Game of Thrones composer Ramin Djawadi on that haunting finale score

I am not a movie or TV soundtrack person. There are a few TV themes I’m attached too—the Downton Abbey opening, for instance—but in general I’m not big on dramatic orchestrations that play underneath the drama. It has to be a really well done piece of music placed just right for me to even notice most of the time…and that’s the way it should be. Unless it’s a musical, the music should be subtly enhancing the show, not getting in the way.

I have made exceptions for Game of Thrones: The opening theme, Drogon’s theme (which is actually the back half of a larger piece entitled “The Dance of Dragons”), and now composer Ramin Djawadi’s latest piece, from the finale, entitled “Light of the Seven.” Djawadi sat down with The Hollywood Reporter after “The Winds of Winter” aired and discussed his musical hit.

https://youtu.be/MFK0yG8xG5I

Ironically, Djawadi had only just joined Twitter this year, about halfway through Season 6, so he had only a few followers prior to the finale. That all changed by 9:30pm EST on Sunday. “….when the finale aired, my Twitter account blew up.” You and the Sept of Baelor, buddy….

"The interesting thing to me was the use of the piano. When we started the season, [showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss], and Miguel Sapochnik, the director of the episode, reached out to me and said, “There’s something coming up in episode 10.” We talked about “The Light of the Seven,” and how it needed to be a new piece of music. Any kind of character theme could tip it, and we didn’t want to tip the audience. Miguel brought it up: “What about the piano?” We discussed it. The piano is not really in the language of the Game of Thrones score. We went back and forth about it, and then we came up with the organ, which we used last season with Cersei during the atonement walk and some of the other scenes when she’s in prison. But the piano was the new instrument…. there’s really nothing like it. The piano has this decay and attack at the same time. We even experimented with the harp, but the harp was not as haunting as the piano. The piano has a huge dynamic range that almost no other instruments have."

Djawadi says the fact that the opening scene has no dialogue for long stretches meant the track had to be nice and long too. (Nearly 10 minutes.) One thing he also pointed out—I always assume that I’m not noticing the music a lot of the time in the show—was that for long stretches of Game of Thrones, there is no music. That changed dramatically this season, which is part of the reason why this set of episodes felt different.

"It was an amazing opportunity to have a long sequence that can carry music like this. In the history of Game of Thrones, there’s also a lot of sequences that are without music….Very rarely do we have these long pieces of music like this. This season I think we had it more than in any other season… even the early episodes, like the Hodor scenes [in “The Door”], that’s a ten minute section with all music and very beautiful shifts within. And the “Battle of the Bastards” as well. That’s a 22-minute sequence."

As for the vocalists in “Light of the Seven,” which most people think is a boy’s choir…well, it is boys singing, but there are only two. Djawadi said that was inspired by “the little kids running around,” ie Qyburn’s little birds. Just in case they weren’t creepy enough.