Ramin Djawadi talks his favorite Game of Thrones compositions and if he’s returning for the prequel series
Ramin Djawadi is quickly becoming a household name. His music is very familiar to fans of Game of Thrones and Westworld alike, and he’s already built quite an enviable resume on films like Iron Man (2004), Clash of the Titans (2010), Pacific Rim (2013), and shows like The Strain (2014-2017) and Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan (2018).
Djawadi’s work on Thrones has been stellar from the beginning, with the show’s iconic main title to the devastating “Light of the Seven” in the Season 6 finale, to the beautiful and haunting theme for Jon and Daenerys, “Truth.”
The German-born Dajwadi was recently interviewed by The Independent and he talked about his favorite and most challenging pieces while scoring Game of Thrones, plus whether he’s considering a return to do the music for the HBO prequel series. First things first: Is he coming back to score whatever the prequel series to Game of Thrones? “I think it’s too early to tell,” he responds. “I’m not sure what where they’re at. That conversation is way too early to have.” In other words, nobody knows.
As for one of his favorite scores, Djawadi had a field day orchestrating the epic and complicated “Battle of the Bastards” battlefield sequence.
"In season 6, the long Battle of the Bastards was really fun to write. That’s a 20-minute long sequence. I really had to sketch the whole thing first before I went back and orchestrate it. I had to make sure I kept the overview of the arc I wanted to achieve. Those scenes take a while to write."
Music is all about emotion, and one can understand which scene was the most difficult for Djawadi to score: “Shireen’s death always comes to mind,” he says. “It was so hard to see.”
The Thrones maestro also chatted with Cnet, where he described how the first inklings of that awesome main title first came to him. “The initial idea came in the car,” he explains. “I was actually driving. They had shown me the visuals of the beautiful main titles with the cities popping up and everything. And then as I was driving back to my studio, that’s when the melody started forming in my head.”
Djawadi also talks about how he and the showrunners use different instruments to signify different locations and characters, saying “So musically I try to switch it up with instruments so besides the visual aspect there’s also an audible aspect to tell us now we are here, or we’re with this family. The violin, for example, we use for the Starks quite a bit. The cello is the Lannisters. For the Dothraki or Khal Drogo, we had a duduk [an Armenian woodwind instrument].”
Game of Thrones fans may not realize this–I certainly didn’t at the time–but Djawadi had never used a piano on a Thrones soundtrack until he wrote “Light of the Seven.”
"Every season I add new instruments. We always laugh about, What instrument haven’t you used yet? All the way to Season 6, when in Light of the Seven we used the piano for the first time. That was an instrument which wasn’t really in the language of the show. But we felt that moment was so different, let’s musically break out of our usual sound palette."
Djawadi is currently on a sprawling UK/U.S. tour with the latest version of the Game of Thrones Live Concert Experience. Get your tickets here.
Next: Take the Black Live: Daenerys Targaryen’s big day out
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