This is part of a series.
- Here’s the last post on Strange World, Bullet Train - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=122718
- If you want the full set of links covering the Too Big To Fail era or earlier, click on my profile.
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Westworld Season 4 (2022) - ***˝
Ramin Djawadi; add’l music by William Marriott & Johnny Martinez; technical score advisor Garret Reynolds
Season 1 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117611
Season 2 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=119377
Season 3 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=120127
TBTF discovery #93.
The fourth season of HBO’s murderbot show gave Ramin another opportunity to play around with his stylish mix of covers and scoring. Parts of it would continue down the electronic rabbit hole that Season 3 tunneled into, but the composer would also throw in plenty of surprises including a terrific cover of Metallica’s Enter Sandman and jazzy elements that suggested the noir vibes he brought to Westworld showrunner Lisa Joy’s film Reminiscence had drifted into the show. Ramin would be intrigued by where he could go from here. “Because we’ve gone so synthetic in Season 3 and 4, it would be interesting to explore some themes instrumentation-wise like we did in Season 1.” He’d never get the chance as the increasingly cost-conscious network would cancel the show, though the week after its finale aired Ramin would have a much bigger show start airing on the streamer.
House of the Dragon Season 1 (2022) - ****
Ramin Djawadi; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman; technical score advisor Garret Reynolds
Game of Thrones Season 8 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=119799
TBTF discovery #94.
The music for HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel wasn’t far removed from its legacy sound, as Ramin would call back to several familiar melodies and still place the same emphasis on lower strings, to the point that all higher-sounding string lines were done by violas and cellos. But the prequel would give Ramin challenges he didn’t face with the original series over a decade earlier. “In Thrones, we had the Starks, the Targaryens, and the Lannisters. So we would create themes for the families, and every once in a while we would have a breakout, like Arya got her own theme. But here, right away, we’re dealing with a bunch of Targaryens within the family.” And it would provide other new possibilities, including adding more woodwinds to the mix (something the Thrones showrunners had generally banned) and allowing more prominent use of instruments that the prior show had only utilized on rare occasions. “In the original show, after six seasons, we used the piano for the first time and it had this massive impact. Because people know about the piano now, why not just drop in right away?”
A good chunk of the score was textural and smaller scale, with many scenes backed by unnerving strings. And some of its new themes were a tad elusive. But there were still plenty of standout elements. A hypnotic repeated female vocal for the princess Rhaenyra added an element of new age mystery to the proceedings, while a beguiling theme introduced at the end of the first episode showed the influence of Westworld had crept into the melodies of Westeros. And unlike the first season of Game of Thrones which kept a lot of its music in a supporting role, the first season of House of the Dragons would occasionally call for music to play a very active role in driving the narrative, giving space for Ramin to inject some fairly interesting elements into scenes: extended musical frustration in the third episode as the king’s brother rows to his potential doom, a lovely yet slightly off-kilter unleashing of a house’s musical theme as a character’s dress color is revealed in the fifth episode’s wedding portion, soaring music for a child’s dragon ride in episode seven, and multiple big thematic statements in the season finale.
DC League of Super-Pets (2022) - ****
Steve Jablonsky; orchestrated by Penka Kouneva, Larry Rench, Philip Klein, Liz Finch,
Tim Williams, Weijun Chen & Daniel Brown; conducted by Jasper Randall; score
programmers Freddy Avis, Sven Faulconer, John Boyd, Xander Rodzinski & Roger Suen
Steve Jablonsky continued to shed his typecasting of the last decade-plus by writing spirited, largely orchestral superhero adventure music for this animated film, the first such gig he’d had since Steamboy almost 20 years earlier. Steve would craft several strong themes, all of which received impressive suites at the end of the album including a hysterically over-the-top march for a guinea pig supervillain. He also snuck in a few quotes of legacy superhero melodies by John Williams, Danny Elfman, and Charles Fox, though one of those wasn’t without challenge. “The opening sequence was the clear spot for using John’s Superman themes. Towards the end, when we started getting into credits, the response was, ‘Oh, John typically does not allow other composers to interpolate his themes into their own scores. Can you prepare us a clip of the opening sequence with the music? We will tell you what he thinks.’ Whatever panic I was feeling multiplied by a thousand at that point, because I’ve met John several times and he’s the nicest, most humble guy. I got an email [days later] saying, ‘We took it to his house. John watched it. He thought the cue was very, very good and he’s fine with it.’” If you’re more of a traditionalist score fan like I am, you’ll likely find this to be Jablonsky’s finest work to date.
Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022) - ***˝
Tom Holkenborg; add’l music sound design by Shwan Askari; add’l arranging by Dallin Burns;
solo duduk Pedro Eustache; technical score engineers Peter Kohrman & Gevorg Chepchyan;
orchestrated by Holkenborg, Jonathan Beard, Edward Trybek & Henri Wilkinson; conducted by
Christopher Gordon; ‘Cautionary Tale’ by Holkenborg with lyrics by Augusta Gore & George Miller
Mad Max: Fury Road was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117381
TBTF discovery #95.
Tom Holkenborg’s reunion with director George Miller after their 2015 hit Mad Max: Fury Road, the film that put Tom on the map as his own entity in Hollywood, was a long time coming. “In 2016, we started talking. I got the script halfway through ’19. He started shooting in February 2020. The main theme and a few arrangements were all created [between] November 2019 and November 2020. The majority of the work was done in 2020 and halfway through ’21.” Some of those compositions were written to be played on set as Miller filmed certain scenes, which begat a hilariously specific set of requirements. “At zero seconds, no music; at four seconds, a quick flourish like flamenco, really loud; three to four seconds and a quick stop; at seven seconds, start takes this; at nine seconds start this. I needed to take the theme and squeeze [it] into this whole book of individual notes. I’ve never done that before.”
Holkenborg’s score exists in two modes. On the one hand, there’s a lot of abstract material, certainly an unsurprising approach for a composer who’d often been reliant on sound design, though there’s a subtlety to what Tom wrote here that’s still undeniably hypnotic at times. That component was counterbalanced with a single major theme which had to feel both timeless and malleable given the different periods in history covered by the genie-centric film’s flashback storytelling structure. “In the first scene with Solomon, there’s a lot of instrumentation that is really old. And it goes all the way up to the end, where it’s a modern string arrangement.” Tom would acknowledge that taking such a monothematic approach in a movie that demanded more score might’ve been the wrong approach, but it felt appropriate here and thanks to judicious spotting avoided what the composer called “theme fatigue. It only plays six times, so the moments are really pinpointed.”
Don’t Worry Darling (2022) - **˝
John Powell; add’l music & arrangements by Batu Sener; orchestrated by
John Ashton Thomas & Mark Graham; conducted by Powell & Gavin Greenaway
TBTF discovery #96.
When John Powell started work on the psychological thriller Don’t Worry Darling (a movie more notable for its bananas press tour than its actual content), actor-turned-director Olivia Wilde “was looking for sonic textures, sounds rather than themes. I tried a few things from reel 4 to reel 6. Once she liked the middle chunk, we were quite clear about how to go about with the ending.” Much of the resulting score is a mix of orchestra (mostly strings), abrasive percussion strikes, voices, and other manipulated sounds - all seemingly intended to gradually play up the sense of alienation and paranoia as the film’s truths are revealed. Soloist Holly Sedillos confirmed that many of the weird vocal elements “were meant to represent a woman’s voice being stifled or manipulated by a man.” It was about as far away from How To Train Your Dragon as Powell could get - much closer to smaller-scale experimentalism we’d heard 20 years earlier in The Bourne Identity - and was a fascinating creative exercise, though its abstract, unsettling demeanor made it an immense challenge to enjoy on an hour-long album.
Alas, Don’t Worry Darling also came with some personal tragedy for the composer. In fall 2021, around five years after Powell’s wife had lost her battle with cancer, his friend, Trinity College classmate, and longtime score collaborator John Ashton Thomas would pass away at the age of only 60. “We first met in 1982 but since 2001 there’s not a film that he wasn’t a huge part of. He wrote so much of his own music that I’m still amazed how he found so much time (and patience) to help me - figuring out how to make my chaotic writing sound like music. He was such a wonderful person to be around that I was always happy to see him. I’m shattered by his loss.”
