The limited series details the couple’s relationship, from their first impressions of each other to the growth of their family. However, throughout the process six hours, composer Gil Talmi explained VariationHe composed over four hours (about 260 minutes) of music to embrace the magnificent and historical elements of the Duke’s past and present challenges.
“Naturally, the subject of royalty and monarchy lends itself to the classical background, with many neoclassical pianos, strings and orchestras.” The composer detailed how Duke combined his past and present by combining darker electronics with modular and analog synthesizers, “all in an effort to “help convey the challenges faced and the darker occult currents.” [Harry and Meghan] faced.”
Talmi’s research went beyond topics, the composer immersed himself in the musical history of the story’s regions and time periods. “From the perspective of being an authentic voice to an authentic story, there is a lot of research that has addressed this for me.”
Talmi continued, “For documentaries, we as composers are there to tell the truth. SW [the research] starts with [asking], “Finally, what is the truth?” I want to make sure I’m not sonically colonized. That I know the instruments, the region, the instrumentation, and that I can hire musicians from this particular place as much as possible to make it really, really authentic.
As Talmi finished her research, she turned to series director Liz Garbus, supervising editor Erin Barnett and executive producer Erica Sashin to develop the series’ thematic clues. Talmi explained that instead of composing music for the “characters”, he creates themes that align with the drama’s messages, developing music that encompasses the drama’s portrayal of “compassion, fear, and systemic and social issues.”
Talmi recorded her five favorite tips that developed. These themes were the title sequence “We Know the Truth”, “The Gilded Cage”, “Shifting the Balance” and “An Untimely Death”. However, Talmi said he wanted to convey “the timelessness, sincerity, poignancy, struggle, and bittersweetness of the story” by performing a neoclassical piano solo throughout “We Know the Truth.”
Throughout “An Untimely Death”, Talmi focused on conforming to the standard composition of documentaries, creating “a lot of space and pause” through major and minor modalities. “Often in a narrative film, the music progresses to emerge and we wait in the documentary scoring,” Talmi explained.
In this situation [of ‘An Untimely Death’]and for the most part, what I find very effective in documentary films is that the music isn’t actually a hit. So if there’s a big event or an outage, instead of hitting it with music, actually let the music unfold. Talmi explained how she tried to compose the music around a specific visual cue, because “it creates this dance between image and music, it’s very respectful and not forced.”
All six episodes of “Harry & Meghan” are available to watch on Netflix.