CHORDS AND SORCERY
Game Of Thrones composer Ramin Djawadi on the series’ standout tracks
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Covered by everyone from South Park to the Buckingham Palace guards, the blood-stirring Game Of Thrones theme is as sweeping and epic as its continent-hopping title sequence. Djawadi — who has composed the music for all 60 episodes of Game Of Thrones to date — only had two directions from showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss when putting the theme together. First, it needed to evoke the mood of a journey. Second, no flutes. “That was the rule,” laughs Djawadi. “It’s something you might expect from a genre like this and they really didn’t want that. So I went with the cello, because it’s a dark show and the cello is really expressive. Then the solo violin joins it and at the end the all-female choir kicks in. It’s nice how it expands over the course of the piece.”
KILL THEM ALL (SEASON 1)
“The Stark theme is a very emotional one, mainly cello and violin.” And the scene where a devastated Robb and Catelyn Stark swear retribution for the public execution of Ned (Sean Bean, dying on screen for a change), is one of its most poignant uses. “It seems like everybody dies in Game Of Thrones,” says Djawadi, who has also scored movies like Iron Man and Pacific Rim, “but most of them are Starks.”
THE RAINS OF CASTAMERE (SEASON 2)
Perhaps famous more for its performance by The National, The Rains Of Castamere became synonymous with the Lannisters after the infamous Red Wedding, during which a whole bunch of Starks have a very bad day (“The Lannisters send their regards,” sneers Michael Mcelhatton’s Roose Bolton, before stabbing Robb Stark). “We wanted to establish that very early on in Season 2,” says Djawadi, “so I wrote the melody to the lyrics from the book. When we get to the Red Wedding and you hear that melody, you know something’s gonna happen.”
MOTHER OF DRAGONS (SEASON 2)
The leitmotif of Emilia Clarke’s Daenerys Targaryen, first introduced so quietly it’s almost
overpowered by the Dothraki theme, asserts itself more as time goes on, particularly with the incineration of the warlock, and Right Said Fred wannabe Pyat Pree. “This is a good example of how we establish something in a modest way, and then build on it. With the dragons growing every season, I have to find a way to make it bigger and more epic every time.”
VALAR MORGHULIS (SEASON 2)
Where other Starks have the cello, Arya’s instrument is the dulcimer — a type of zither. While it was first heard in Season 1, it really comes into play here, as Maisie Williams’ young warrior is introduced to the key phrase, “Valar morghulis” (roughly translated, “All men must die”). “It has a great, tingly sound that just felt right for her. It lends an ethnic feel, which works for the journey she’s about to embark upon.”
HOLD THE DOOR (SEASON 6)
The most heart-rending iteration of the Stark theme accompanies one of Season 6’s most dramatic moments: the death of Hodor (Kristian Nairn), whose single-word vocabulary takes on a new level of significance. “I got really emotional writing this. Hodor was such a likeable character and it’s a very powerful scene. It starts out with the White Walker ticker — that clicking sound, which is the idea of bones. Then it turns into this dramatic chase until we get rid of all the action and are left with just emotion at the end.”
BASTARD (SEASON 6)
Jon Snow’s return this year may have surprised precisely no-one but it did signify a turning point for the character, one that finally made him worthy of his own theme, which debuts during his resurrection and continues as a dominant theme in the season’s bloody battle for Winterfell. “The entire scene is maybe 22 minutes and most of it has music. We wanted to make sure it didn’t get tiresome so we were very careful of when to take the music out. When the horses finally hit and all the soldiers clash, we said, ‘Let’s pull out and have the sound effects play out.’”
LIGHT OF THE SEVEN (SEASON 6)
With almost no dialogue, the ten minutes as we build to Cersei’s (Lena Headey) volcanic revenge on Jonathan Pryce’s High Sparrow (as she releases a wildfire explosion beneath King’s Landing) relies almost entirely on score to build the tension. If Season 6 has a standout sequence, then this is undoubtedly it. “That was the first time we’ve ever used the piano; it’s just not part of the language of the score,” says Djawadi, who had written himself into a corner. “We couldn’t use the Lannister theme [The Rains
Of Castamere] or the Sparrow theme [High Sparrow, from Season 5] because we didn’t want to give away what was going to happen. I had to write a completely new piece of music that wouldn’t tip people off.”
THE WINDS OF WINTER (SEASON 6)
The season reaches its climax to the backdrop of a triumphant medley. “There are so many thematic elements there. I put Theon’s theme in, Daenerys’ theme, the dragons’ theme, the Unsullied theme and then the main title kicks in, which is something we always hold off on until episode nine or ten, when the really big things happen. In every season, I try to come up with new ways of playing with that main title.” He’s got two more seasons, at least, to come up with a couple of interesting new quirks.
GAME OF THRONES SEASON 6 SOUNDTRACK IS OUT NOW ON DOWNLOAD, CD AND AS A THREE-DISC VINYL SET