Written By: Jeremy Lim
If you’ve seen a CW show from the past five or so years, there’s a good chance you’ve heard something composed by Sherri Chung. Chung has worked on a whole host of DC television adaptations, “Riverdale” and most recently, “Kung Fu.” Compositions and scores have a tendency to be overlooked by the general public and that’s doubly true when it comes to music for television. But Sherri Chung has become a name to watch out for.
I got a chance to speak with Chung about her work and what it means to be a part of an Asian American production like “Kung Fu” in August.
Sherri Chung got into music at a young age. “I was just always growing up with music and playing a lot with the church and church bands. I was performing a little bit but I was mainly practicing piano and studying all of that.” When it came to shifting her focus towards scores and music for TV and film, it was never a given. “Like a lot of us, I watched TV, I watched movies, but I just never really thought about the music as much.”
But after seeing the 1991 film “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” starring Kevin Costner, something changed for Chung. “It has an amazing score by Michael Kamen and I didn’t know who Michael Kamen was at the time. For some reason, that score to that film just hit me like a ton of bricks. I just had such clarity. I was like, ‘I don’t know what that is, but I wanna do that.’”
Chung would go to college at Jacksonville University where she studied Music Composition and Theory and then ended up at the University of Southern California studying Scoring For Motion Picture and Television in her graduate studies. This USC graduate program would end up shaping and changing Chung’s career path, as this is where she first met her now-collaborator Blake Neely. The two have worked together quite frequently on shows like “Arrow,” “The Flash,” “Supergirl,” among others.
“I met [Neely] more on the academic level. When I was doing graduate work at USC, he was one of the advisers.” Speaking of Neely, Chung had nothing but wonderful things to say about the veteran composer. “I was just really blown away … There’s a lot of people that are amazing composers but not all of them are either interested in education or are capable of breaking down what they do.”
Chung continued to heap praise and credit on mentors and colleagues, making sure to specifically spotlight Walter Murphy, composer on “Family Guy” and “American Dad,” where she started as an orchestrator. “When I started working for [Murphy] as an assistant and then as one of his orchestrators, that’s when I started to fangirl a little bit. He really knows his stuff.”
Through personal effort and a lot of guidance from people like Neely and Murphy, Chung became more and more familiar with who she is as a composer. “I like to think a lot about what the function of a score is. For me, that informs the gravity of it, what it’s supposed to do. Does it need to elevate or does it really need to stay out of the way?”
She went on for the next couple of minutes talking about what she has spent her life learning and practicing. Throughout my interview with her, Chung was high-spirited, even a little silly at times. However, when it came to talking about music for film and TV, it’s as though a switch had been flipped and suddenly I was a student in a MasterClass. “I like to write away from picture with the story in mind. I like to get an uninhibited path to finding what the answer is. I think of it as, first, I’m a composer. Then, I’m a film composer.”
Though Chung glowed when speaking about music and doing what she loves, her thoughts on the entertainment industry as a whole were a little more complicated. “Female composers have been around for years and years and years, but the visibility hasn’t always been there and the interest hasn’t always been there.”
Chung told me that in all four years of her undergraduate studies at Jacksonville University, she was the only female studying to be a composer. With her recent work on “Kung Fu,” however, Chung expressed her gratitude to the openness of not just the show but also the showrunners, Christina Kim and Robert Berens. “Talking to them, we wanted to lean into the fact that this was an Asian story with an Asian American family, but we wanted to be careful about when we put ‘cultural specificity’ in.”
This fit between composer and showrunners really comes out when you look at the finished product on screen. The “Kung Fu” score, available on all streaming services, manages to bring about a distinct East Asian flair while never crossing the line into triteness, caricature, or cliché. Take Kung Fu’s “Main Title Theme.” The piece is instantly recognizable as something from East Asian origin but manages to dip and dive around certain clichés like the use of the “East Asian Riff” while embracing and shifting others.
“In the way past, when an Asian person came on screen, you’d bang a gong or you’d have parallel fourths. We’re obviously not going for insulting (sic) and caricature but there are a lot of other clichés, too … and I completely embraced them and we’re gonna try and do it in a way that isn’t traditional. So I had to do research on Chinese dramatic music.”
The work Chung has done on “Kung Fu” has not only been enlightening for her professionally but also personally. Chung was raised by a first-generation Chinese American father and a white American mother, leading to a disconnect between her and Chinese culture. She described her father’s story as, “a common immigrant story,” where her exposure to Chinese culture became muted as it passed through a generation. “I didn’t grow up with any sort of shame about being Chinese, I just didn’t grow up with a huge amount of connection to it.”
However, through her experience on the show, Chung has grown to not only take ownership of her heritage but also to be truly proud of it. “It grew from a connection to an ownership, to an investment, into a pride, and just being proud about not only who I am and what I identify as, but to the immigrants who have come over … because it’s all up the chain.”
Chung continues to steadily make a name for herself in the world of television and film. Moving forward, she continues her work on season three of “Batwoman,” season two of “Kung Fu,” premiering on March 9th 2022, and season six of “Riverdale,” airing on CW beginning November 16th, 2021, while also working on new projects like the upcoming HBO Max series “Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai.” Whether the media sees her as a composer, a woman, or an Asian American in Hollywood, Sherri Chung continues to press forward as herself, a talented amalgamation of all three.
Stay up to date with Sherri Chung’s works by following her website, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Soundcloud.