Germaine Franco ’84’s score for Disney’s “Encanto” is the music everyone is humming right now.
It’s also topping the charts and racking up award nominations left and right. Earlier this year, the film’s soundtrack hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200. Franco won a Society of Composers and Lyricists Award for outstanding original score for a studio film and received her first Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations, both for best original score. She’s the first Latina to be nominated for an Oscar in that category.
“It was so surprising,” she said. “Just to get invited into the Academy is a big deal. (She was also the first Latina to join its music branch.) To have my peers who are the most amazing composers and music editors and executives — for them to really, you know, support this work and the film, I felt so honored.”
She’s quick to point out that her trailblazing success — she’s also the first woman to score a Disney movie — didn’t happen overnight. It’s the product of several decades of hard work and determination, beginning with her childhood in El Paso, Texas.
Franco took an early interest in music, and recalls family being a constant source of support as she immersed herself in it. She took lessons, listened to many different genres and performed in an array of ensembles ranging from marching and concert bands to orchestra and stage bands.
“You know how important that is, the mom who drives or dad who drives you to the lessons and believes in you,” she said. “And I had a lot of great teachers.”
Franco went on to attend Rice, studying percussion and earning a bachelor’s degree in 1984 and a master’s in 1987. It was during this time she started writing music in addition to performing.
“I loved music, but it was at Rice where I truly began to dig deeper into the analysis of music, you know, to the level that I learned while taking music history and ear training, and theory and harmony, orchestration,” she said. “All those classes prepared me to get to where I could start working in this field.”
She said her Rice education also gave her the discipline that’s essential for long hours of practice — or, as of late, long hours in the studio or performing on a movie score. She performs as a percussionist on all of her scores.
“Having the background and education that I got at Rice and the Shepherd School enabled me to really expand my world,” she said.
The opportunity to score “Encanto” came after countless career experiences, ranging from playing with and having her work performed by major international orchestras to working on movie scores for animated pictures such as “The Book of Life” and “Coco.” For the latter, she received an Annie Award for outstanding achievement for music in an animated feature.
When she began writing for “Encanto,” Franco said she started with only five photos, as the animators were still creating the film. Until she received a copy of the movie months later, she had to “imagine that world inside (her) head.” She said directors Jared Bush and Byron Howard “didn’t want this to sound like a big Disney orchestra film from beginning to end.”
“They really wanted something smaller, (capturing) the emotional moments, and then it can get big when it needs to,” she said. “But they were looking for the sound of magical realism.”
To capture this sound for the film, which tells the story of the Madrigal family living in a magical house in the mountains of Colombia, Franco did a lot of experimenting on her workstation. She pored through thousands of musical samples and explored the sounds of traditional Colombian instruments, traditional orchestra and human voice.
She worked closely with Lin-Manuel Miranda, who created the film’s eight songs and whom she described an “amazing musician, storyteller and composer.” When it came to the movie’s big musical numbers, she said the animators “get so excited” when they get a song.
“They just are ready to go, you know, wild,” she said. “But they need the songs to be at least somewhat in demo form (to animate them).
“It’s a very interesting process,” she continued. “It’s such a collaboration. I’m inspired by the images, too. You see the beautiful flowers and the imagery and the animation — all hand-drawn — and musically, you want to respond to that.”
When asked for her advice for students looking to follow in her footsteps, Franco urges them to follow their bliss.
“Whatever it is you love to do, that’s what you should be doing, not what someone else thinks you should be doing,” she said. “I know I went to school with some people that were majoring in fields that they didn’t enjoy, but enrolled in the major because their parents thought they should do so.”
Franco said there’s nothing better than the journey to finding your voice as an artist, but that it doesn’t happen overnight. She said her “firsts” have made her feel a real responsibility to be open and help others get to the place she did.
“If you go down a path that doesn’t work, try a different path. But you can’t ever give up,” she said, noting that she took on some odd jobs both while she was in school and to support herself in the early days of her career. “It’s not all glory. It’s a lot of sweat and hard work. And you have to be willing to do that in today’s world.
“I’ve been working in this field for over 30 years,” she continued. “It takes so many experiences, so many ensembles, so many teachers, so many failures, you know, learning how to fail and getting back up again, and doing it again, and having wonderful communities that support you whether they’re ensembles, friends … I’ve relied on those communities, because you can’t get there on your own.”
For more information on Franco, read Rice Magazine’s 2020 feature here and visit https://www.germainefranco.com/ .