtrack was preceded by the single "Rain Song" released on November 20, 2020.

Development
Mosseri read the film's script even before scoring the film hoping that it would resonate with Korean Americans and immigrant families. He himself rooted for the characters due to the realness in the humanity of their characters. He gone with traditional film score in the first place instead of using temp tracks in the edit, crediting Harry Yoon (the film's editor) who put his demos and sketches and used in the film and assembled certain sequences in the film to his music and extended them to fit into the score, which was less restrictive. Chung insisted him to blend Korean and American music and not to go overt with it, making it pretty wide open.

The Fames Macedonian Symphonic Orchestra performed the score with over 40 string players. As with Mosseri's previous ventures, the film consisted of new ivories. Initially he wanted to use a new piano for each project traded from local Los Angeles company. However, due to the short duration he had scoring the film while finishing Kajillionaire (2020) he intended to use the same Yamaha piano, although he never felt the sounds necessary the same and was different from the 1940s guitar he had. He detuned the guitar to as low so that it could hold intonation and then doubled it with the piano to give it a grounded quality and not exactly sound exactly like guitar and piano. Mosseri admitted that "when those two sounds are married, it creates a third sound".

Mosseri sang, wrote and recorded "Rain Song" whom sent the demo vocals to Chung and suggested the lead actress Han Ye-ri to record the vocals. He felt that the idea is to be a lullaby from Monica (Ye-ri) to her son David (Alan Kim), hence the suggestion to sing Ye-ri was appropriate for the film. Stephane Hong translated the English lyrics into Korean.

Reception
Music critic Jonathan Broxton wrote "Minari is a surface level score; it sits on top of the narrative creating an overarching mood, a pervasive tone, but never actually gets into the meat of the storytelling craft that is at the heart of good cinema." James Southall of Movie Wave called it as a "a distinctive score, one which achieves its emotional support in unusual and creative ways, and it makes for a really satisfying album." Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair complimented Mosseri's score as "a woozy chorus, sounding like a lullaby". Glenn Whipp of Los Angeles Times called the score as "sublime". Benjamin Lee of The Guardian called it as a "hair-raising score" that only "increases in stature as the film progresses". It has been listed by IndieWire as one of the "best film scores of 2020".