Scott FeinblattThe soundtrack music of any wildly successful film, TV show or series goes hand in hand with the love its fans feel toward the program itself. The score to Game of Thrones, the popular HBO fantasy series based on George R.R. Martin’s fantasy book series A Song of Ice and Fire, is no exception. The composer responsible for creating the soundtracks that have accompanied the fantasy battles, political intrigue and complex character development is Ramin Djawadi.
Other significant entries on Djawadi’s resume include the films Iron Man, Clash of the Titans, Pacific Rim, Warcraft and A Wrinkle in Time, as well as the HBO series Westworld, the FX series The Strain and the Amazon Prime Video Jack Ryan series. Additionally, Djawadi has won multiple Emmy awards for his Game of Thrones scores and has taken the Game of Thrones Live Concert Experience on global tours since 2017. Following the conclusion of the series, the maestro has been on the road with the updated version of the concert experience and will wrap up the tour with three stops in SoCal — including in Irvine and Hollywood, on October 4 and 5, respectively. In advance of the show’s stop at Irvine’s FivePoint Amphitheatre, Irvine Weekly had an opportunity to ask Djawadi about his music-writing process, how the concert has been updated, and what fans can expect to see at the show.
(James Dicks)
There are a number of ways in which composers will receive their input from a show’s producers and directors. Djawadi explained some examples of the direction his collaborators will take when discussing a project with him. “I always ask right away, ‘What do you hear?’ Many times they already have some kind of vision of what they want to do with the overall project, and music is part of that,” he said. “[Sometimes they say,] ‘I want this to be very emotional driven.’ Sometimes it’s even just finding out what instruments. … You know, some people say, ‘I really want this to be very percussion driven,’ or ‘I like trumpets.’”
For his Game of Thrones work, Djawadi was asked to go against expectations. “[There’s a] running joke where they particularly said for me to stay away from flutes because they didn’t want anything to medieval sounding. And so there was just a good guideline right away, and I’m going, OK, I won’t touch any flutes.” When asked about this irony, he explained the rationale was to resist the instrumentation of another popular fantasy series, “That’s why we laugh about it … they particularly wanted something that was not in the direction of some other fantasy shows, especially Lord of the Rings, which was obviously such a popular score. Howard Shore’s amazing score had such a distinct tone, and [for] some of that he used medieval flutes.” He continued, “So they particularly said, ‘We don’t want to go in that direction. We have to find our own way.’”
Djawadi finally arrived at a solution that then became a distinctive trait of his Game of Thrones scores. “We ended up with a lot of solo cello, and we felt it was a fitting sound and instrument and mood for Game of Thrones. That’s why the cello, in particular, is the most dominant instrument in the show,” he concluded.
For the touring show, Djawadi had an opportunity to create new variations and arrangements of the music, so not everything fans hear will be exactly as they recalled it on the show. “I had a lot of fun with that actually because I realized I’m not bound to the picture anymore,” he said. “In fact, it’s the other way around; I can create pieces and the [accompanying] footage around it because, obviously, we have only two [to] two and a half hours to tell a story.”
As far as updating the show after the series had concluded, this was not new territory for Djawadi, as the tour has been updated in this way before. “I reworked it, yet again, for the third time to include season 8, and it gets quite tricky because you’re obviously trying to tell a lot of information in very little time,” he explained. “My approach was really from [wondering:] ‘What are the big beats in each season?’ and ‘What are the big character arcs that I need to touch upon?’ And I tried my best to really capture it all … there are pieces that we know from the show, like for example, ‘Mhysa,’ which is the finale in season three, that is fairly similar to how we hear it in the show, but then there are other pieces that are particularly arranged just for the live show.” Djawadi pointed out that audience reception to the show’s incorporation of both original arrangements of some pieces with variations of other pieces has been good.
(James Dicks)
The music has not been the only thing to change in the years that the concert experience has been touring. Djawadi recalls, “The first tour was in the round, [so the stage] was in the middle and it had a huge stage and it had a lot of stuff going on. [For] the second tour, we updated it with season 7, and we took it away from being in the center because we felt sound-wise and stage-wise, we wanted to try something different,” he explained. “Now [for] this new tour, we want to try something new yet again, which is [why] these concerts are all outdoors; that’s something we have never done before. We thought that could be fun to take it to these open air venues. Before, when we were in the arenas, we would actually come with our own stage and set it up. When you are at open air arenas, [the stages are] already there. So you [just have to] bring your stage design.”
Game Of Thrones Live Concert Experience will be at FivePoint Amphitheatre in Irvine on October 4, at 8 p.m. Ticket prices range from $32-$521 (plus fees) and are available through Live Nation.
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