Prehistoric Planet Season 1 (2022) - ****
Anže Rozman, Kara Talve & Hans Zimmer; theme by Zimmer & Andrew
James Christie; orchestrated by Cara Batema, Abraham Libbos & Andrew Rowan
AND
Frozen Planet II (2022) - ****
Hans Zimmer, Adam Lukas & James Everingham; theme by Zimmer & Anže
Rozman; orchestrated by Gregory Jamrok, Abraham Libbos, Norvin Tu-Wang &
Joe Zimmerman; add’l music Laurentia Editha; add’l instrument design
Sebastian Ruiz V.A.; technical score assistants / engineers Adam Adams,
Ricky Corona & Stewart Mitchell; composer assistant Harsha Thangirala
Planet Earth II was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117577
Blue Planet II was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=119141
Seven Worlds, One Planet was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=119853
“One of my main memories just before my father’s death was when he took me to the Rhine, which was completely covered in foam. He was explaining to me [that] we’re destroying the world [and] we need to go and do something about that. And it hugely influenced me. The only work I’ve done that’s worth anything is for Sir David Attenborough. He doesn’t preach, he doesn’t bully. He makes you fall in love with this planet. And remember, I’ve done the other side: Interstellar, this planet is doomed and we’d better leave. I don’t want to leave.”
If you liked the Bleeding Fingers David Attenborough nature documentary sound in its more orchestral incarnations, then 2022 would give you two chances to experience it - one an effects-heavy miniseries visualizing how our understanding of dinosaur behavior has evolved and the other a sequel to the 2011 series Frozen Planet. Neither would feature Jacob Shea, who likely got a little burned out after knocking out three of these jobs over a four-year period. New names would step to the forefront, which Hans said was the business model for that team anyway. “Truly, I’m the oldest person there. Bleeding Fingers was set up as this place for young composers, fresh out of school, who have an enormous amount of loan debt. They could come to us and learn something and get paid from day one. [We’ve] found unbelievable talents from around the world. It’s become very international.” The spirit of competitiveness that Hans provoked among his underlings in Media Ventures in the 90s was still alive and well though. “If you do it in a group, you don’t have to be the only one who is utterly exhausted. [Yet] as much as we like each other, there’s always, “I’m going to write something great. Now, go and beat me at it.’”
Prehistoric Planet came about thanks to Hans’ work on the 2019 remake of The Lion King. “Jon Favreau was talking about combining [these] photorealistic visual effects with what the BBC have been doing.” There’s a surprising amount of elegance to much of the orchestral writing, with series composers Anže Rozman & Kara Talve at times coming closer to what Harry Gregson-Williams had been doing for Disneynature than the “epic” vibes of prior BF nature scores. After a trip to some U.S. dinosaur-related sites, the gang would also be inspired to create instruments from “bones, bone replicas, and rocks,” all of which add intriguing world music textures or otherworldly percussive ambience to many sequences. The typical TBTF era challenge of unfinished digital effects remained though. “We worked on it for almost two years. We had spotting sessions with the directors and the showrunner [with] some animatics and storyboards. We don’t talk so much in musical terms, but emotions and story, and then we’d go back and forth with Hans, and that’s how the ideas come to life. [After] the first version of our music [they’d redo] some animations and recut the sequence and we had to record music to the new picture. But [what helped was that] the story arc never changed throughout.”
On Frozen Planet II, composers Adam Lukas and James Everingham would do something similar to the pointillism that Jacob Shea & David Fleming aimed for on Blue Planet II. “We looked at ice splintering and fracturing and tried to convert that into music” by recording phrases, swells, and techniques with a string octet that were then assembled as an audio library called Fractured Strings that could be layered on top of their later orchestral recordings. Other tricks included recording at faster tempos and then lowering the playback speed to get ”this grainy quality - it’s all over the score.” The frequent deployment of Norwegian vocalist Aurora Aksnes added to the work’s entrancing, ethereal vibes. Taken together, these two works didn’t exactly break the mold for nature documentary music (not easy to do, but something composer Panu Aaltio pulled off in the prior year for the Finnish film Tale of the Sleeping Giants), but they still represented a clear step forward for the brand in this genre and a notable improvement on the “this is fine” vibes that the music of Planet Earth II gave many score fans back in 2016.
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Next time: “I’m fighting all the demons within me and going to speak them in my language, which is music.”
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