Music for Film & Television
Lawson White composes music for narrative film, documentary, television, web series, advertising, and moving image. His scores draw on percussion, voice, pedal steel, acoustic instruments, analog and digital synthesizers, programming, processed sound, and detailed studio production.
He approaches scoring as a form of dramatic and structural collaboration. Music can establish a world, shape pacing and tension, reveal a character's interior life, transform the meaning of an image, or become an active subject within the film itself.
His background as a composer, multi-instrumentalist, producer, engineer, and interdisciplinary performer allows him to carry a score from its first idea through writing, performance, recording, editing, production, mixing, and delivery. He is especially interested in projects where sound, image, movement, architecture, and live performance are developed together.
Selected work is below. For commissions, performances, and collaborations: lawson@lawsonwhite.com
Scores & Original Music
(Untitled)
Press & documentation: Cantaloupe Music — soundtrack | David Lang — score page | AllMusic — Lawson White credits | The New York Times — review | Los Angeles Times — review | Roger Ebert — review | Variety — review | IONCINEMA — Jonathan Parker interview
(Additional Music · Score Realization & Soundtrack Production with David Lang · Engineer, Mixer & Mastering Engineer · Performer: Guitar, Keyboards, Percussion & Programming · On-Screen Role: “Seth”
Feature film directed by Jonathan Parker · Samuel Goldwyn Films · 2009
Jonathan Parker's feature film (Untitled) is a satire of the contemporary art world centered on an uncompromising experimental composer, played by Adam Goldberg. The project required music that could function simultaneously as the fictional composer's own work, as live performance within the story, and as a dramatic score shaping the audience's experience of his world.
Lawson worked closely with David Lang to realize the film's musical language — performing, recording, programming, editing, producing, mixing, and contributing additional music — and appears throughout the film as Seth, one of the musicians in the composer's ensemble. The performances themselves, on camera and on the soundtrack, are largely Lawson's own. With Lang unable to be on set, the score's day-to-day realization ran through him; as Parker put it in a 2009 IONCINEMA interview, “he did the whole score basically.”
The soundtrack — combining music composed for the film with works from Lang's catalog — was produced and edited by Lawson with Lang, and released by Cantaloupe Music.
“ultimately on the side of experimental music and art” — Stephen Holden, The New York Times
“The percussionist (Lawson White) crumples paper.” — Michael O'Sullivan, The Washington Post
“exquisite, judiciously used soundtrack score” — Robert Koehler, Variety
Dramatic Escape
Press & Documentation: Watch on PBS | Saboteur Media — official film page | Jacob Burns Film Center | Rehabilitation Through the Arts | BroadwayWorld
Composer · Original Score
Feature documentary directed by Nick Quested · Saboteur Media / Goldcrest Films · 2015 · Broadcast nationally on PBS/THIRTEEN, 2017
Dramatic Escape follows a group of incarcerated men at Sing Sing Correctional Facility as they audition, rehearse, and perform A Few Good Men through the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program.
The film moves from the practical demands of making theater inside a maximum-security prison to larger questions of responsibility, collaboration, redemption, and transformation. Lawson composed the original score, creating a musical framework that supports the dramatic process while leaving space for the men's own voices and stories.
The same RTA program — and the film's central figure, Clarence Maclin — later reached wider audiences through A24's Oscar-nominated Sing Sing (2024), in which Maclin starred as himself.
Basic Witch
Press & Documentation: Watch the series on Vimeo | Annie Tippe — official project page | Prime Video
Composer · Original Music
Dark-magic comedy web series directed by Annie Tippe · Created by Annie Tippe, Kim Blanck, Janna Emig, Jessica Frey, Claire Rothrock, and Ryann Weir · JASH · 2016
Basic Witch is a comic web series in which contemporary friendship, work, romance, and real-estate anxiety coexist with an understated supernatural world. The series marked the directing debut of Annie Tippe, who went on to win the Lucille Lortel Award for Best Director for Dave Malloy's Octet.
Lawson composed original music for the series, building a playful screen language that can move quickly among character comedy, emotional awkwardness, mystery, and heightened fantasy without overpowering the performances.
