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b'You have almost certainly heard Nicholas Britell\\u2019s music, even if you don\\u2019t know his name. More than any other contemporary composer, he appears to have the whole of music history at his command, shifting easily between vocabularies, often in the same film.\\n\\nHis most arresting scores tend to fuse both ends of his musical education. \\u201cSuccession\\u201d is 18th-century court music married to heart-pounding beats; \\u201cMoonlight\\u201d chops and screws a classical piano-and-violin duet as if it\\u2019s a Three 6 Mafia track.\\n\\nBritell\\u2019s C.V. reads like the setup for a comedy flick: a Harvard-educated, world-class pianist who studied psychology and once played in a moderately successful hip-hop band, who wound up managing portfolios on Wall Street.\\n\\nThat is until he started scoring movies, and quickly acquired Academy Award nominations.\\n\\n\\u201cWhat I\\u2019ve found in the past,\\u201d said Jon Burlingame, a film-music historian, \\u201cis that people have found it impossible to incorporate such modern musical forms as hip-hop into dramatic underscore for films. When Nick did it in \\u2018Moonlight,\\u2019 I was frankly stunned. I didn\\u2019t think it was possible.\\u201d'