One of my favourite elements of Denis Villeneuve's Dune has to be the score by Hans Zimmer which
may not be his most approachable score outside of watching the film, but the way it supports
the images onscreen is one of the perfect fusions of visuals and sound I've seen in a
long time. Zimmer wanted to create instruments and sounds that no one had ever heard before, allowing
the viewer uninitiated with Dune to feel the alien landscapes that they visit. His score
works in cooperation with the footage to give the complete immersive experience that this film
was aiming to achieve. In this video, I'm going to be analysing the incredible Dune
score by Hans Zimmer, discussing why it is such an effective piece of music. Before I get into it,
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let's dive into the score of Dune by the legendary Hans Zimmer.
When composer Hans Zimmer was approached to score
Dune, the movie adaptation of Frank Herbert seminal science fiction novel,
he knew the way he wanted to score it and wanted to approach the film with a particular mindset.
This was that it would not sound like Star Wars or other films in the science fiction genre.
From a musical standpoint, those films built on influences from classic movie scores of the
early 1900s. Even the tune from the Cantina scene was inspired by Benny Goodman. In contrast, Dune
involved Zimmer building sounds that nobody had ever heard of before. There was a freedom to get
away from a Western orchestra and he could spend lots of time making up these particular sounds.
He had a deep inspiration after reading the novel as a teenager wanting to bring this
to the screen one day without even listening to prior scores used for the Dune property.
And the resulting soundtrack might be one of Zimmer’s most unorthodox and most provocative
so far. Along with plenty of synthesizers, you can hear sounds of scraping metal, Indian bamboo
flutes, Irish whistle, gigantic rumbles of distorted guitar sounds, a war horn that is
actually a cello, probably performed by Tino Guo and singing that defies Western musical notation.
These are just a few of its disparate elements and the score aims at combining this with the huge,
chest-thumping sound of Zimmer’s best-known work of the last decade. The radical use of
sonic experimentation and weirdness is entirely befitting the saga of a futuristic, intergalactic
civilization whose population are stalked by giant sandworms and revere a hallucinogenic
substance, the spice melange. Sometime after his involvement with the band the Buggles,
the German-born, California-based composer made his name with scores for Rain Man, The Lion King
and The Thin Red Line. But to many, he is perhaps best known for his work on
Christopher Nolan movies, including Interstellar, Inception and The Dark Knight Trilogy. In fact,
Zimmer turned down an offer to work on Nolan’s latest film, Tenet, to focus his energies on Dune,
his lifelong dream. And that's probably the same for Dune Part 2 as Nolan is re-teaming with Tenet
composer Ludwig Gorannson for Oppenheimer. Hans Zimmer said that he has been working
on Dune and thinking about it ever since he first read the novel as a teenager which is why he takes
it very seriously. He avoided seeing the 1984 movie adaptation by David Lynch, featuring music
by Toto, to preserve the vision of the movie in his head. As part of his creative process,
the composer also spent a week in Utah tuning in to the sound of the desert.
He wanted to hear the wind howl and get a deeper sense of atmosphere that would later
be included in the score for the movie.
Hans Zimmer’s score is so prominent in Dune that at times the movie feels like an otherworldly
implementation of the work he did on Planet Earth, giving the soundtracks a big essence of nature.
But it's also by far his most musical film. The score is almost present in the scenes or
landscapes we see on screen, participating directly in the narrative of the film. It’s
spiritual and to that point that the composer had so much music he wanted to bring that he ended up
writing 3 different versions of the soundtrack. In addition to the original soundtrack,
there’s The Dune Sketchbook, comprising extended sonic explorations, and The Art and Soul of Dune,
a companion soundtrack to the book of the same title that goes behind the scenes of the film.
I had the pleasure of listening to all three and hearing the Sketchbook and Art and Soul soundtrack
while reading the book, which are two experiences I want to continuously have. The music
is almost the perfect combination of poetry that lasts and physical beats that work well at the
moment. And don't forget that Zimmer has still much more written for the recently announced
Dune Part 2. But while it's the composer's name in the credits and on the multiple soundtrack
releases, he has once again preferred to think of himself as a member of an unusual band that
includes a select group of composer-collaborators. To Zimmer, if someone has a great idea,
he's the first one to want to go on that adventure. The composer David Fleming, who gets
an additional music credit for his contributions to the score, had explained that they create and
collaborate on ideas, experimenting as long as the filmmakers will allow them to before finally
starting to apply those ideas to the picture. He described their meetings as an open discussion,
saying, “more than anyone else, you can count on Hans to push a bold idea one step
further than you think it could possibly go, and then push some more”. This collaboration
is perhaps a comfortable environment for Zimmer who previously delivered two great scores in
Batman Begins and Blade Runner 2049 with the extended help of James Newton Howard and Benjamin
Wallfisch. On Dune he also worked with more new voices to develop the sounds we would later
hear. Guthrie Govan, a slide guitarist whom Hans had discovered on YouTube, described the
process as one where he'd outline the desired end result rather than prescribing a specific means
of getting there. For one of the sounds, Zimmer apparently said, "this needs to sound like sand”.
