Sometimes it takes a 60-piece orchestra to successfully rating a collection; typically it takes only a single musician.
Those extremes are illustrated by two of this season’s hottest exhibits: the Apple TV+ satirical collection “The Studio,” whose revolutionary percussion rating is the work of Antonio Sanchez; and the acclaimed Disney+ drama “Andor,” which concludes the “Star Wars” origins-of-the-Rebellion saga with new music by Brandon Roberts.
Sanchez’s one-man band is a enjoyable factor of the Hollywood showbiz sendup “The Studio.” He didn’t know showrunners Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg previous to this, but it surely turned out they had been utilizing his all-drums rating for the 2014 movie “Birdman” as a brief soundtrack for “The Studio” and liking what they had been listening to.
“They sent me the first episode, and I could see that what was working for them was the percussion, the timing and the rhythm,” Sanchez says. His years on the highway as a jazz drummer enabled him “to do a lot with less, to be decisive and intense, but with a lightness,” he says.
It’s not simply Sanchez improvising to the scenes. “A lot of times it’s maybe five drum tracks stacked one on top of another, to give it an almost infinite array of coloring,” he explains. “I’ll do one pass with just a regular drum set. The second pass might be with brushes, a third pass with mallets, a fourth pass might be cymbals or different things with my hands.”
And to distinguish “The Studio” from “Birdman,” he added bass, piano and, relying on the storyline, sampled brass or woodwinds, all created solely by himself in his studio close to Barcelona, Spain; no different musicians participated.
For the second season of “Andor,” Roberts wanted a 60-piece London orchestra, an eight-voice choir and quite a lot of offbeat devices for the planets Yavin, Mina-Rau and Ghorman.
The unique composer of “Andor,” Emmy-nominated Nicholas Britell, began the season scoring all of Episode 4, most of Episode 5 and a part of 6 earlier than he needed to go away the mission. Most considerably, he penned the Ghorman National Anthem that figures prominently in Episode 8 because the protestors are being massacred by Imperial troops.
“I wanted to maintain the DNA and the palette that Nick created for Season 1, and use some of those themes,” Roberts says. “But then [showrunner] Tony Gilroy was very clear that there would be new planets, plot developments and character expansion that required new thematic material, new ideas and bigger world-building musically.”
Because he jumped into the center of post-production, Roberts was in a position to see all 12 episodes earlier than beginning to compose. Yavin wanted a theme that was “melodic and orchestral and grand,” whereas the wheat planet Mina-Rau demanded one thing “earthy and wholesome, Americana,” and Ghorman leaned extra in direction of Viennese waltzes with Eastern European colours together with cimbalom and hammer dulcimer.
Roberts’ music for the sophisticated Cassian-Bix relationship was essential in later episodes, whereas the early jungle-moon sequences benefited from Roberts’ use of surprising percussion together with angklungs, an Indonesian bamboo instrument as soon as utilized in “Planet of the Apes.”
Background “source music” turned a enjoyable a part of the project, inventing a neighborhood Ghorman band (“Kafhaus”) with gut-string violin; ritualistic tribal drums for the marriage on Chandrila; and composing an operatic aria sung within the Ghorman language (“almost as if it’s a classical piece that’s been making the rounds through the galaxy,” Roberts says).
An intimidation issue was the place of “Andor” within the general chronology of “Star Wars.” It follows the feature-film prequels scored by John Williams, then the Britell-scored “Andor” Season 1, however precedes “Rogue One” (scored by Michael Giacchino), which was itself a prequel to the unique, Williams-scored “Star Wars: A New Hope.”
“The biggest challenge was creating a musical continuity while simultaneously trying to bring my own voice to it,” Roberts says. “To make a small contribution to ‘Star Wars’ musically is a dream come true for a composer.”
