‘Andor’ Composer Nicholas Britell on How the Music Evolves Throughout the Series

Andor composer Nicholas  Britell was recently a guest on The Playlist podcast “The Rogue Ones: A Star Wars Andor Podcast”, where he discussed his approach to creating the score for the new series. Britell is a three-time Academy Award-nominated composer who also worked on the score for the HBO series Succession. (A few familiar themes from that series can be heard in Andor at times.) He was confirmed to be a part of the series over the summer, and has already started working on music for the second season, which will begin shooting in the coming weeks in the UK.

 

When preparing for season one, Britell worked closely with showrunner Tony Gilroy to create some musical themes that they would be able to play on set. Britell expanded on this during his conversation with The Playlist, saying:

 

“I think the unique thing with Andor was the amount of on-camera music actually necessitated this early process. It’s one thing to say, ‘Here’s my script; let’s talk about it and imagine some ideas.’ It’s another thing to say, ‘We’re going to be shooting in a few months, but we need to write all sorts of stuff right now,’ and there’s choreography we have to figure out. The Aldhani Eye Festival, the whole signaling sequence – the alarm signaling in episode 3 on Ferrix. That’s a very complex percussion piece that I wrote – each rhythm has a meaning. We had to figure out how they were going to do that on set.”

 

Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) in Lucasfilm’s ANDOR, exclusively on Disney+. ©2022 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.

 

He also gave some details about how the music is changing as the series evolves in many nuanced ways that we probably haven’t even consciously noted:

 

“The wonderful thing that I felt personally was that the show evolves. Each episode builds and changes as we go. We’re learning things, the characters are learning things, and so the music is changing. So, there are things, for example, in the grammar of the music in episode one that are very different from the grammar in episode six already, and that will continue happening over the course of season one.”

 

The entire music from the first four episodes will be released on Friday, October 21. The other two volumes will hit at a later point. New episodes of Andor are released every Wednesday. You can check out Josh’s written review of episode 7 here, and listen to The Resistance Broadcast’s full discussion on it here.

 

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Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as movies from Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.

Miguel Fernandez

Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as movies from Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.

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