Hell on Wheels - “Elixir of Life”
Press & documentation: Apple TV — episode information | Den of Geek — episode review | Cowboys & Indians — episode recap
Original Music Contributor · Season 5, Episode 5
AMC television series · Episode aired August 15, 2015
Lawson contributed original music to “Elixir of Life,” the fifth episode of the fifth season of AMC's historical drama Hell on Wheels.
The episode moves among intersecting stories of migration, labor, ambition, racial conflict, violence, and betrayal during the construction of the first transcontinental railroad. This credit demonstrates Lawson's ability to write within an established episodic world and support multiple narrative threads while respecting an existing musical identity.
Film Soundtracks with David Lang
Two feature-film soundtracks with Pulitzer Prize–winning composer David Lang. On The Woodmans, Lang's score is performed by Sō Percussion — the ensemble Lawson toured and recorded with from 2003 to 2008. On (Untitled), Lawson performed the music himself, on camera and on the record, while also contributing additional music of his own. On both films, he carried the score from the page to the screen: producing, recording, and editing the music with Lang.
U.S. Department of Energy - “Phone Charger”
Press & Documentation: Watch on iSpot.tv
Composer · Original Music
National television commercial
Original music for the U.S. Department of Energy television spot “Phone Charger,” a concise public-service commercial built around energy conservation and everyday behavior.
The project represents short-form scoring in which musical identity, pacing, and a clear final beat must be established within a very limited duration.
The Woodmans
Press & Documentation: PBS Independent Lens — film and full credits | The Hollywood Reporter — review | Kino Lorber | Cantaloupe Music — soundtrack | David Lang — score page
Original Score Producer and Recordist · Soundtrack Editing and Production with David Lang
Documentary directed by C. Scott Willis · 2010 · Kino Lorber / PBS Independent Lens · Winner, Best New York Documentary, 2010 Tribeca Film Festival
The Woodmans examines the life and work of photographer Francesca Woodman and the artistic family from which she emerged. David Lang composed the film's score, performed by Sō Percussion.
Lawson produced and recorded the original score — as credited on screen, “Original Score Produced and Recorded by Lawson White” — at Clinton Recording Studios in New York, and worked with Lang on the editing and production of the soundtrack album, released by Cantaloupe Music in 2011.
The Hollywood Reporter ranked the film among the most affecting art-themed documentaries of recent years, and singled out the music:
“Enhanced by David Lang's mostly restrained score, performed by So Percussion” — The Hollywood Reporter
Commercial, Experiential, and Reel Selections
Additional work represented in Lawson's current audio reel spans large-format, advertising, and narrative contexts — concept work, pitches, and independent cue studies alongside commissioned scores:
Sphere (Las Vegas) — large-format / experiential scoring concept
Vaseline “Wrecking Ball” — two commercial cue concepts
Selected cue studies (2022) — narrative, atmospheric, and electronic scoring excerpts
Across Media
Film is one part of Lawson's larger interdisciplinary practice. His work moves among composition, improvisation, performance, spatial sound, dance, theater, recorded music, installation, and moving image.
He is particularly interested in projects in which music does more than accompany a finished picture: artist films, dance films, live scoring, expanded cinema, gallery and museum commissions, site-responsive work, and collaborations in which sound and image are developed together from the beginning.
Lawson welcomes conversations with filmmakers, directors, producers, choreographers, visual artists, curators, and institutions about original scores, commissions, screenings, performances, installations, and interdisciplinary collaborations.
Commission or collaborate: lawson@lawsonwhite.com · Music for Dance · Theatrical Productions · Sound Design
Scoring Reel - Video
Lawson White - Film & TV Reel - YouTube Playlist
Scoring Reel - Audio
Current Work
Lawson’s current work returns to film from the composer’s chair: live and studio-based music made in dialogue with movement—voice, pedal steel, synthesizers, percussion, chamber instruments, and electronics shaped through composition and real-time improvisation.
He is developing interdisciplinary work for theaters, galleries, museums, film, and installation. He welcomes conversations with choreographers, dancers, companies, filmmakers, curators, and presenters about commissions, live performance, and collaboration.
Commission or collaborate: lawson@lawsonwhite.com