And the process led to entirely new instruments being created from scratch.
With pandemic-era travel restrictions in place, many of these elements were recorded separately
in different parts of the world. A winds instrument was built from a 21-foot horn
and a contrabass duduk, a supersized version of the ancient Armenian woodwind instrument. Chas
Smith, working in isolation scraped and scratched various metallic instruments of his own invention,
including one made from springs and saw blades, and another made of a superalloy used in cryogenic
storage tanks and SpaceX engines. In the film, these are the sounds that support visuals of
desert sands and windblown spice. The spice harvester scene is of course a primary example
of these sounds on display. But it all started off with the track “Paul’s Dream,” a suite that
exhibits the mesmerizing energy of the desert power of Arrakis: a melange of strings, choir,
strange buzzing, and the whirring of the ornithopter blades. The piece contains the DNA of
everything that happens musically. There are three themes that serve as a counterpoint, beginning
gently but then circling back later. There was an amazing commitment from vocalist Lisa Gerrard,
who was in Australia, coming up with a language that is all her own. It could be from the future,
it could be from a different world. By contrast, “House of Atreides,” a noble piece about Paul’s
family, was highlighted by bagpipes. It was one of the major and more surprising musical
moments that fully forms during a ceremonial arrival on the desert planet Arrakis. The scene
is announced with the drone of bagpipes, generated by a team of 30 highland pipers
playing in a converted church in Scotland. Ear protection had to be worn to record this
with the volume reaching the equivalent of an air-raid siren. But perhaps the most mystical
presence in the score is a choir of female voices, singing, whispering and chanting in
an invented language that represents the "song of the sisters" track, based on the Bene Gesserit.
“The true driving force of this novel is always the female characters,” Zimmer said. “It’s really
the women that craft the destiny of everybody.” One arresting voice comes through like a
war cry, all ancient, melismatic syllables in unsettled rhythms and these vocals were
recorded in a closet in Brooklyn. His singers sang for hours a day, emerging when it was dark,
almost becoming a sacred musical laboratory. Stylistically, they drew on South Indian vocal
percussion and Tuvan overtone singing. And when you start to hybridize these far-flung
influences and techniques, interesting sounds start to happen. As one of Zimmer's vocalists
stated, the experimentation is a vocal technique, and that technique is called Hans Zimmer.
This perhaps best answers how Hans Zimmer created the score for Dune. He was always listening to his
collaborators and allowing experimentation in between even if the end goal is a vision
for the music that he had. It's direct yet adaptable all at the same time. And the final
outcome speaks for itself. Dune represents yet another Hans Zimmer masterpiece. A retro-future
the invention of music conveying the beauty and danger of the planet Arrakis.
And there's plenty of music left to come and that which was left on the cutting room floor.
For example, in Frank Herbert’s novel, the character Gurney Halleck doesn’t just lead the
Atreides soldiers into battle, he also plays the baliset, a fictional musical instrument
that is kind of a cross between a mandolin and a sitar. Though some scenes were filmed for Dune:
Part One with Gurney holding a baliset, we didn’t get any of those in the final cut.
And that’s because the legendary composer Hans Zimmer recorded a lot more music for Dune than we
ended up hearing. Maybe we'll see this scene, other scenes and all the other music did
for the film someday, but what we do know via interviews that the composer has been involved
in recently is that he’s already composed an hour-and-a-half of music for the second film
in the director’s proposed trilogy. Based on Part one I can't imagine what Zimmer will do in Part 2
or the lengths that he will go to to achieve the score of that film.
However, the first film is an indication that it will be nothing short of masterful.
But that was my video discussing Hans Zimmer's score for Dune. Denis Villeneuve insisted that
Dune is the kind of multisensory experience that demands to be seen on a big screen in a
cinema. In the same way, Zimmer’s score is one that demands to be experienced
via a good cinema sound system. The composer writes his music in surround sound,
but it’s not just about the big sound and the big screen. It’s about sharing
this big experience together. The sounds are almost physical in this film and it relates
to something that Zimmer has always done well. He makes you feel the movie through his music.
Dune makes you feel the weight of the plot, it makes you feel that strangeness of the landscapes
and the power of factions like the Bene Gesserit using commanding female voices.
Like I said before, this may not be the Zimmer soundtrack that you listen to on repeat without
watching the film, but it definitely is one that works incredibly with the images to go alongside
it. I think it's his most important score since Interstellar and based on what everyone
is saying, I wouldn't be surprised if Zimmer picked up his second Oscar early next year.
I haven't heard theatrical music like this in a long time that has moved me the way Zimmer
did with Dune. But let me know down below in the comments section what you thought of Hans Zimmer's
Dune score alongside whether you agree with the points I have raised in this video. I will be
doing more breakdowns on the film in the coming weeks, so keep a lookout for whenever I post.
For much more breakdown videos on Denis Villeneuve's Dune,
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But anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed it, I've been Cortex and as always make some noise.