NEW RELEASE | MEDIEVAL PHRASES LUTE & THEORBO
Hollywood has crafted its own soundset for what the audience thinks of as appropriate for a period or fantasy film. That means mostly that it must come from the classical realm, with standard orchestral instrumentation. This has held true with blockbusters from Braveheart to Lord of the Rings. When asked about writing the soundtrack for the Ring Trilogy, for example, Howard Shore said, “The world that I write in is very 19th century.” This is probably due to an instrumentation issue. Old instruments are hard to find, and they often can’t generate the epic score that we’re often looking for. But they can be massaged into a score to make it feel authentic – one of Sonuscore’s main aims is to provide you with the right tools to do just that.
Among all movies and shows, Game of Thrones has probably set the latest standard sound for what the audiences think of as “authentic medieval music”. It combines more modern musical elements with a range of instruments often left untouched and unheard in the popular mind. Even though Game of Thrones can’t be said to be in the medieval period by any means – there be dragons! – like most high and low fantasy it does bring a heavy influence from it.
Ramin Djawadi, the composer behind the Game of Thrones soundtrack, wasn’t necessarily looking for musical realism as much as he was looking for something that truly set the mood and at least felt real. “Despite these thematic elements and the medieval aspect of the series, we decided to tackle the music differently,” Djawadi said in an interview with DW. “So I had to think about which instruments I wanted to work with. The deep sound of a cello, for example, stands out quite prominently… [The show’s producers] wanted a ‘global sound’, I think. The fact that we are in this fantasy world with characters like Daenerys Targaryen and Dothraki people with their ethnic traits allowed us to open the door to instruments like the taiko and the duduk, a wind instrument with a different sound from the flute.”
It’s part of this fantasy-type inspiration and similar thinking to Djawadi’s that has drawn us to creating many of our instruments here at Sonuscore. Starting with Origins and moving on to our Lyrical and Ancient Duduk Phrases, and finally to our new Medieval Phrases series where we introduce the lute and theorbo, we’re creating the perfect collection for composers to emulate the kind of sound found in Game of Thrones and similar shows and movies.
Attila Völgyi
FROM GREECE TO ARABIA TO ITALY
The lute naturally fits in the fantasy and historical spheres, with its long history that transcends time. It originally had come from Spain in the 1200s as a slightly modified oud (check out our Origins library that features the oud), itself a modified lyre from Ancient Greece.
Though it had spread throughout the European realms by the 1400s, its true rise to popularity was during the Renaissance. The Italian nobles and intellectuals needed something to define what it meant to be “European”. They looked back to the times of the Classics for inspiration – the epic tales of Homer and Virgil, the rambling prose of Cicero, Greek gods and goddesses, and so on. As a descendant of the lyre, the lute was a perfect stand-in for the main instrument played to conjure up the blessings of the old gods.
There was another standard instrument for the Ancient Greeks, and that was the kithara, which was a bit larger, and would be played for when poems or epics were recited. The musicians of the late-Renaissance had indeed revived their own art of the musical resuscitation of poetry and epics, with opera. Instrument-makers modified the lute to get something like a kithara. Enter the theorbo. With an extraordinarily long neck and a second peg box, it was capable of long, deep tones that was beyond the ability of the lute.
ABOUT THE STUDIO AND ARTIST
We traveled to Hungary to catch Attila Völgyi for the recording sessions at TomTom Studio in the suburbs of Budapest. The studio has done some remarkable work for Hollywood and the video game industry – Bridge of Spies, The Huntsman Winter’s War, to name a few credits. When paired with a phenomenal musician like Attila, the results truly shine.
Attila got his start playing classical guitar, organ, and jazz guitar. He moved on to the lute in 2007, when he began studying under the acclaimed lutist István Győri. Now he teaches at the Béla Bartók Music School along the Austrian border in the beautifully Baroque town of Szombathely – just the right atmosphere to pick at the lute. Our mother company, Dynamedion, has worked with Attila on several projects, including recording the video game soundtracks of The Elder Scrolls Online and Age of Empires 4.
SONUSCORE GOES MEDIEVAL
Until we recorded this Lute & Theorbo library, all our previous products had been more lyrical and free. With this latest library, we had to go in a different direction: plucked instruments. As we planned how we would go about the recordings and the UI, we realized that we wouldn’t be able to integrate them into any of our other series. That’s when Medieval Phrases was born. Lute & Theorbo are only the first instruments in this exciting new series, perfect for fans of high fantasy soundtracks and historical dramas.
Working with Attila, we quickly learned that the best way to approach Medieval instrumentation was to pay attention to the modes that were more common during the period. That’s why we settled on approaching this library with phrases in the Dorian and Natural Minor modes. The major seventh is very prominent in the major modes and just didn’t feel right in this context.
START MAKING YOUR OWN MEDIEVAL MASTERPIECE TODAY
The MEDIEVAL PHRASES: LUTE & THEORBO is the perfect library for anybody wishing to capture that medieval mood. Full of authentic period arpeggiations and patterns, with just a few keys you can turn your quiet tavern into a festival of brawling peasants and hooded bandits, shouting for more mead.
Download your copy today!
Don’t forget while you’re enjoying the library, we have a great selection of other instruments in parallel genres that can fully round out the medieval or ancient sound you might be going for.
ABOUT THE LIBRARY
The library is split between 10 lute themes and 5 of theorbo. They are each unique in their style and include sets of expressive and emotive phrases, all in the Dorian and Natural Minor modes.
MEDIEVAL PHRASES LUTE & THEORBO will cost $99.99 / €99,99 and will be available with a 20% introductory discount for $79.99 / €79,99 until June 7th 2022.
