Period Films Inspire Scores with Unusual Instruments, Surprising Sounds

Movies set in the past often rely on music to tell us just where we are. Most, but not all, of the composers of this year’s period pieces felt the obligation to reflect time and place.

For Ridley Scott’s long-awaited sequel “Gladiator II” composer Harry Gregson-Williams not only employed a 90-piece orchestra and 100-voice choir, he spent months seeking out unusual instruments that might suggest the ancient Roman empire: ancient woodwinds, primitive horns, long-forgotten drum sounds.

He even visited the studio of a Spanish craftsman who built, and plays, the giant bronze trumpet known as a carynx. “It looked quite threatening like you could probably use it as an instrument of war,” Gregson-Williams says. To these he added both male and female vocal soloists—including one from Australia and another from Ethiopia—for various colors; Lisa Gerrard, who sang on Hans Zimmer’s original “Gladiator” score, can be heard late in the film.

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Warrior-turned-gladiator Lucius (Paul Mescal) has his own theme featuring the ney flute (and a descending melodic line that subtly refers to Zimmer’s original theme), and the composer added an electric cello for “a slippery, sliding” motif for the scheming power player Macrinus (Denzel Washington). This marked the composer’s seventh time working with Scott (“Kingdom of Heaven” and “The Martian” were among their other collaborations).

For “Blitz” Steve McQueen’s drama about a boy trying to find his way home during the Nazi bombing of England in 1940, composer Hans Zimmer supplied what he calls “a symphony of terror… the most torturous, horrendous score, so that grownups could feel what that child was feeling.”

Zimmer’s German Jewish mother had been evacuated to London in 1939 and lived through the Blitz herself. “She had told me all the stories,” Zimmer says, “but as I was watching the film, her stories became an emotional experience where I suddenly felt what my mother had gone through.”

At the end of a recent European tour, he recorded members of his band to play “horrible, dissonant, nasty notes” and then layered them into what sounds like a large string section. He also added the sounds of a child’s recorder for rare moments when George (Elliott Heffernan) is just being a 9-year-old having fun.

English indie rocker Daniel Blumberg scored Brady Corbet’s epic “The Brutalist” with less than a dozen musicians, recording them all over Europe. Chief among them was 88-year-old pianist John Tilbury, who was recorded playing “his beautiful Steinway literally in a shed in his garden in Kent,” Blumberg reports.

The composer wrote music before and during production, including the jazz numbers that help to set the era (’40s and ’50s), and Corbet played his demos on the set.

“Brady wanted Adrien (Brody, who stars as an immigrant architect in Philadelphia) to feel and respond to that,” he says. He recorded brass in Berlin, other pianists in France, and synthesizers with Depeche Mode’s Vince Clark (for the ’80s finale) in New York. Blumberg’s main theme represents architect Laszlo Toth, with a romantic variation for his wife Erzsebet (Felicity Jones).

Alexandre Desplat knew he couldn’t refuse a movie titled “The Piano Lesson” The August Wilson play focuses on a beautifully carved family heirloom that resides in an African-American home, and the composer felt that the sound of the piano should be, for the most part, reserved for moments when the instrument itself is actually played on screen.

“I felt it had to be like a sacred altar, something you respect, and the piano comes to life when you open it, not before,” the French composer says.

The Pittsburgh 1936 setting appealed to Desplat because of his love of Duke Ellington jazz of the period, so he incorporated bits of jazz colors. But because “The Piano Lesson” also incorporates supernatural elements, he added a small women’s choir, “voices from the past” representing the family ancestors who are so important to Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler).

“Nickel Boys” contains one of the year’s most unconventional scores. Composers Alex Somers and Scott Alario recorded traditional instruments, children’s choirs and even the sounds of toys, then processed them into something that Somers describes as “slow and ambient and textural” for RaMell Ross’s film of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about two boys in a Florida reform school where abuse is rampant.

“Our music is slow,” Somers says. “We don’t use much percussion; it’s dreamy and ambient. And the way he presented the story visually pairs really beautifully with something that is slow and textural. We score from a pure emotional place and less of a thoughtful film-scoring objective.”

Both composers visited the Louisiana sets and drew inspiration from the location before returning to their studios (Somers in L.A., Alario in Rhode Island) to create their unusual soundscape.