There’s a lot to love about Game of Thrones, but its music has developed an outright cult following. How could it not? One hears that powerful intro and we all get jazzed for a night of politics, fantasy and debauchery.
In a recent interview with The Atlantic, acclaimed Game of Thrones composer Ramin Djawadi talked about how the series has brought him a certain level of celebrity. He broke down the methods he uses on the series, his own fascinating history with music and how he consistently turns quantity into quality.
Of course, we can’t talk about Djawadi’s music without bringing up his homerun hit, “Light of the Seven.” The haunting score accompanies the infamous scene when Cersei executes her plan to blow up the Sept of Baelor. The road to the final song was a long one, especially considering that for the first five season of the show, showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss had essentially banned the piano because it didn’t sound medieval enough. (Flutes were also banned.)
But the best rules are made to be broken, and the risks Djawadi took with “Light of the Seven” more than paid off. “It doesn’t accompany the scene,” Benioff and Weiss told The Atlantic. “It shapes the scene, as much if not more than any other creative element.” They weren’t wrong. “Light of the Seven” soon hit No. 1 on the Spotify Viral 50, displacing even the latest pop music.
So how did Djawadi achieve all this musical success? He credits both rock and classical music, remembering youthful days spent headbanging at concerts and times in kindergarten, where they “put a Mozart piece in front of you and explain how the counterpoint is working.”
If that’s what they’re teaching in kindergarten out in the Rhineland, sign me up. No wonder the man comes off like a modern-day Mozart. My own education was more Barney than Bach.
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Djawadi’s first big break was another on-screen hit. He was working on Pirates of the Caribbean under famed composer Hans Zimmer. The team had been agonizing over a specific sequence involving a donkey. “If you don’t get the sword fight with the donkey right, you might as well bury the movie,” Zimmer said. “Very quietly, the guy who was making the coffee, who I didn’t think played a musical instrument, said, ‘When you go home tonight, do you mind if I have a go at it?’” Of course, that dude with the coffee was Ramin Djawadi.
Nowadays, he’s not the guy prowling around the Keurig. Djawadi is the rockstar of the TV composing world. He’s got a tour, he’s got his own fanbase and he has more creative license than ever to do what he wants. The struggle now is figuring out how to keep a show sounding fabulous when you have hours and hours of footage to score.
Still, he never seems to disappoint, does he? Ramin Djawadi has proven himself to be a powerhouse behind a keyboard, someone whose fame will outlive the series.
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