He did it again. Ramon Djawadi, the Emmy Award winning composer (from last year’s episode “The Dragon and the Wolf“), has really outdone himself with the epic “Night King” theme from Sunday night.
Chills. Chills, I tell you.
Listen below.
Says Djawadi via The Wrap:
“The episode as a whole is definitely one big focus, because it’s just one big arc. But the piece at the end, the piano piece, I feel stands out and is so different,” Djawadi told TheWrap. “And if you look in the history of the ‘Game of Thrones’ score, we only really had one other big piano piece and that was in Season 6, the piece that we call ‘Light of the Seven,’ when Cersei blows up the Sept [of Baelor]. And that was the first time that we used the piano. So when we got together for this season we said, ‘OK, this is another moment now where the piano could be the right choice of instrument again.’ It’s the ending of this unbelievable battle sequence and yet the score needs to shift you from all the action and the music and ups and downs that came before and so we thought it’s time for the piano again.”=
“It was really a challenge to write because, similar to the ‘Light of the Seven,’ there is very little dialogue,” he continued. “I think there’s two sentences in there — Bran thanking Theon and that is it. The rest is all music. But the big difference compared to the ‘Light of the Seven’ piece is that this piece is at the end of the episode. The ‘Light of the Seven’ was at the beginning of the episode and things slowly unravel and you get to see things and the audience is figuring things out. The difference here is it’s the end of this big episode and it’s just — the plan is over. Like when the piano plays, there is nothing to unravel anymore except this is it. It’s over. This battle cannot be won. And it’s just haunting sadness as the Night King approaches Bran.”
Djawadi loves that he gets to see the episodes early because he then has “so much time to figure out where the music is going.” But in the case of “The Long Night,” it seems nothing could truly prepare him for the task at hand.
“This episode was the most challenging episode to-date to write because of the sheer amount of music, the battle sequences,” he said. “I spent at least double, if not three times as much time writing this one compared to the other ones because of the challenges. Like, for example, the longest battle sequence we ever had was on [Season 6’s] ‘Battle of the Bastards,’ which was 17 minutes, which is a significant amount of action music and is just one battle scene. And then compared to this episode — which is the entire episode and its an uber-length episode that is 80-plus minutes — to get that right and to constantly have the tension rising and then to reset to create a little bit of hope, like our heroes can maybe defeat the Night King, and to get that right took a while.”
I see another Emmy on his horizon!
