Setting a grand stage for ‘Game of Thrones’
Ramin Djawadi can summon fire. Or so he says. While thinking about how to best create a concert experience for the music he composed for the hit TV show “Game of Thrones,” Djawadi decided he needed to think bigger than the customary film-to-concert experience, which is often set in concert halls and theaters. Djawadi works on a TV show with a grand scale, so he wanted a performance that reflected the source material.
“Think about it, on the show Dany has dragons, and those dragons breathe fire,” he says. “So we need fire.”
So there will be fire.
The Game of Thrones Live Concert Experience will not be held then in a customized music venue but rather Friday night in the Toyota Center, where a full orchestra and choir will present along with accoutrements from the fictional land of Westeros — like Weirwood trees, a giant ice wall and banners for various warring houses.
Djawadi wishes to make clear that while the performance will be a spectacle, it’s meant to be contemporary in presentation without settling into an arena rock show. The visual assets will embellish modern classical music the German composer wrote for “Thrones.”
At 42, Djawadi has a formidable amount of lauded and awardwinning music to his credit. He left Germany for Boston to study at the Berklee College of Music and then headed to Hollywood. Early work included composing music for the film “Blade: Trinity” and the TV show “Prison Break.”
Then in 2011, writer/ producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss contacted him about creating the music for their adaptation of novelist George R.R. Martin’s epic “A Song of Ice and Fire” fantasy series.
Djawadi’s work became the show’s first creative element to reach
viewers. His droning theme set a menacing and moody tone, introducing the title sequence of the “Game of Thrones” pilot, which aired in April 2011.
The grand piece of music bucked a TV trend spanning several years — starting with “Lost” — in which theme songs were largely kicked to the curb — reduced to a few seconds or done away with altogether.
“It really bothered me because I remember loving main title songs as a kid,” Djawadi says. “But the trend became skipping straight to the show. When the creators approached me, they told me I had two minutes. That’s a feast for a composer.”
Benioff and Weiss took Djawadi to the effects house where much of the grandiose visual material for the show was created.
“They wanted a title that summarized the tone of the show,” he says. “And the one word they used was ‘journey.’ ”
Djawadi’s subsequent music had to be farreaching to reflect the farflung settings in the story. He had to create different moods for the sweltering King’s Landing and the freezing terrain on both sides of the Wall. He had to evoke feelings of menace and contemplation that would eventually explode into scenes of shocking violence before giving way to further strained meditation.
For all its outward violence, “Game of Thrones” is very much concerned with the internalized thinking and scheming that leads to conflict. Dark interior shots and the grayish white of snow-covered exteriors dominate. Here, Djawadi’s work recalls that of one of his heroes, albeit in an opposite manner. Djawadi recalls growing up enraptured by scores by the famed Ennio Morricone, the Italian composer whose work soundtracked a subgenre of 1960s Westerns made by Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone.
“I was a huge Morricone fan,” Djawadi says. “I often think of him and the way he connected his music with the striking images of each of those films. His work is my measure for greatness.”
One not entirely obvious tip to Morricone and Leone on “Thrones” will be more obvious in the live show. Djawadi serves as conductor for the concert, while also adding some instrumental parts here and there. Among them: He’ll play a glass harmonica to signify the arrival of the White Walkers, the show’s plaguelike force of the undead that threaten just about everything living. In the concert, as in the score, Djawadi will play a glass harmonica to introduce the creatures. Doing so recalls Charles Bronson’s mysterious gunman from “Once Upon a Time in the West,” who makes unnerving appearances throughout the film playing harmonica.
The Game of Thrones Live Concert Experience will offer the show’s fans something to fill the lull until the show’s return, which will be summer rather than its customary spring. Benioff and Weiss are drawing “Game of Thrones” to its conclusion, with a likely 13 episodes to be distributed over two short seasons this year and next. Djawadi is already busy with another project that will likely have legs: He created the theme and is doing music for “Westworld,” HBO’s buzzy science-fiction/ Western hybrid, which he describes as “different, interesting and special.”
But the end of “Thrones” has him feeling down.
“The concert has taken my mind off of it a little,” he says. “But I will miss working with all the people involved. I feel so fortunate to be a part of it, but I do feel sad and depressed that it’s coming to an end.”