Vince Pope (‘True Detective: Night Country’ composer) on the ‘sinister’ and ‘ethereal’ of the human voice [Exclusive Video Interview]
“I’d spoken to Issa López a lot before we got started about feel and where we wanted to go with the score, the kinds of things that we wanted it to do,” reveals Vince Pope, “which were to sort of point up the landscape, the spiritual nature of the story.” Those early conversations helped the composer craft a haunting score for “True Detective: Night Country” which tapped into the raw emotions found in this HBO crime mystery. Watch the exclusive video interview above.
Showrunner López requested that human voices be used in the score, specifically highlighting the indigenous people depicted in the series. It turns out, Pope needed no convincing on that front as he had already planned to include vocalization due to the “religiosity” that singing has captured throughout history. “So it felt like a natural fit if we’re having something spiritual,” explains Pope, “and they’re just very, very emotive. There’s so many places you can go using the human voice.” He utilized two different vocal approaches within the compositions, depending on how melodic, or not, a particular piece of music needed to be. “There’s the throat singing, which is more percussive and much more sort of raw if you like,” notes Pope, “And then there’s the more ethereal vocalizations that we used.”
WATCH Issa López video interview: ‘True Detective: Night Country’ creator
The team recruited Canadian singer/songwriter Tanya Tagaq so that an indigenous artist could contribute to the sonic landscape of the show. “She does things with her voice that very few people on the planet I would say can do,” admits Pope. Audiences can hear her evocative singing and chanting thundering through the first piece of music in the series as a herd of caribou start a stampede, setting a tone that is at the same time ominous and wondrous. “I think actually Tanya helped us go there, from the very dark kind of sinister stuff to the more melodic and the more ethereal, if you like, and the more hopeful elements of the score,” says Pope.
“It felt very natural to have a score that wasn’t overtly electronic, it had to feel organic,” states Pope in reference to the other major element at play: nature. The beautifully shot scenery, including the vast seas of ice in the night-time, would immediately conjure up emotions for the composer to work with. Pope describes his tendency to work this way, creating music based on the ‘feeling’ of a scene. “I try to bring out what the scene is trying to tell me in a sort of a musical way,” he reveals, “whether that’s sound or whether that’s the harmony or lack of harmony.”
WATCH John Hawkes video interview: ‘True Detective: Night Country’
The final music cue of the series, which begins as Detective Danvers (Jodie Foster) provides an explanation of the deaths in the series and runs through to the credits, is one of Pope’s favorites. It encompasses a spiritual sensibility, the primal power of nature, and veers from eerie to optimistic. “It goes from the smallest hint of melody through to something which hopefully is sort of positive and uplifting, but at the same time leaves a question mark hanging,” notes Pope. “I like music that resides in a sort of hopeful place, but not a cheesy hopeful place. Somewhere that’s kind of poignant and hopeful. And also with a hint of sadness. A cue that you could use on a sad scene, as well as an optimistic scene. I think that’s an interesting place to be musically a lot of the time.”
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