The New York Philharmonic will perform Michael Abels’ score for Get Out, Jordan Peele’s horror-comedy about racism and slavery, in live-to-film performances this Halloween, October 31, 2026. The orchestra will play the score as the film is screened.
Peele hired Abels, then 54, after discovering his orchestral rhapsody Urban Legends on YouTube. Abels had not scored a feature film before. At the time he was running the music department at a private school in Santa Monica, California. Peele said he considered that an asset: “I didn’t want somebody who was bringing their baggage into it.”
According to Playbill, Abels had always wanted to score films, but opportunities in Hollywood for Black composers were scarce in the 1980s. He worked on commercials, gospel choir arrangements, youth orchestra music and an unproduced opera about Rodney King before his feature break.
Score
The opening credits feature “Sikiliza Kwa Wahenga,” a song sung in Swahili. Abels said he chose the language because American audiences would not be able to understand the lyrics, which would make listeners focus on the emotion of the words. The rest of the score is written mostly for harp and strings, with a love theme for solo cello.
The film was the first of three Peele and Abels collaborations, followed by Us and Nope. Get Out received four Academy Award nominations, and Peele won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
See New York Philharmonic live
Upcoming New York Philharmonic events with tickets available:
- Oct 28, 2026 — David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, New York, New York · Get tickets
- Oct 29, 2026 — David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, New York, New York · Get tickets
- Oct 30, 2026 — David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, New York, New York · Get tickets
- Oct 31, 2026 — David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, New York, New York · Get tickets
- Nov 4, 2026 — David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, New York, New York · Get tickets
Tickets are sold by GetUrTix. Code GTIX20 takes 20% off the ticket price at checkout — no minimum, no expiry.
Source: Playbill
