Like Royalty

original short film score

Film music has played a large role in my choice of career. It was my introduction to the orchestra. I frequently baffle my friends by answering their “have you seen x movie?” questions with, “no, but I have listened to the soundtrack.” And while music was always something I loved and liked the idea of pursuing, it was seeing the National Symphony Orchestra play the ET score live to picture that made me think, “I can do nothing else.” So when I heard Asher Kaye and Sophie DeLong playing Princess Leia’s Theme one September evening in our first-year dorm building, I knew I had made two new friends.

Fast forward two years and some change, Asher showed me an action-comedy short with a certain absurdist gravitas he had made and asked me to score it. The film, “Like Royalty,” follows two pizza enthusiasts in their solemn duty of obtaining tomatoes for the Royal Pizza Pizzeria. I couldn’t say yes fast enough.

The extent of the commitment our main characters show to a seemingly trivial task precisely caters to my own sense of humor. In our spotting session, I asked Asher if he wanted me to lead into the farce of it all with comic music or amplify the irony with a very serious score. We chose the latter. The resulting piece draws heavily on Hollywood Golden Age orchestration , with a brassy fanfare, woodwind runs, rumbling timpani — the whole nine yards. In a moment of intense religiosity near the end of the film, a choir enters in Gregorian style, singing the words of Horace: Dulce et decorum est pro patria moria (it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country).

Our timeline was unexpectedly sped up by a screening opportunity at Oberlin’s Apollo Theater. On less than a week’s notice, we recruited a 15-piece orchestra and 25-voice choir to record the score on a Friday night in an empty Conservatory classroom. Asher brought his camera, and Sophie was the concertmaster. The session concluded with a thematically necessary pizza party. It was the kind of beautiful evening — spontaneous, creative, and a little absurd — that makes me especially grateful to call Oberlin home.

The whole process of writing and conducting this score was a great joy for me. The film premiered on April 24, 2025 at the Apollo. And to my delight, I heard more than one person singing or whistling the theme in the lobby as I left the theater. I hope this is my first of many collaborations with the wonderfully talented filmmaker Asher Kaye.

-Matthew Thomas Brown