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Sometimes it takes a 60-piece orchestra to effectively score a series; sometimes it takes just a single musician.
Those extremes are illustrated by two of this season’s most popular shows: the Apple TV+ satirical series “The Studio,” whose innovative percussion score 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 fun element of the Hollywood showbiz sendup “The Studio.” He didn’t know showrunners Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg prior to this, but it turned out they were using his all-drums score for the 2014 film “Birdman” as a temporary soundtrack for “The Studio” and liking what they were hearing.
“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 road 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 just 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 differentiate “The Studio” from “Birdman,” he added bass, piano and, depending on the storyline, sampled brass or woodwinds, all created solely by himself in his studio near Barcelona, Spain; no other musicians participated.
For the second season of “Andor,” Roberts needed a 60-piece London orchestra, an eight-voice choir and a variety of offbeat instruments for the planets Yavin, Mina-Rau and Ghorman.
The original composer of “Andor,” Emmy-nominated Nicholas Britell, started the season scoring all of Episode 4, most of Episode 5 and part of 6 before he had to leave the project. Most significantly, he penned the Ghorman National Anthem that figures prominently in Episode 8 as 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 middle of post-production, Roberts was able to see all 12 episodes before starting to compose. Yavin needed a theme that was “melodic and orchestral and grand,” while the wheat planet Mina-Rau demanded something “earthy and wholesome, Americana,” and Ghorman leaned more towards Viennese waltzes with Eastern European colors including cimbalom and hammer dulcimer.
Roberts’ music for the complicated Cassian-Bix relationship was critical in later episodes, while the early jungle-moon sequences benefited from Roberts’ use of unusual percussion including angklungs, an Indonesian bamboo instrument once used in “Planet of the Apes.”
Background “source music” became a fun part of the assignment, inventing a local Ghorman band (“Kafhaus”) with gut-string violin; ritualistic tribal drums for the wedding on Chandrila; and composing an operatic aria sung in the Ghorman language (“almost as if it’s a classical piece that’s been making the rounds through the galaxy,” Roberts says).
An intimidation factor was the place of “Andor” in the overall chronology of “Star Wars.” It follows the feature-film prequels scored by John Williams, then the Britell-scored “Andor” Season 1, but precedes “Rogue One” (scored by Michael Giacchino), which was itself a prequel to the original, 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.”
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