Most of the time, I'll be conducting the orchestra, but there will be some pieces that I'll be playing an instrument as well, just because I love playing. There's pieces where I want to grab an instrument and play with the rest of the group, like 'The Light of the Seven,' for example; I would love to play the piano for that.
We knew we wanted to have our own tone for the show. And then the big instrument that actually we came up with was the cello. It has a big range. It can play really low. It can play high. And it has a dark sound, and 'Game Of Thrones' is obviously - it's a dark show, and the cello became the featured instrument.
With 'Iron Man,' I have to give Jon Favreau great credit for the score because he always said, from the beginning, 'Tony Stark is a rock n' roll guy.'
I listen to either romantic classical music, Brahms or Beethoven or something like Mozart, or I go all the way contemporary and listen to Metallica or Adele, Radiohead, jazz, whatever it is that is completely opposite.
I guess with any type of music or any art, there's always an evolution.
'Game of Thrones' offers such a wide range of instruments that I use and stylistically for what I'm doing, but 'Westworld' is the same.
It's always daunting to start from scratch, but it's exactly what I love about my job.
I actually enjoy the fantasy world quite a bit. You have no boundaries.
I always try to pick projects by: Is this something that excites me? What are the people like to work with? Obviously you spend a lot of time in a room together with them, so I always try to find projects that hopefully have great people attached.
I feel choir just has a great sense of power when used with an orchestra, or even by itself.
I love to do animation movies, and those might be some scores that are lesser known, unless you really kind of dig through my work and see.
I used to just scribble things on a piece of paper whenever an idea would - came to mind. Now with cell phones. It definitely has gotten a lot easier because I can just take it out and just - I'll just sing into my phone.
Absolutely, I'm living my dream. Yeah. My wife always jokes, says I'm a big kid, you know, playing in the studio and coming up with melodies and sounds. And, you know, I wouldn't know any other way because I just have music in my head all the time, and I just love it.
I used to love American Westerns, growing up in Germany.
Deep down, classical Romantic music is what I love: Brahms, Tchaikovsky, the Romantics.
At the beginning of each project, I like to create a palette of sound for that particular project.
Performing was always something that I actually used to do before I settled in the studio as a composer.
What I like about 'Game of Thrones' is that there's such a wide range. We have everything from very small, just solo instrument pieces, just the solo violin or solo cello, and then we go all the way to these bigger action moments.
What's so great with 'Game of Thrones' is that there are so many characters and they're so many locations and that it's just very inspiring.
There's been a great development with scale on TV, but my approach is always the same across projects, whether it's a video game, a movie, or a TV show: I always try to set up my sounds and my themes. I really try to stay with the characters and do the storytelling through the music.
