Composers working in longform TV continue to find fascinating and original ways to convey the essence of character and nuances of emotion over multiple hours of storytelling. This season’s standout efforts included shows like “Murderbot,” “Pluribus” and “Spider-Noir.”
For Apple TV’s “Murderbot,” composer Amanda Jones (who previously worked with co-creator Paul Weitz on the film “Moving On”) confesses that she “inundated” Weitz with demos and musical ideas for six months before shooting even began. And once she met Paul’s brother and co-writer Chris Weitz, she was formally brought on board.
For the title character (Alexander Skarsgård), “this robotic thing that has human-like tendencies,” Jones says, she decided on an analog synth, the Roland Juno 60, in part because “it just creates the craziest noises — something that was definitely a piece of machinery but does have a mind of its own.”
To this she added a Korean reed instrument, the saenghwang, which “can reach crazy high-pitch frequencies” and underlines the notion of an organic-synthetic combination. “As he’s achieving some sort of humanity, or showing some essence of being sentient, I would blend those layers,” she explains.
As the series progresses, we hear more of her 50-piece orchestra. She had the most fun using it the music of “Sanctuary Moon,” the sci-fi soap opera that obsesses Murderbot. “I’ve always wanted to write something like this,” she says. “It’s very Bernard Herrmann-esque and it was great to stream-of-consciously write something in that style.” She also put music to Chris Weitz’s lyrics for the “Sanctuary Moon” theme.
One of the year’s most striking themes was the wordless vocal accompanying the word “Pluribus,” which opened the Apple TV series with Rhea Seehorn as a survivor of an alien mind invasion targeting everyone on Earth.
It’s the work of Dave Porter, longtime composer for series creator Vince Gilligan (“Breaking Bad,” “Better Call Saul”). The two-part harmony is sung by the same singer, Kenya Hathaway. “She’s got a childlike quality, an innocence missing from a lot of professional singers, and a little soulfulness that brought a humanity and a relatability that I loved,” Porter says.
Because the story involves disaster on a global scale, the composer needed a 50-piece orchestra. Yet at times, he says, “I’ve scaled that back to a third of it, just to make sure we’re not overpowering the story that we’re telling”—which, much of the time, involves the solitary existence of Albuquerque author Carol (Seehorn) and her efforts to thwart the “hive mind” now ruling the world.
His orchestra consists only of strings and low brass. Adds Porter: “The Others are not treated as the bad guys. “We wanted to be very nuanced about that, seeing all the facets of who they are, positive and negative.”
There is also a nine-voice choir, whose sounds were written “to be as intricate as possible and often percussive. Also, I wanted it to sound effortless, especially as used in reference to The Others, because all things come easy to them.” Porter worked on the nine-episode series over an 18-month period.
Finding the right musical approach for the eight-part Peacock thriller “All Her Fault” was a challenge, composer Jeff Beal (“House of Cards”) admits. But, he says, he “couldn’t put the book down” and the writing and performances (especially star Sarah Snook, playing a character whose child is abducted, and Sophia Lillis, as the nanny suspect) were top-notch.
“Music was a big part of this because of the emotions that are in play. The story is, on one level, a great genre thriller and, on another level, it’s this weird emotional ride of a marriage, trust and betrayal,” Beal tells Variety. “I lost my mom shortly before I did this series, so I was thinking a lot about the powerful connection between a child and a mother.”
Beal’s music is primarily for strings and piano. “I just love the way strings can be creepy, or full of passion and strange beauty,” he says. “A boy soprano also hovers over the main title,” which is the theme for Milo, the missing child. “He’s in a way the most important character because his absence really drives the story forward.”
Percussion and some electronic elements —”more edgy sounds,” he says — also enter the picture for the Chicago detective (Michael Pena) investigating the crime. Overall, “It was less about character themes because it was really themes of dislocation that sometimes play between the characters. And you have no way of knowing how twisted the secret’s going to be, and how spiritually betraying it is.”
Quebec composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer (“The White Lotus”) talked with director Mark Munden about “Lord of the Flies” years before the Netflix miniseries began shooting. It was de Veer who suggested the extensive use of classical works by Benjamin Britten and Olivier Messiaen to suggest the English-school background of the boy choristers who survive a plane crash on a Pacific island.
By the time Munden was in post-production, de Veer was available to contribute original music. The first episode contains “synthetic abstract noises to give some hint of the horrors to come,” he says. “But for the later episodes, the classical thing disappears slowly and (the music) becomes more and more chaotic.
“How the boys discover themselves to be completely primitive and violent, that was my job,” de Veer reports. “So I started using deformed sounds from instruments like the bass clarinet and cello in a way that would represent the transformation these boys are going through.”
Surprisingly, he used only “seven or eight” musicians and three singers for all of his music. The voices include “yelling and screaming and even crying. They become very hellish and they can be moving, but also, I think, vulnerable,” he says.
By the third episode, de Veer notes, “I have these choirs on top of an unapologetically electronic beat, and drums which are more tribal, expressive and dynamic, because we are at a peak of intensity of madness happening in the jungle.” He spent three months writing the score.
The latest incarnation of Spider-Man is “Spider-Noir,” with Nicolas Cage as a 1930s private eye who was once known as The Spider (with all the familiar super-powers). “The challenge with this show,” says composer Kris Bowers, “is how to make it feel modern while at the same time honoring the noir sound that inspired the writing and filming.”
He partnered with longtime colleague Michael Dean Parsons (they worked together on “Bridgerton,” “Secret Invasion” and other projects); the two shared composing duties throughout the eight Amazon Prime episodes, about four and a half hours of music in total.
“Kris and I did an exhaustive study of scores of that era,” says Parsons, drawing on that tradition (notably films like “Double Indemnity”) but then modernizing it for “a completely fresh approach,” including electronic elements and even electric guitar.
All of the main characters have their own themes: Ben Reilly (Cage), his journalist friend Robbie Robertson (Lamorne Morris), crime kingpin Silvermane (Brendan Gleeson), femme fatale Cat Hardy (Li Jun Li), villain Sandman (Jack Huston) and more.
Bowers and Parsons also have a 50-piece orchestra, although all the jazz piano in the score was played by Bowers, a veteran jazzer. The percussion was mostly “found sound,” unusual noises (such as camera and newspaper-business sounds for Robertson’s character) that were altered and manipulated in their studios, Parsons notes.
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