Brothers Atticus (two-time Oscar winner for The Social Network and Soul) and Leopold Ross teamed together with fellow composer Nick Chuba to take on the immense challenge of scoring FX’s Shogun. To do so, they needed to use traditional Japanese music from centuries ago, while also adding a modern twist to make the music of the series be something more, something greater. To try to mix reverence with the modern is no easy task, but the trio was up for it. Their score received one of the astonishing, in volume, 26 Emmy nominations for Shogun.
In our conversation, we discuss the long lead time from script to film that gave them unique advantages over working on other series, as well as their desire to mix the ancient with the new to create a sound for the series that sets itself apart without going so far afield as to not respect the source material and the culture of the time. No mean feat, but it would appear that the mission was accomplished.
Awards Daily: This is not your dad’s, or perhaps, depending on your age, your granddad’s, Shogun. This is a version of a beloved miniseries from 1980, 44 years later. What’s really interesting, in terms of what you three did with the score, is that there is a mixture of traditional Japanese sounds, but also a lot of modern sounds as well. How did you make that mixture work?
Atticus Ross: Leo and I get a call about Shogun. This is in the COVID era. We soon reached an understanding of how excellent it was going to be. To be honest, I was nervous, because a lot can go wrong with a historical drama in terms of music. The most important thing for us was to come up with, conceptually, the voice of the show, which is the same on any show or any film that you’re doing. What is the most appropriate music to tell this story, to do the storytelling in the way that honors the way that (show creators) Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo see the show. And I think what we came up with was something that does feel unique, and it acknowledges the time and the place, but it’s operating in a new language. This show, like how you eloquently put it, is not your granddad’s Shogun. I think the music had to do the same thing. As to how that was achieved, I’m passing the mic to Leo and Nick.
Leopold Ross: I think that what Atticus has said is true. I think we definitely wanted to make sure that on a cellular level, the instrumentation was authentically Japanese, however, the goal was never to make traditional Japanese music. Atticus and I had a little bit of experience with some Japanese sounds a few years prior, just getting to understand some players. So we had sort of the seed of an idea, but I think a lot of what helped us was having a little bit of a luxury of time. We did a lot of research and we ended up connecting with Taro Ishida, who ended up being our arranger. He’s based in Tokyo and is an expert in Gagaku music. We had some exploratory sessions with him and through that process is how we found the sound.
Atticus Ross: There’s some specificity about it, it’s not just Japanese music. It’s Gagaku, and Nick is an expert in the history.
Nick Chuba: It’s a style of music that is from the imperial pre-Edo period of Japan. The show takes place right on the line between pre-Edo and Edo Japan. The actual historical figure that Toranaga is based on is Tokugawa Ieyasu. His shogunate repopularized this style of music called Gagaku which was seen as almost out of fashion at the time. And so it was an interesting tie-in and it felt just serendipitous that we could use these instruments to follow his character around and be the world of the show and the sonic foundation of all the music we put together. So we had to go and figure out the best way to record all this stuff, because we didn’t want it to just be like oh, here’s a melody I wrote yesterday on piano. Can you just play it how I wrote it? We wanted to get at the core of their style of playing, which has these very specific phrases and they’re in a different tuning system than the Western ear. So we had to tune all our modern synthesizers and stuff down to their tuning system. So it took a lot of back and forth with Taro discussing. We would send him music and then sometimes he would say oh, I think this would work well on this instrument, or this won’t be able to be played on this. There was a lot of back and forth and trying to be respectful of the tradition of Gagaku and incorporating it in a way that felt interesting and cool.
Atticus Ross: And it wasn’t just like sending music to a traditional arranger, it was collecting a lot of material which we would then process. Leo can talk about how some of the themes are written because it’s interesting, in terms of how we’d lay it out on the keyboard.
Leopold Ross: It was a lot about recording their traditional phrases and then bringing it back into our studios and manipulating it and then building custom sample instruments. What I mean by that is, we would take the processed audio and we would cut pieces out of that audio and then when we pressed a note on the keyboard, it might trigger a phrase of the Gagaku players, rather than just one note. Or it might trigger a harmony of two or three notes, and we used that to inform the writing. And then once we’d written pieces using those instruments, we’d send that back to Taro and they would play on it again, and then we might do that process even further one more time. So it was a lot of layering and blurring the lines between what was the traditional sound and what was this kind of morphed sound.
