How A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms perfected its Western, whimsical score
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms has broken the mold of what viewers expect from a Westeros-set show. It's smaller-scale, it's funnier, and it even sidesteps Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon staples like an elaborate title sequence.
These switch-ups from the Game of Thrones formula extend to the show's score, which sounds nothing like Ramin Djawadi's sweeping soundtracks for Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon. Like all the stylistic differences between A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and its companion shows, these sonic differences are by design.
"Obviously, the original series, which is the most beautifully scored series probably of all time, is quite epic and orchestral because of the nature of the drama that is unfolding," A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms showrunner Ira Parker told Mashable in a video interview. "And we are quiet and simple, and Dunk [(Peter Claffey)] has a very different energy."
To capture the energy of sweet knight Dunk and his friendship with squire Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell), Parker looked to Dan Romer, the composer behind projects like Station Eleven, Beasts of the Southern Wild, and Far Cry, and Parker's self-described "pie-in-the-sky" pick to work on A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms' score brings the Western to Westeros.
Parker and Romer collaborated extensively and bounced ideas off one another throughout the making of the series. They knew that they wanted to bring a Western-style sound to A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. After all, Dunk's story does follow some Western beats: A wandering hero arrives in a new town, crosses paths with a villain in Aerion Targaryen (Finn Bennett), and winds up in a public duel.
"We wanted to give the feeling of a Western without actually having the sound of a Western," Romer told Mashable in a video interview. "We wanted the music to still feel like something that could exist in the Game of Thrones world, but still had a bit of a nod to a spaghetti Western, Ennio Morricone kind of vibe."
Enter one of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms' most potent musical weapons: lilting whistled ditties, performed by Romer's frequent collaborator Giosuè Greco.
"People have been whistling since hunter-gatherer times. That sound can be anywhere at any time. So even though we haven't heard whistling in the Game of Thrones universe before, it works for me, where it doesn't feel outside of what could have been at that time period," Romer explained.
For Parker, the whistle was the perfect entryway into Dunk as a character. "It sounds like the music that is playing most of the time in Dunk's head," he said. "He's just there, happy to be getting along. 'Hey, this is pretty nice. I'm a knight, I'm at a tournament,' and just whistling as he goes."
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms' score also relies heavily on stringed instruments, including fiddles, cellos, and guitars.
"As far as using guitars, there's been guitar-type instruments forever in different parts of the world," Romer said. "I'm generally tuning the guitar in a way that feels a little bit darker than maybe a modern guitar would sound, but I think that sort of a sound works in that world. We can accept that sound as part of Westeros, for sure."
Romer worked on two main melodies for the show: a Dunk theme and an Egg theme.
"I think that because they're together so much, those things fade together," he said. The thing with themes is, it's difficult often to say, 'This is what the theme is.' You can do character themes, but I think often themes become situational over time. You can say what your intention for a theme is at the beginning, but then as you go on, it takes on its own meaning. Themes become what they want to become."
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms knows exactly when to unleash an epic score.
One undeniable theme that appears in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is Djawadi's original Game of Thrones theme. The iconic tune gets repurposed twice in different ways across the show's first four episodes. In episode 1's opening minutes, Djawadi's theme swells beautifully, only to get cut off by Dunk pooping in a field. It's a toilet humor twist on audience's expectations of what kind of fantasy they'll be getting in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, and a clever weaponization of Game of Thrones' own musical style. (The show pulls something similar in episode 4, when a rousing, epic fiddle theme leads into a fart.)
"You use two farts in six episodes, and it's all anyone ever wants to talk about," Parker laughed. "In the 14th century, they love their poop and fart jokes. They went crazy for this shit! Like Chaucer, that's all poop and fart jokes. But using the music as punctuation was important for us."
He continued: "A lot of it is playing on expectations, especially in a world as familiar as Game of Thrones. Sometimes you want to go directly against those, because we have a character who is very much not like the other characters that we have come to know in Game of Thrones. We wanted to say, 'This is his unique point of view. He still has all those normal feelings. He still feels that heroic call to action, but then he has, you know, a nervous stomach.'"
There are no nervous stomachs around when the Game of Thrones theme makes its return in episode 4, though, when Baelor Targaryen (Bertie Carvel) declares he will fight on Dunk's side in the trial of seven.
"Now the call of greatness is fucking here. Now it's go time. You'd have to be dead not to feel anything," Parker said of reusing the theme. "Then Dan Romer took that score, and if you watch all through the credits at the end, he melds it with Dunk's score, and I think it's honestly the most beautiful piece of music that I've ever heard. It just goes so well together. In that moment, it feels like, 'Oh, Dunk has become a real part of this world now.'"
Using the Game of Thrones theme is one of the rare instances when A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms diverges from the sweetness of the Dunk and Egg melodies. Other instances come in the tourney scenes, when audiences can hear the low droning of horns, as if the onlookers are sporting the Westerosi version of vuvuzelas.
"At those moments, we are blurring the line of what's score and what's happening in real life," Romer explained. To get the sound just right, he played peck horns, and he recruited his friend Kenny Warren, of the brass band Slavic Soul Party, to make homemade horns using piping from Home Depot.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms also breaks from its usual mode when it comes to the Targaryens, whose royal standing lies well above Dunk's humble origins. The music matches that, getting loftier and fuller when they're involved. When Aerion stabs Ser Humfrey Hardyng's (Ross Anderson) horse during a joust, he's accompanied by a darker, string-heavy, more villainous theme. When Egg reveals his true identity at the episode 3, Romer brings in more orchestral strings and operatic vocals to boot.
"There's something about [the Targaryens] that feels like they just want to have this more operatic, classical thing going on," Romer said. "That brings up a tradition or a history of villainy, almost."
"It's such a big turn. We couldn't stay away from how operatic this moment is," Parker said of episode 3's musical switch-up. And indeed, the reveal that Egg is actually Aegon Targaryen opens the show up beyond Dunk's relatively small world, both on a story level and a musical level. Without it, we wouldn't get musical cues like episode 4's meshing of Dunk's theme and the GoT intro.
These moments of more "epic" music are the exception, not the norm, of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms' score. However, they're proof of careful curation, of knowing when Dunk's world radically shifts from his normal state of happy-go-lucky whistling to more dramatic Targaryen entanglements.
The result is a score that cannily bridges the gap between the preestablished musical conventions of Game of Thrones and the whimsical play of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.
"When Dan came in, I don't even know how to say it musically, but it's almost like he added a little sparkle within the music that makes you feel like it's a coming-of-age story," Parker said. "It feels a little hopeful, amidst everything else."