In coming to film music, Beltrami sought to escape from the late 19th century harmonies and melodies that the immigrant Hollywood composers of the early 20th Century brought with them from Europe, their legacy having endured as a dominant paradigm for score writing.

"Though there will always be new statements made utilizing that vocabulary, I’d rather speak my own musical language. Film has the potential of allowing me to explore my own ideas, which I find very attractive."

Those ideas have found an ever-widening audience via numerous recent opportunities for this in-demand composer. Beltrami has scored the hit TV drama series The Practice and his recent film credits include Angel Eyes and Blade 2.

Other Beltrami scores have been heard on the soundtracks to Scary Movie 2, Mimic, Joy Ride and the 2002 Sundance festival favorite The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys. In addition to the recognition afforded by his cinematic efforts, Beltrami has received awards from the American Acade my of Arts and Letters, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the ASCAP Foundation, the Harry Warren Fellowship Committee and Meet the Composer.

Beltrami’s family emigrated from Italy, and Marco grew up on Long Island, New York, where his predilection to create music surfaced early on. Beginning piano lessons at age 6, the future film composer was often more interested in re-writing, rather than practicing, his assigned pieces. As a teenager, he played keyboards in rock bands, but when the future film composer enrolled at Brown University, music was not initially his focus; a career in urban planning beckoned at the time.

Beltrami gravitated to Brown’s electronic music studio, where he quickly realized the innate compatibility of synthetic sounds with the European tonal palette. Working there in the mid-‘80’s, using both older analog synthesizers and then-recent innovations such as the Synclavier, Beltrami nurtured a passion for electronic sound and an aptitude for bold, assured and arrestingly physical musical gestures.

He strove to incorporate synthesis alongside his orchestral, chamber and vocal works, fostering a predilection for carefully structured music built with meticulous attention to detail that has served him well in his cinematic endeavors.

Graduating from Brown, he studied in Venice, Italy with firebrand avant-garde composer Luigi Nono, though recalling the period Beltrami admits that his lessons at the time had more to do with politics than music. Upon his return to the U.S., he entered the Yale School of Music on a scholarship. There he was mentored by one of the most prominent of contemporary American composers, Jacob Druckman, whose masterful expansions on principles of orchestration put forward by Stravinsky and Ravel led Beltrami to cite Druckman as "My biggest influence, the one who prompted me to look at music in a new way."

The polyglot influences of the young composer’s student years left him convinced that there was room for new voices in American orchestral composition. His was not to be the pastoral vision of an Aaron Copeland, but rather one that reflected the founding notion of America as a cauldron of hybridized ideas and cultures. Beltrami relished the idea of a musical landscape where, in his words, "the music of a Jamaican bandleader was of equal importance with the work of a Germanic music scholar." The one-time urban planner, inspired by the energy of American cityscapes, resolved to incorporate comparable intensity into his music.