MRH: Is you background mainly in blues music?

BM: No, not at all. Actually, I’m a classically trained composer and pianist, although I play in a lot of rock bands and I definitely had a lot of pop in my upbringing, but I’m definitely coming from the classical world, really, if I had to pick a side.

MRH: I was really surprised at the contrast between your Rest Stop scores, which are sort of heavy blues/rock with great guitar textures, and the Caprica music, which is very classical, and includes elements from chamber and minimalism.

BM: Pop and blues are languages that I like to use. The Rest Stop films were tremendous opportunities for me to score a horror film with a bluegrass band, which is essentially what I did, and that was a tremendous amount of fun I’d love to say that I really grew up with that kind of music, but I didn’t; that’s just something that I’m passionate about, and I’ve come to enjoy now.

For me it’s always about finding something different, something new that I haven’t done before, so you’ll find that the scores that I’ve done for Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles sound totally different in the instrumentation and in the style than Battlestar, but I’d like to think that you can always tell that it’s me, just by the musical similarities that are there; I always like to find different instrumentations and different sounds for each project.

MRH: Do you do your own orchestrations, or do you have a team that you work with?

BM: I have a team that I work with extensively. It’s the only way to survive getting through [a heavy work load]. I generally have three shows and a couple of games and a couple of movies in the works at all times, so I definitely don’t have time to do my own orchestrations anymore. I did for the first season two seasons of Battlestar, and that nearly killed me.

MRH: Is there any particular genre that you haven’t tackled yet, because you’ve done horror, science-fiction, drama, and comedy?

BM: Well, I’ve love to do an eighteen hundreds period piece zombie musical. That’s a genre that I’d love to tackle. I think I’m ready for it.

MRH: It’s funny that you mention that, because there’s author Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a bloody fusion of Jane Austen’s story with flesh eaters that was published this past May by Quirk Books.

BM: Yeah, well that would be fun.