Atticus Ross: Which essentially is the sound of the show. That became the voice. As you can tell, a lot of effort went into that. The whole thing was pretty wild actually, in terms of a challenge and threading the needle in the right way. But we were also lucky enough with Taro to have things like access to this monastery, it’s a temple that we weren’t actually allowed to even name, to record. When you hear the monks in the show, that’s the first time that ceremony has ever been recorded. And they were cool about it and they gave us this crazy sheet music that looks like artwork.
Leopold Ross: That we were able to do that was pure luck, wasn’t it, Nick? Taro just mentioned oh yeah, there’s this festival going on.
Nick Chuba: Yeah. The way we approached it, was in a DIY type approach where Taro would just mention offhand oh, there’s this festival where all these monks are gathering. Maybe I’ll just go up and record something. And he would go and put two mics up and record it. And it would be really cool. Sometimes you would hear cicadas in the background or there’s stuff that we would get that was really interesting and had a lot of character to it. And, again, I think that’s probably because we had so much time, like an unusual amount of time, to really go down these different paths and explore what was possible.
Atticus Ross: Some of it was that specifically we’d written the piece and it would go over and then be played on occasion. There are themes that do appear, you’ll hear our version of it and then you’ll hear a traditional ensemble playing it later in the show. And then there were other pieces that came about through this bizarre process that we’d discovered. I think where we succeeded was that it doesn’t sound like anything else. And I think that it does speak to the show in a way. I know that Justin and Rachel are happy and that’s the main thing. And I think that there’s an aspect that the way that the music works in the show is much like how everything else works in the show in the sense that it’s a jigsaw that is carefully being put together with not everything revealed. Sometimes the music is speaking, or most of the time the music is speaking, to the psychology. Shogun is as much about what isn’t said as what is said. From my perspective, of the things that I’ve worked on, this stands out. As a most musical journey, it’s pretty amazing.
Awards Daily: So you all are nominated in two categories: for the opening theme and for the score of the show as a whole, and the opening theme is really key in setting the stage. AIt has this sort of mysterious, quiet intro and then it picks up, especially with the drums. You get that start to every episode and then you also have the bookending of it when in episode 10 at the end where you hear that opening theme again, but expanded. It really brings the show full circle.
Atticus Ross: Yeah, because it appears many times in between and in different ways.
Leopold Ross: The way that we approach Shogun and the way that we tend to approach things generally is we’ll have our initial kind of conversations, in this case with Justin and (director) Jonathan van Tulleken, and we’ll consume the scripts. This is obviously very early on, before they had shot, and we consume all that information and then run forward feeling our way through the dark based on inspiration of those conversations about the scripts and we’d create material fast and try and build up a library of ideas which we then share with the showrunner. That was how we approached Shogun, and the first time we sent a batch of ideas, the main title piece was one of them. It was something very immediate where Justin very quickly got back and said that’s it, that’s the sound. It was very different to how it sounds now, but that became something to cling to in terms of something that was connecting with him. That was the start of the snowball of how we approached the music. But having said that, it sounds like a nice story, but when we were mixing episode 10 a year and a half later, we were still doing notes on the main title. Nick can fill you in on the pain of that process.
Nick Chuba: We just needed to take it to an 11. And it’s hard to get it to an 11. (Laughs).
Atticus Ross: But do you want to speak about whose theme that is and some of the other themes in the show?
Leopold Ross: Yeah, it is the main title and by the way that was Justin’s idea very early on and, as you mentioned, how it ends the show. Justin was very involved in where we put music and how deliberate we were and the meaning behind the music. The main title theme is obviously the main title theme, but Blackthorne’s theme is an iteration of that theme. And then Blackthorne and Mariko have a theme that sort of is a combination of an iteration of the main title and Mariko’s theme. There’s various character themes. Ishido has a theme that we ended up playing on rubber bands.
Atticus Ross: Yeah, you’ve got to tell that story, but also it’s based off Toranaga’s theme.
Leopold Ross: Toranaga has a very sort of grand theme, which is befitting his character. And it’s played on an instrument called a kokyu. It’s a bowed instrument, and the only time it’s used in the show is in Toranaga’s theme. But with Ishido, he is someone who will never be great, despite his sort of desperate attempts. So we were trying to figure out a way to emphasize that in the music, and we ended up landing on the rubber bands, because they share some characteristics of plucked traditional Gagaku instruments. When you’re talking about the biwa and the shamisen, they don’t have a lot of release, and so the rubber band shares that characteristic, except it also sounds dumb. (Laughs). So we ended up basically playing Toranaga’s melody, but on rubber bands to give it this kind of plinky feel. In many ways, Ishido is the comic relief, and that became his sound.
