‘Masters of the Air’ composer Blake Neely on walking the fine line between honoring WWII airmen and glorifying war [Exclusive Video Interview]
Things have come full circle for Blake Neely. The veteran television musical composer, conductor and orchestrator got his start working as an assistant for composer Michael Kamen and performed orchestration for him on the iconic HBO wartime miniseries “Band of Brothers” from Playtone and its principals Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman and exec producer Steven Spielberg. That was in 2001 and jump-started what has been more than two decades of consistent work for Neely. When a second Playtone WWII epic, “The Pacific,” went into production in 2008-09, Neely was brought in to compose on that one, too, along with Hans Zimmer and Geoff Zanelli. “And we had an amazing time doing that,” he recalls. “Fast-forward to a few years ago and I heard Playtone was doing (the third link in its WWII trilogy) ‘Masters of the Air.’ I told Gary, ‘I’d really like to do this by myself. I can be the through-line. I want it to have a single voice.’ And he took the shot and we did it, and we had a great time. Not that it was always fun because it’s a harrowing tale and we all said that after two years (of working on it) we needed therapy.” Watch the exclusive video interview above.
“Masters of the Air” tells the alternately inspiring and traumatizing true story of the 100th Bomb Group during World War II, the famed “Bloody Hundredth.” It stars Austin Butler, Callum Turner, Anthony Boyle, Barry Keoghan and Nate Mann. The nine-part Apple TV+ epic earned three Emmy nominations, including for Neely’s sweeping original main title theme music. (He won his lone Emmy in the same category in 2021 for “The Flight Attendant.”)
Neely is particularly proud of his “Masters” theme because he admits it was quite the struggle getting to the finished product. “I had three weeks…no wait, four weeks of writer’s block on the main title theme,” he asserts. “I panicked, I realized, from talking about it to so many writers and composers. As soon as I relaxed, I was sitting at the piano one night at my house, not even intending to be working on it, and that’s when I found it and said, ‘Oh my God, that’s it! That’s the ‘Masters’ theme!’ So I got my iPhone and voice memo app out and quickly recorded it, and then we had something to start with.”
That main theme is the centerpiece of Neely’s score. Entitled “Soar,” it opens quietly, the orchestra building to a crescendo that finds the music exploding into a noble, patriotic, rousing flourish that speaks to the heroism of the real-life men it honors. Once he had the basic structure of the theme figured out, Neely says, “I challenged myself to put in things that alluded to flying. There’s big dives and big leaps in the melody, and then there’s all of this stuff that sort of goes around as if in a dogfight. I had to ask myself a lot of questions. Do we do a major key? Do we do a minor key? What feels better? What feels worse? What feels cheesy? And all of these talks go back and forth here in this studio with my collaborators.”
Figuring out the right tone for that main theme helped dictate how the entire score would play out through the nine “Masters” installments. He learned a lot about tone from watching his mentor Kamen write the score for “Band of Brothers.” “One of the biggest things that music can and will do, if you do it wrong, is glorify war,” he emphasizes, “and we don’t want to do that. So I kind of walked that fine line. But look, I’m not by myself. I’m collaborating with Playtone and (Spielberg’s production company) Amblin. They’re telling me, ‘Well, in this scene we need this.’ Thankfully, a composer’s not just sitting in a dark room throwing out music and asking, ‘Does it work? Does it work’ Thankfully, I’m not the last decision.”
Neely also stresses that he’s surrounded during his production by great score producers and players. “If you can surround yourself with the best in the business to help you pull off a sometimes crazy vision, it’s fantastic. But the pressure to do it right was real, because these were real guys we were portraying. We all shared the burden of representing them correctly.”
“Masters of the Air” streams on Apple TV+.
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