Pinar Toprak (born 18 October 1980) is a Turkish-born American composer, conductor, and musician, who specializes in creating thematic scores.
Early life and education
Toprak was born and grew up in Istanbul, Turkey. Her father was an accountant who supported Toprak's interest in music and movies, particularly westerns and Superman. Toprak has said she was always drawn to superheroes and comic books growing up.[1] She memorized the dialogue from the 1978 film starring Christopher Reeve, and dubbed it to Turkish.[2][3]
Toprak enrolled in the Istanbul State Conservatory, the oldest conservatory in Turkey. During her studies there, she focused on composition and multi-instrumentalism.[4] She began as a violinist and later switched to guitar."[2]
She finished high school at 16, and, after her 17th birthday, moved to the United States. She lived with her brother in Wisconsin where she completed a short ESL program before enrolling at Berklee. During that time, she found work as a jazz guitarist and pianist."[2]
At Paramount, she attended scoring sessions[2] and worked for Hans Zimmer's production company, Media Ventures International (now Remote Control).[8] She also trained in programming sample instruments.[6] She left Zimmer's company after a year to work as assistant to composer William Ross.[6]
In 2006, she composed the score for the video gameNinety-Nine Nights,[8] and then for Behind Enemy Lines 2. From that time onward, she worked on more than forty feature films and several video-game and television projects. She worked on the fanfare of Skydance Media from 2010 to 2022.[5]
Among her work was the score for the romantic comedyThe Lightkeepers (2009), which won the 2010 International Film Music Critics Association (IFMCA) Award for Best Comedy Score.[8] Toprak's score for The Lightkeepers made it to the 2011 Academy Award Shortlist for Best Original Score.[8] She composed the music to the documentaryThe Wind Gods (2011) for which she received a second IFMCA award for Best Documentary Score in 2011. In 2017, she was hired by director Dean Devlin to compose the score for Geostorm but was laid off after production companies Warner Bros. and Skydance Media hired a new director for the movie's reshoots. The same year, composer Danny Elfman hired Toprak to write additional scores for the 2017 DC superhero movie, Justice League (Dir. Zack Snyder).[2]
Toprak auditioned and pitched a main theme for the film Captain Marvel, which became a hit. She is the first woman to ever score a major superhero movie, and the first to compose for a film that made more than $1 billion.[5]
Toprak's other works include the score for the 2018–2019 series, Krypton, prequel to the Superman series; DC's television series, Stargirl; and the HBO limited series, McMillions (2020), for which she was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Original Music Composition for a Documentary Series or Special.[11] She is the first Turkish composer to be nominated for an Emmy.[12] Her work on the 2018 movie The Tides of Fate earned her the 2019 ASCAP Shirley Walker Award, and also, her third IFMCA Award for Best Original Score for a Documentary Film in 2019.[4]
In 2008, Toprak married Thanos Kazakos, a music composer and sound design major from Greece. They had met at Berklee, and had a daughter. They divorced in 2013.[2]
