Ludwig Göransson’s scores for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026) and Tenet (2020) trade on diegetic and instrumental ambiguities that intentionally disorient audiences in time and space, writes Philip Brophy in his latest Secret History of Film Music column
Bernard Herrmann’s score for Don Chaffey’s Jason And The Argonauts (1963) is an archly theatrical extravaganza that musically routes transatlantic pop culture to the Italian peplum genre explosion from the late 1950s. Though this wave of grand gladiatorial epics, produced in Italy and often featuring American beefcake performers as titular heroes, was waning by 1963, Herrmann’s triumphant entrance horns, cymbal clashing, galley kettle-drum pounding and multiple cascading harps sound more pompous and less foreboding than his more well known orchestrations. Yet this score captures the plastic veneer across peplum’s exaltation of classical architecture and ancient vistas.
Peplum movies constitute one cinematic wave entranced by Roman Imperial glories. From early silent movies like The Last Days Of Pompeii (1908), to the postwar peplum onslaught, battles in massive colosseums, grand edifices, museographic weaponry and period costumery were fetishised as nationalist markers. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026) fetishises the abstract notion of heroicism embodied by those peplum men of action. Jason And The Argonauts was based on the third century BCE epic Argonautica. Nolan’s The Odyssey is based on Homer’s epic poem written in the eighth century BCE, but set four centuries earlier. With so many lines of reference, pulling across centuries of mythmaking, a film maker should be able to make a historical drama without much concern for historical veracity. Nolan’s film arguably attempts the opposite, catering more to the fantasy of authenticity. But what about Ludwig Göransson’s score?
Like Herrmann’s Jason And The Argonauts, Göransson’s The Odyssey looks to Ottorino Respighi’s I Pini Di Roma (1924), which employed Roman military horns to flavour its sonics with an Italianate aura. (This tone poem sounds remarkably like a contemporary film score.) As such, Herrmann and Göransson each in their own way have incorporated unusual instrumentation and recording techniques to expand the sonic dimension of the orchestra.
This approach yields The Odyssey’s best moments: the glowering gongs and tectonic sheets of “Zeus’ Law” with its hissing ambience and subliminal psychoacoustics; the enhanced breathiness and distant bowl-ringing of “Penelope” and its deliberate merger with warm synth pads; the liquefied vocality of microtonal choirs and sampled growls in “Agamemnon”; and the atonal miasma of unidentifiable textures combined with synthetic grumbles and screeches in “Cyclops”. Audited as a soundtrack release away from the pummelling percussion of the film’s innumerable 70 mm battle sequences, Göransson’s score is a meld of Fourth World and dark ambient, refreshingly acoustic and absent of hollow orchestral stucco.
The Odyssey’s score is built from themes articulated by folk instrumentation: the Greek aulos, a double-pipe operated by a single performer, resulting in harmonised lines; and kithara lyres, with mellow string resonance accentuated by textural plectrum scrapes. Buffeting and buoying their tones are bronze gongs, metal bowls, steel covers, iron balustrades, all struck, hammered, raked and swiped. Research into the philological grammar of Greek melodies was undertaken for the film, but the aural world captured in the studio sessions mostly conveys The Odyssey’s musicality.
Worth noting here is the legacy of Italian movies which undertook bipartisan approaches to radical sonics and cultural traditions. Federico Fellini’s Satyricon (1969) is based on Petronius’s first century satirical novel, but wildly mixes delicate themes by Nino Rota with sourced electroacoustic pieces by Tod Dockstader, Andrew Rudin and İlhan Mimaroğlu – often layering multiple tracks together. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex (1967) is based on Sophocles’s Athenian tragedy from the fifth century BCE, and collages a wide array of Folkways LP tracks of indigenous music from around the globe. Both films steadfastly rejected the musical artifice and the pretensions of peplum productions. Experienced today, these two films still excite with powerful audiovisual charge – something The Odyssey’s score inherits.
The Odyssey is Göransson’s third score for Nolan, following Oppenheimer (2023) and Tenet (2020). His first Nolan commission most resembles The Odyssey, possibly due to both films trading heavily in the unworldly terror of spatio-temporal dislocation, which drives its heroic characters forward on impossible missions. In The Odyssey, the shifting tempo pulses, clickety-clack framework percussion, rising choral jabbering and militaristic skin pounding of “Troy” encapsulate the Trojan Horse tactic of trickery by highlighting the embodied sensation of biding time within its cramped interior, ready to burst out on cue. Its scenography replays numerous moments in Tenet where the audience is left pondering whether they are inside or outside of the spatio-temporal situations depicted on screen.
The most distinctive features of Tenet’s score are its arrangement and production. Matching Tenet’s dimensionally warping world of inverted entropy, Göransson’s melange of symphonia, electronica and studiophonics signpost how, by the 2010s, anything could be aurally massaged into a film score – and that even Hollywood soundtrack paradigms were being transformed. “Rainy Night In Tallinn” opens with what sounds like an orchestra tuning up. Its aural wall looms large until it is silenced by a low-slung fuzz bass thumbing a single note with a fret trail-off. Cryptic militaristic claps and toms herald a ritual as synths, amped guitar distortion and teeth-grating synth pulsations build in density.
This becomes a main theme in the film. It evokes an industrial band covering a mid-1990s trance anthem like Lunatic Asylum’s “The Meltdown” (1993). Similar trance-like rupturing is brought to the fore in “Meeting Neil” where the whole track is laced with FM synthesis grit and forced to endure some noisy tremolo stabbing, as if the score has been chopped into nano-thin slices. A device used in the film at its most rupturing points, it’s a sonic equivalent of a projector burning and melting a celluloid frame in the cinema.
Like The Odyssey, the soundtrack for Tenet has been released as a double CD: each movie is long, carrying a numbing bounty of cues, many of which are mini-suites in their own right. In an earlier era of crossover composition for film, Peter Gabriel’s Moroccan fusion experiments for Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation Of Christ (1988) were released as two CDs, one of sources alone. Such accreditation is rare in film scoring, as it is an artform predicated on musical derivation. But isn’t that what myths are? While ancient plays and classical poems have inspired the story arcs realised in movies low and high, the role of musical accompaniment and narration affords great potential to musicalise a centuries-old soundworld through contemporary idioms and their technological realisation. The twisty forward-backward looping of Tenet complements the essentialist aim to bring The Odyssey forward to a contemporary audience: this is precisely what Göransson has been tasked to deliver.
Nolan’s projects have allowed Göransson to extend himself into multiple genres and styles, drawing on his background in various pop idioms (most notably through co-writing and producing five studio albums for Childish Gambino). The subtle adoption of trance and dubstep in Tenet might be modish, but it feels technologically apt. Trance music is but one musical genre of many that luxuriates in a dated soundworld and a never arriving futuristic realm. Maybe that’s why Lunatic Asylum’s “The Meltdown” constructs its spiralling melody loop from the pompous synth grandeur of Israeli-American Shuki Levy’s score to the French-Japanese co-production anime Ulysses 31 – set in the 31st century. Such is the musical entropy inherent in musicalising mythology.
Wire subscribers can read Philip Brophy’s original Secret History of Film Music columns from the 1990s online in the digital archive. It was revived in 2025 as an online column: previous instalments published on The Wire website can be read here. Wire readers and print and digital subscribers can also find this essay on page 18 ofThe Wire513.
