LOS ANGELES — Chris Walden, the Hamburg, Germany-born composer who has served as the lead music arranger of the Academy Awards for seven years, was recording on a scoring stage in Cologne more than 30 years ago when a German film executive peeked in and quipped, "That sounds like Hollywood."

That moment confirmed two things for Walden: "First, I can actually write that music," the composer said in a recent interview at his Franklin Hills home while in the thick of Oscars prep. "And secondly, it's not wanted here."

So he moved to Los Angeles.

Early in his L.A. tenure, Walden landed a solid gig scoring movies made for television, a business that tanked with the advent of reality TV. After that, the composer turned his attention to a big band pet project, making ends meet with leftover work scoring German TV shows. Unexpectedly, Walden's band became his calling card, ultimately drawing prominent record producer David Foster into his orbit. Foster, who produced Chicago, Celine Dion and Natalie Cole, put Walden on the path to a few Grammy wins and eventually — by way of then Oscars music director Bill Ross — back into the film industry.

From his first run with the Academy Awards arranging team in 2008, Walden was hooked; the job seamlessly blended his favorite parts about film scoring and classical composing. Since then, he's reprised the role nine times, seven as lead arranger.

"How we do the show, musically, has not changed," Walden said, adding that the Oscars are the last awards show to employ a live orchestra. "It's just that I'm more in control now. I do more of the work, and I can put more of my fingerprint on the show than when I started."

Walden's work begins in advance of the Oscar nominations themselves. Typically some time in January, the composer begins researching top awards contenders and toying with recognizable melodies from their scores. He can arrange most music by streaming it on Spotify or Apple Music, but he also has the bulk of composers on speed dial to request their arrangements if need be.

Only once has he ever prepared a winner plan for a film that wasn't nominated: "A Man Called Otto," starring Tom Hanks.

"I was certain," Walden laughed. "Then when the nominations came out, [I thought], 'What happened to that movie?'"

Once nominations roll around, he really hunkers down and gets working.

Walden kept a writing room at Hollywood's Capitol Studios before it closed for renovations in 2022. Now, he works from a home studio overlooking Silver Lake.

Two walls are adorned with an array of Grammy certificates and platinum records. Lining the others are shelves of old handwritten scores, stacks of cased instruments and a plethora of study scores. Walden's favorite, an egg yolk-yellow Brahms edition, sits within close reach of his desk chair, where he sat fine-tuning his Oscars best original score medley.

"I picked the order just how I felt the music should build," Walden said, explaining each film's position as they flashed across the 27-inch screen. As with many aspects of the Oscars, Walden was not permitted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to speak on the record about any specific films, but he said he wanted to open with the sweeping sound of a blockbuster and close with the sweet, romantic music of a drama.

Walden is also responsible for orchestrating winner walk-ons (including several cues for each nominee), presenter-walk ons, musical transitions before and after commercial breaks, and featured performances, like the "Wicked" medley that opened last year's show. All in all, it's somewhere around 120 pieces of music.

It's an astronomical amount of work to complete in just a few months. Sometimes in the home stretch, Walden recruits outside help — but never because of writer's block, he said, just due to time constraints. After all, orchestrating prearranged scores is far easier than composing original music from scratch.

If he ever does get stuck, the composer said he moves to another portion of the arrangement, works through that section, then returns to the problem area. Sometimes it helps to sketch on paper, like he did as an early-career composer.

The most important thing, Walden said, is to avoid mere replication — both of the nominated films' scores and of the featured performance numbers. Instead, the composer is tasked with "infusing our Oscars aesthetic into it."

That's gotten harder over the years as underscore music for films has become more about soundscape and sound design.

"It's hard to find a melody I can hold on to," Walden said, citing John Williams as one of the last melody-driven composers. "Maybe they feel it's distracting. They just want something that sets the mood, plays an atmosphere."

One of this year's nominees, which the composer couldn't specify, didn't have a score at all. Typically his next move is to look at licensed songs, but it didn't have those either. In those rare cases, he writes his own composition — something generic yet glamorous.

Walden's final task comes a week before the show when he goes into the studio with the orchestra to rehearse and record everything. Those recorded cues act as a fail-safe against technical malfunctions during the broadcast, though the orchestra aims to play everything live.

For some, working behind the scenes might be stifling, but for Walden, it's liberating.

"I don't crave the spotlight," the composer said. When he goes out with his famous friends like Michael Bublé and people inevitably flock to them, he said, "I'm glad it's not me."

Walden so enjoys composing music that in 2022 he founded Pacific Jazz Orchestra, an iteration of the big band he first assembled decades ago. Taking creative inspiration from the Netherlands' Metropole Orkest and structural inspiration from the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, PJO employs a unique instrumental style rarely seen in the U.S.

The 40-piece ensemble, complete with string, woodwind, brass, percussion and keyboard instrumentation, "can pretty much play anything," Walden said.

Walden's time with his orchestra inspires his work with the Academy Awards, and vice versa. He sees a similar pattern when he switches mediums: "when I'm writing a film score, I get inspired by something that I might have written for an album before, and if I'm writing an arrangement, sometimes I get inspired by something cinematic."

At times, the composer struggles to manage both gigs, but "he loves the stress," said his daughter Sabrina Walden, who also serves as PJO's production manager and programs coordinator.

"I always tell people, Chris has his back to the audience when he's performing," she said. "I get to see his face when he's conducting, and that's when he's his happiest."

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