Composer Craig Armstrong will receive the SoundTrack_Cologne Lifetime Achievement Award on August 25. (Photo: Simon Murphy)

Craig Armstrong — composer of scores to Moulin Rouge!, The Great Gatsby, Love Actually and Ray — will receive SoundTrack_Cologne’s 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award in a closing night ceremony at this year’s conference, which runs Aug. 22-25.

The announcement was made today by Soundtrack_Cologne CEO Michael Aust at a Cannes Film Festival cocktail party for the film music event, now in its 15th year. “Craig Armstrong is one of the most influential and innovative contemporary composers, who transcends all genre boundaries,” Aust said, adding that he is “happy and honored” to celebrate his illustrious career.

Blending classical and electronic instruments to unique effect, Armstrong won a Golden Globe for his work on Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 Moulin Rouge! Armstrong, who hails from Glasglow, Scotland, relocated his family of five to Australia for a period of months to score the music-intensive project, which he called “one of the best experiences of my career” in an interview with the Glasgow Daily Record.

He went on to score Luhrmann’s 2013 hit The Great Gatsby, another music-driven project for which Armstrong received a Grammy nomination for the soundtrack. Armstrong met Luhrmann working on the 1996 film Romeo + Juliet, which was considered quite avant garde at the time, for its juxtaposition of a Shakespeare with a rock music soundtrack, and a score featuring bombastic choral touches “as well as flamboyant orchestral pieces by the London Session Orchestra,” conducted by Armstrong, who also orchestrated and was  one of three composers contributing to the score (along with Nellee Hooper and Maurius de Vries). 

Armstrong’s credits also include collaborations with Oliver Stone, for whom he composing the score for World Trade Center (2006) and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010), and Phillip Noyce, creating music for The Bone Collector and The Quiet American (2002). In 2006 Armstrong won a Grammy for his soundtrack to the 2004 film Ray, the biopic of musician Ray Charles directed by Taylor Hackford.

Trained at the Royal Academy of Music in London, Armstrong, 59, got his foothold on the ladder of popular entertainment conducting and contributing orchestral arrangements to Madonna’s 1994 album Bedtime Stories. He again collaborated with the singer on 1998’s Ray of Light.

Armstrong launched his career in the 1980s when he was named house composer at the influential Tron Theatre, working with director Michael Boyd, who went to lead the Royal Shakespeare Theater Company (from 2003 to 2012) and actor and director Peter Mullan, with whom he later worked on films including  Orphans (1998), The Magdalene Sisters (2002) and  Neds (2010). His first collaborations with Mullan were a series of shorts between 1993 and 1995 — Close, Fridge and A Good Day for Bad Guys — that became known as “The Close Trilogy.”

In addition to his scoring work, Armstrong has composed concert pieces for the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and the Scottish Ensemble. Armstrong’s second Scottish Opera commission, “The Lady From The Sea,” premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2012 winning the Herald Angel Award. His latest solo album Sun On You, was released by Decca Records Classical this year.

It’s Nearly Tomorrow was released by BMG Chrysalis in October 2014 and features guest collaborations from the Blue Nile’s Paul Buchanan, singer-songwriter Brett Anderson and jazz trumpeter Chris Botti, among others. Craig has a new album being released with Decca records later this year featuring solo piano and string ensemble.

Armstrong is a member of ASCAP and has been honored with three ASCAP Film & Television Awards (in 2017 for Me Before You and Bridget Jones’s Baby, and in 2009 for The Incredible Hulk).

At Soundtrack_Cologne Armstrong will talk about his work during Film Day, Aug. 24, receiving his lifetime achievement award the following evening.

Previous Soundtrack_Cologne Lifetime Achievement winners are Bruce Broughton, Cliff Martinez, Enjott Schneider, Eberhard Schoener, Manfred Eicher, Michael Nyman, Horst Peter Koll, Christian Bruhn, Irmin Schmidt and Peter Thomas. SoundTrack_Cologne 15 takes part from August 22nd-25th, 2018. Each year the conference welcomes guests from around the globe to more than 40 panels, round tables, workshops and networking events and is now considered an important part of the growing landscape of music festivals and conferences in Europe.