Lakeshore Records will release The Slap – Original Television Soundtrack digitally on July 24, 2015 with a CD to be released later this year. The album features original score by the composing team of Jon Ehrlich and Jason Derlatka. The 8-episode miniseries event, aired earlier this year on NBC.
"The Slap is unique in that it centers around a single event, but the reverberations of that one moment impact each of the characters differently," said Ehrlich. "In an early meeting I referenced Stephen Sondheim—Walter [F. Parkes, executive producer] loved the idea of a Sondheim influenced language for the score. I think we had an instinct that it would serve the show's emotionally layered and complex architecture."
"In each episode of The Slap, the story is told from a different character's perspective, so the audience is having to reassess how it feels about what happens as a consequence of a man slapping a young boy, who is not his child," explained Ehrlich. "We decided that we wanted the score to provide a unifying point of view, and we liked the idea of the score expressing the narrator's knowing, and in a way, more objective perspective."
"We sense the narrator has seen this story before—he's seen it a thousand times," Ehrlich described. "Linking the score to this narrator's POV allowed us to play the emotional moments while also expressing their intellectual and ethical complexity. It becomes harder and harder for us to take sides, because the score lays the groundwork for what we inherently know – people aren't one-dimensional; the audience isn't one-dimensional; the dance of life is both tricky and treacherous, and it all depends on how you spin it. Each episode adds a layer of complexity to the narrative. And the score, while addressing the moments, always tries to maintain an omniscient distance."
The Slap is a Universal Television production for NBC and is viewable in its entirety at nbc.com.