Awards Daily: So in my preparation, I rewatched the show and then I also listened to the score on its own. And it’s a very different experience, because I think a lot of the time in the show the score will insinuate itself into a scene. The scene will begin without a score and then the score will come in and elevate. And then there’s other parts where the more dramatic pieces of the score are very forward. Is it interesting to have recorded the music for a film or a series and then to watch how it plays in the show?
Atticus Ross: There’s nothing not intentional about any bit of Shogun and certainly in the music, and what you picked up on, those would sit in those places in that way in our own studios, because this was all done in the home. We’ve done interviews where people have thought it was recorded in Abbey Road or somewhere like that, but Leo’s sitting in his studio, I’m sitting in mine. I don’t know where Nick is. (Laughs). I enjoy the aspect that it sounds so big in places, but it was actually done in this sort of DIY kind of way, but to your point Leo was going to say something more interesting, I’m sure.
Leopold Ross: I don’t know if it’s more interesting. It’s just again banging on about how the luxury of time helped us in that sense because the post production was a long stretch because it was so VFX heavy. So there were times where we were able to walk into the mix stage with Steve Pedersen and Greg Russell, who are the mixers of the show who did an amazing job, but we would walk in with something and it would end up being quite drastically different because we had the time to play with how the music came in and the kind of dance between the music and the sound design. One example I can remember, I think you probably remember it as well, Nick, is the earthquake in episode five. That was something where we had quite a different structure but it was only when we got to the mix stage, because it’s something I always find quite peculiar with making shows is that you don’t hear the final sound effects until you get to the mix stage, so that’s really the moment where everything comes together. It can often be like we’ve only got half a day to do this whole thing, so let’s just make it work. That wasn’t the case on Shogun. The earthquake in particular was one scene where it was like hold on, let’s pull the music out here. We also, if I recall correctly, pulled out a lot of the natural wind sounds. When they’re standing on the mountain 30 seconds before the earthquake, the air kind of sucks out and you lose atmosphere and music and it just becomes even more quiet to mimic that old adage that nature knows the earthquake is going to hit before it does. Then the first sound you hear is those birds coming around. And then from there we creep in. We did all work together collaboratively in moments to make it as great as it possibly could be with a bit of push and pull.
Atticus Ross: And that particular moment is really where Blackthorne sort of surrenders to the culture. When Leo’s talking about the luxury of time, just to be a bit more specific, and this goes back to your earlier point about how the main title closes episode 10: when we were doing Watchmen, for instance, the way Watchmen worked was like how other TV shows I’ve worked on have worked, which is that when it started, we didn’t know what was happening at the end and it was moving so fast. Like you’re just in this mad thing where you’re working 23 hours a day because you’ve got to mix the next episode in two weeks or whenever it is and you’re seeing it and it’s intense. Shogun was intense in a different way, in terms of the levels of stress I’m talking about. What we were able to do was look at it more like a 10 hour film than that traditional series of slots. Mainly because they went off, like Leo mentioned, and they shot it, so it existed, but then there was this long period post shoot of VFX. That was what the differentiator was and our ability to look at it through the lens of how episode 10 does relate to episode one. The first two episodes, the music’s somewhat through the lens of Blackthorne and his crew–this where the hell are we kind of thing.
Nick Chuba: Talking about the bookends with the main title at the end, that was something Justin knew was going to happen way before we even saw the final episode or he sent us rough cuts. He kept talking about that it’s going to end on a shot of Toronaga’s back with the main title playing. I think stuff like that doesn’t happen as much on normal TV shows because they’re just trying to get through them. And you’re not able to seed these ideas and develop them or like the Mariko/Blackthorne theme combining midway through the season. The opportunity to be really deliberate with how you’re using the music was something that I think was unique to this project.
Awards Daily: One of you mentioned before that you were thinking very much about the individual characters with how you were forming the score. Mariko’s fight scene, in episode nine, was very striking because there’s a lot of delicacy, I think, in some of the music that is with her at other times, and in that moment it becomes more powerful, which I think suits the scene. Did the impact of Anna Sawai’s performance, as well as the other performances affect how you scored?
Leopold Ross: I think the impact of performance allowed us to use a lot less music. If performances are that good, which they are pretty much across the board in this show, they don’t need help. It’s more a sense of how do I get out of the way of this person? The performances definitely did help in that sense. In regards to episode 9 and Mariko, that’s like the culmination of her spirit and defiance. Her theme is really an interesting journey in terms of development because it starts incredibly stoic and delicate and it’s primarily, in the first few episodes, usually just one flute playing. But as her arc continues, we worked with Taro Ishida and the Gagaku players to add layer upon layer of orchestration of different parts that we could bring in to bolster her theme as her story continues. That sequence, when she’s leaving Osaka Castle, is all about her defiance kind of exploding into view. So by the time she’s lost that spear fight, it’s at its most aggressive.
