‘1883’ composer Brian Tyler on writing that 8-minute theme [Exclusive Video Interview]
After “Yellowstone” composers Brian Tyler and Breton Vivian came on board to score “1883,” the first limited series prequel in the Yellowstone-verse, creator Taylor Sheridan sent them the scripts. “It’s this really amazing, dark, stark epic tale that is the origins of kind of the growing period of America and for all of its dreams and nightmares,” Tyler tells Gold Derby at our Meet the Experts: Composers panel (watch the exclusive video interview above). “I loved it. The screenplay was very engaging, very emotional. And so I set out to write this music that really echoed the story, but also the tone.”
Starring Sam Elliott, Isabel May, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill and LaMonica Garrett, “1883” follows the origins of the Dutton family — McGraw plays James Dutton, the great-grandfather of Kevin Costner‘s John Dutton on “Yellowstone” — as they travel west from Tennessee. Because of that trek, Tyler did not want the music to sound stereotypically Western, but rather reflect the global cultures and backgrounds of the immigrants making the arduous journey.
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“We want it to be more mythological, more ancient, in that these are people that came from other lands, and they came here too for a dream. And so the music is really a part of world music from all over this, much earlier, that people kind of imported the United States. It became part of the music that we know the old West, but it’s before that, really,” Tyler explains. “So the music sounded almost like gypsy music, people that come here [and] everything was translated into people that were basically either fleeing something or brought here or there all sorts of kind of harsh, this circumstances are almost always hardship.”
Tyler, who received his third career Emmy nomination for the score, also composed the main theme, the full version of which is eight minutes. It’s a rich, evocative piece that conveys both the hopefulness and hopelessness of immigrants as they journeyed into the unknown. Writing long themes is “something I love to do,” Tyler shares.
“There’s this thing that that is certainly part of the storyline, which kind of is this idea that it’s the the American. The pursuit of these people for their dream is also a nightmare at the same time,” he continues. “So writing a piece that was eight minutes for a theme, it needed to capture kind of these moments of aspiration and hope, but also the other side — the tragedy and losing children and loved ones to all sorts of elements or to greed or to all of these things that are part of the human experience.”
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