Ramin Djawadi on the inspiration for the Game of Thrones concert tour

In a new interview with Billboard Magazine, composer Ramin Djawadi discussed what inspired the upcoming Game of Thrones concert tour. Game of Thrones isn’t the first property to have a concert series built around it, but this may be on a grander scale than most. One reason? Most concert series of this kind are based on movies, not TV shows.

Harry Potter, for instance, launched a concert tour just this past summer at the Hollywood Bowl. “Tour” is a looser term in this case, because at each stop it’s the local orchestra playing the music, not one orchestra traveling the country. And each orchestra picks their movie (they usually pick one of the first two, so they can play the John Williams pieces.) The actual concert is therefore only as long as the movie’s run time, since there’s the film is playing in the background.

(Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images)

This is impossible for Game of Thrones, as no one is going to sit there for sixty hours straight, and no orchestra is going to play that long. And yet, showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss still wanted to make a go of it. “Oh, we would love to hear this live, you have to play this live,” they said to Djawadi at one point. And Djawadi had serious ideas about it.

"What I always said was if we were going to do this concert I want to take it a step further than what people know as the traditional ‘Let’s play some music from your favorite TV show and have an orchestra.’ But let’s really turn it into a spectacle and an actual show."

However, whatever visual splendor is involved, he insists that the focus is still on the songs.

"This is all about the music, but having the stage like you saw in the video, it really makes it very contemporary and exciting,” he said of the 360-degree stage that will bring the scenes to life using LED telescoping and wall screens that will be augmented by 3-D designs that rise and fall from the stage floor. “You can see we have fire on the screen and dragons and the middle part turns into The Wall and it can really mold into structures and locations that the show has that will take the audience on a more immersive, really exciting [experience].”"

Although Djawadi doesn’t say it outright, the timing of the concert makes it seem like a way to help hold over fans during the extra long wait for Season 7.

"The idea is to come out and relive all of the first six seasons with the fan-favorite pieces [of music] and, with that, relive some of their favorite scenes,” he said, noting that at various points the audience will feel like they’ve stepped inside a castle, a snowstorm or a blast of fire. “But we’re also creating our own content that will glue everything together and is Game of Thrones-inspired.”"

So far no actors from the show have been confirmed to be part of the spectacle. But we can always hold out hope.