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On September 22, 2004, Oceanic Flight 815, a plane en route from Sydney to Los Angeles, disappeared over the Pacific Ocean. Although the outside world assumed that everyone on board had perished, the plane actually crashed on an unmarked island, and some of the passengers survived. During the next several years, the castaways discovered that the island had many peculiar features: a potent electromagnetic field; a secret community of scientists, called the DHARMA Initiative; mysterious residents who had been alive for hundreds of years. Six survivors succeeded in leaving the island, only to return via a second plane. They eventually tried to release themselves from their predicament by detonating a derelict hydrogen bomb. This explosion seemed to result in yet another complication--the creation of a parallel reality in which the original flight landed on schedule, with its passengers' lives radically altered.
In the world of the ABC sci-fi series "Lost," where these grippingly unlikely events have occurred, time is a malleable entity, jumping forward and doubling back. In the world of the film composer Michael Giacchino--whose contribution has been so crucial to the show's cult success that J. J. Abrams, its co-creator, told me, " 'Lost' would not be on the air today if it were not for Michael"--time is always ticking away. Giacchino has only two or three days to write thirty or more minutes of music. Hours after finishing a score, he hands it off to an orchestra of skilled Los Angeles studio musicians--a rare luxury on network television. In the six years that Giacchino has been working on "Lost," he has mobilized an army of compositional devices, from the harshly dissonant to the plaintively lyrical, helping to keep millions of people addicted to an often delirious plot. At once nerve-jangling and hypnotic, his music is integral to what Michael Emerson, a member of the cast, calls "the great soulful puzzle" of "Lost."
One day in February, I visited Giacchino's home, in Tarzana, in the San Fernando Valley, to watch him create the uncanny sounds that cause viewers to clutch their sofa pillows. A trim forty-two-year-old with tangled dark-brown hair, he padded around in an untucked button-down shirt, loose-fitting jeans, and running shoes. His studio is a smallish room on the second floor,...