Atticus Ross: I think Lady Ochiba’s theme is one of my personal favorites and I think it’s fucking brilliant, and I can say that because I didn’t write it. But part of it is when the vocal enters, I think it’s super powerful. We got Justin to write the lyrics, which you hear.
Leopold Ross: It’s a funny one because again, Justin was super involved in a collaborative sense in that, ahead of the game, he said to us there’s this character, Lady Ochiba, I think her theme should have voices. That was immediately a starting point. We then worked with Taro Ishida again. He sent us a list of eight different vocal styles of the Edo period. So we would then look into those, and figure out what seemed appropriate. We brought in a vocal performer to work with once we’d chosen the style that we were going to go for. But what we were noticing is that there’s a lot of very fast vibrato used in that particular period of time. What we wanted to do is take that and warp it through a process called granular synthesis, when you’re able to break down a sound into tiny little particles and then move through that sound at an incredibly slow pace. So that’s how we built Ochiba’s theme: recording the vocalist, processing it in that way so that what were these very fast vibratos became these incredibly slow bends from one note to another and that’s what gives it a slightly kind of woozy feeling. So we built that track and we sent it to Justin and he said he loved it. Seeing as we were doing vocals, we thought what about if it had a lead vocal–thinking that he’s obviously going to say no, because no one wants a lead vocal in score–but he was like yeah, I think it should have a lead vocal and I think the vocal should say “flowers are only flowers because they fall”, which is something that Ochiba then says to Mariko later on. Again, it goes back to everything being extremely deliberate and thought through. The vocal that appears in the end credits of episode five, and then again at the end of episode six when Ishido kills the other Regent in the forest. That vocal is saying “flowers are only flowers because they fall.”
Nick Chuba: We did have to go through a translation process to get it into the Edo specific language.
Leopold Ross: We did an amazing session with the singer where she worked with Taro to build what that lyric would be in Edo period Japanese, because that is also very different from modern Japanese. We did a bunch of different takes, and it was just quite a funny process, because there’s a language barrier, and we were trying to impart these quite kind of esoteric ideas in terms of how she should deliver the vocal. We ended up doing about a thousand takes and the one that we used was take one. (Laughs).
Atticus Ross: Also Taro’s mum would sometimes be there to help if she could speak English a bit. Zoom was very helpful in terms of being able to sit in on the sessions in Japan as they were being recorded. That was all done on Zoom.
Awards Daily: To see the show embraced the way that it has been and to know how significant your score and your music is within it must be an incredible feeling. This is a show where there’s not a lot of English spoken. There’s some, but it’s a very different culture, a very different time period. And your music has to bring people to that place where this time period existed, but also give them an entry point. And I think that’s what it does.
Leopold Ross: It is a great feeling from the point of view that when we walked into the project, I, for one, wasn’t aware of the original Shogun miniseries. So it was a friend of ours, emailing us saying hey, do you want to do this show? It’s going to be all in Japanese. The expectation was incredibly low, so to be here now is a very humbling feeling and we’re all really proud of the work, but I would also say it’s a testament to the level of quality across all of the crafts in the show: the costume design, the production design, the sets. Everything about it is held to this incredibly high standard that Justin was driving. And so I think it’s just nice to see quality recognized.
Atticus Ross: Everything Leo said, I echo. I think another good thing is in terms of audience. Like Leo said, when we first heard it’s a show, it’s set when it’s set, and it’s all in Japanese, it wasn’t a low expectation in terms of how good the show could be. We hadn’t seen anything. But moreover, how is that going to fly in terms of an audience being ready for a show entirely in a different language, or 90%. To see quality not only exercised in the making, but then received in this way speaks to the idea that TV doesn’t need to be dumb. It can be challenging. It can be a story that you have to watch every second of. People want something good. I’m not a business person or whatever. I’m not in charge of making shows. There’s a couple of other shows as well. The Bear, for instance, is one that doesn’t treat the audience like an idiot. That is very flattering, and obviously being able to be even a small part of that is a great feeling.
Nick Chuba: I think we worked on the show for two and a half years and so you forget that it’s even coming out because it just becomes a part of your day to day life in a way. It’s pretty surreal to not only see it come out but have a piece so well received. The amount of time you put into something doesn’t always yield an equal result but in this case it actually did. We put in all this time and I think because of that it ended up being as good as it is and I think that’s true for the whole show across the board, so I’m definitely really proud to be a part of it.
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