Blake Neely and Nathaniel Blume accept award from BMI Vice President, Creative – Film, TV & Visual Media Doreen Ringer Ross, Executive Vice President of Creative & Licensing at BMI Mike Steinberg and BMI Assistant Vice President of Creative Ray Yee onstage at the 34th Annual BMI Film & TV Music Awards, May 2018 Los Angeles. (Photo: Lester Cohen / Getty Images)

Nathaniel Blume has calendared the score for the CNN original series 1968, a four-parter that debuts Sunday, May 27. “1968 sets out to capture the mood and environment of our country during that particularly dark year,” Blume said, talking about his role in the historical project. “Since the series tells its story through interviews and archival footage without the use of a central voiceover, the score plays a large part in reflecting that dark mood while providing a consistent narrative tone across the compiled visuals. We wanted this music to have its own identity.”

Blume’s work can be heard on hundreds of episodes on series ranging from CW’s The Flash to ABC’s Deception and CNN’s The 2000’s.

Emmy Award-winning executive producers Tom Hanks, Gary Goetzman and Mark Herzog present 1968. Airing over two nights — Sunday, May 27 and Monday, May 28 between 9 p.m.–11:00 p.m. ET– the four-part docuseries goes back 50 years to explore 1968, a year marked by seismic shifts in American politics, social movements, global relations and cultural icons that changed the modern landscape. Using previously unreleased archival footage and contemporary interviews with journalists, historians, and notable figures, the series maps the tumultuous events of the entire year, from the assassinations of MLK and RFK to escalating anti-Vietnam War sentiment and civil rights struggles.

“The show runner, Dave Rivera, supported the creation of longer musical ideas to tie multiple scenes together and to allow for more in depth development,” Blume continued. “The theme for Nixon is presented one way when he’s successfully campaigning his ‘Silent Center’ slogan, and yet another way when he’s attacking President Johnson nearing the election. The intent is for that development to come across, if not overtly, at least subliminally in the viewing experience.”

In addition to his ongoing television projects, Nathaniel has scored the animated feature Vixen: The Movie. He has composed extensively for CNN, providing the music of 1968: The Year That Changed America as and the network’s ‘decades series’, including the The Sixties, The Seventies and The Eighties. Nathaniel has also written seasons of additional music on many television programs such as CW’s Arrow and Resurrection and ABC’s PanAm. He also composed the score for the documentary Shakespeare High, which was an official selection at the Tribeca Film Festival.