“They put a Mozart piece in front of you and explain how the counterpoint is working.”įluency in the work of both Eddie Van Halen and Ludwig van Beethoven helped Djawadi develop a sound that is at once complex and crowd-pleasing. “In kindergarten, they teach you about canons,” Djawadi told me. Growing up in the Rhineland, however, classical music was unavoidable. “Good memories,” he said, holding it in a mildly heroic pose. Walking through his studio, I admired the lutes and djembes on display, but Djawadi was most excited to show off a seven-string electric guitar from Vai’s early-1990s line of instruments, patterned with psychedelic flames. As a teenager in Duisburg, Germany, he headbanged at Anthrax concerts, shredded guitars in bands with names like Antagonist, and worshipped Steve Vai and Yngwie Malmsteen, two of the most fire-fingered technicians to ever wear leather pants. O rchestral composition has long competed with another of Djawadi’s musical obsessions. 1 on the Spotify Viral 50, displacing the soon-to-be-ubiquitous pop of Maggie Rogers’s “Alaska”-an impressive feat for a 10-minute instrumental, and evidence of one of the more surprising twists in the Thrones saga to date: It’s made a rock star of its composer. Shortly after the episode aired, “Light of the Seven” landed at No. Thrones fans thrilled to the scene, and to its sound.
He punctuated his piano chords with unsettling silence, employed a church organ to evoke Cersei’s torturous past with the religious cult she was attacking, and instructed two boys to sing together in such a way that they were “not out of tune, but you get that feeling of Something’s wrong.” I visited Djawadi in his Santa Monica studio recently, and he broke down for me how he’d written “Light of the Seven” to draw out the scene’s themes. Even Djawadi’s most valiant melodies carry a whiff of the ominous. Since then, he’s created a sprawling sonic landscape befitting the show’s apocalyptic refrain: Winter is coming. The 44-year-old German Iranian composer cemented the series’ iconic status back in 2011 with a theme song whose relentless thrum of strings catchily embodied the roiling intrigue to come. When Thrones leaves the air this year, its cultural legacy will include-and has been enabled by-Djawadi’s richly textured music. “It shapes the scene, as much if not more than any other creative element.” “It doesn’t accompany the scene,” Benioff and Weiss told me via email. But the elegiac mood of the composition, called “Light of the Seven,” conveyed more: Cersei’s violent act wasn’t just a game-board-upending coup it was a tragedy born of malice and desperation.
The heretofore unheard instrument suggested, however subtly, that one of the series’ signature plot twists was in the making. As one of Cersei’s minions skulked through the sewers below the cathedral, lighting fuses, the score reverberated with haunting piano arpeggios.
So Djawadi finally brought the piano to Westeros. “There’s a warmth to it that the colder piano doesn’t have.” “I played the whole scene with harp, and everyone was shaking heads,” he told me. They also banned the flute, for fear that Thrones would sound like a Renaissance fair.īut when Djawadi sat down to soundtrack a pivotal sequence in Season 6-the slow reveal that the embattled royal mother, Cersei Lannister, was about to bomb her own kingdom’s cathedral, incinerating half a dozen regular characters in the process-none of the instruments he tried seemed right. Weiss, decided that the ivories were too delicate for the show’s brutal realms, where even weddings tend to involve some stabbing. Early on, the showrunners, David Benioff and D. During the series’ first five seasons, however, he left one common weapon untouched: the piano. The arsenal of instruments Ramin Djawadi has used to score Game of Thrones includes mournful strings, mighty horns, and the Armenian double-reed woodwind known as a duduk.
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