Lorne Balfe’s sound of creation

What does creation sound like? That’s the question Scotland-born Film, TV and game composer Lorne Balfe signed up to answer when he began work on the soundtrack for Steven Spielberg’s 2023 documentary, Life On Our Planet. Voiced by actor Morgan Freeman, this eight-part series tells the four-billion-year story of life on Earth, describing the five mass extinctions that have shaped the planet – and the sixth we face today. Released on streaming platform Netflix last year, Life On Our Planet is now embarking on a UK tour, the London Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (which recorded the original soundtrack), plus the Welsh National Opera, Royal Northern Sinfonia, Manchester Camerata and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra taking on the epic score.

Series composer Lorne Balfe joined me from his London home during a during a brief break from recording to explore how he tackled the magnitude of this narrative, and how he helps build characters an audience can relate to.

'Dinosaurs are difficult territory because an audience is always going to think of Jurassic Park, but I think Life On Our Planet is more Jurassic Park meets Game of Thrones' (Image courtesy of Netflix)

You worked with director Steven Spielberg on this series – how did you approach this two-year project?

I had never scored natural history before, mainly because I wasn’t too sure how to write for it because you don't necessarily get connect to the characters. Dinosaurs are also difficult territory because an audience is always going to think of Jurassic Park, but I think Life On Our Planet is more Jurassic Park meets Game of Thrones. You can't get bigger than the whole concept of creation, survival and extinction.

There wasn’t really a brief, it was a conversation about how this project is different from other documentaries – there's an actual narrative to it. You get all the different species and their stories, but there's also a bigger picture. There's the concept of the extinctions faced on this planet before, and which we will face again. Musically, what do we do with that? It all comes down to hope. Hope is the only thing that we can all agree on, so it was a creative conversation about how we tell the story of survival. Right from the beginning I started finding instruments that could relate it to the past like bone flutes, the oldest instruments archaeologists have found.

This is the first time that Netflix has toured a live version of a documentary in the UK – how does writing for a documentary differ from writing for a narrative film?

I don't ever see a difference between genres. Because Life On Our Planet is different from a lot of other natural history shows out there – there is a narrative and these characters are simply a different species – I just treat it exactly the same. Writing for the relationship between birds and their insect prey might not be exactly the same as writing for the character of Darth Vader for example, but you do treat each group as one character.

The first thing I do is write suites that represent the character's emotional journey. It did the same with the concepts of extinction and survival; what does that sound like? It's the same as trying to write a love theme, you're trying to figure out the DNA.

It's not just about writing great melodies. What's important is what the melody is attached to. Who is this person and what is the back story? You have to immerse yourself in it and write to represent it.

(Image courtesy of Netflix)

You undertook extensive research before creating the score. Can you talk a bit more about how you approached the task of researching such an enormous topic as the history of Earth?

It is massive and if you don’t decide when to stop it can just continue. The Internet is an amazing thing and social media platforms like Instagram have made the concept of world music smaller in a good way. The ability to discover musicians using it is amazing. While researching instruments, I was able to watch people playing on Instagram and find musicians who wouldn't necessarily be recording on film scores because they might play as a hobby, but have got a great skill.

One of the instruments we discovered, the carnyx, was one of very few in the world, and there's less than a handful of people who can play it properly. It is a relatively a new instrument compared to the story that we're telling, but there's something simplistic and haunting about it that connects you to the past. It's the same as the bone flutes we used in the soundtrack. They're not as sophisticated as modern woodwind instruments, so there's a purity and honesty to the sound that makes the audience feel connected to the past.

Your catalogue includes scores telling stories from space exploration, to fantasy worlds, to the creation of Tetris – how do you work to support these vastly different narratives?

I think the task of the composer in media is to try to understand and become the character. The purpose of a score is to remind the audience of who this character is with what they're hearing, so that the next time they get introduced to the character, and they hear the music, they can associate the traits, the persona of that character with it. Once you treat a project like that, it's not necessarily easy, but you have a rule to follow.

Obviously, I can’t relate to being a superhero or to being Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible, but I can look at their back story and at what makes that person who they are, understand it, and then help to tell that story.

(Image courtesy of Netflix)

Your recent performance of Top Gun Maverick at the Royal Albert Hall saw you joined onstage by actor Tom Cruise. During a typical screen project, how much contact do you usually have with the actors whose performance complements your work?

A few years ago, I did a film called Military Wives where I was very involved with teaching the actors how to sing and it was way outside my remit. I was knee deep in that project, but usually working with the actors is very rare. Instead, I try to get to the bottom of what the director, what the writer is thinking. Our job when writing music is to help give an emotion to something which sometimes the actors themselves aren't able to fully express.

However, if you're working with an actor who's also a producer like Tom Cruise (on Top Gun: Maverick) they get very involved with the score.

Life On our Planet is arranged across eight chapters, how did this structure influence your approach to the score?

You always have to step back and look at the bigger picture. We know how we're beginning – the concept of creation – and we know how we're ending – with extinction. Each episode delves into a different species, or a different story, but they have to connect. You've got to look at the bigger picture and the development of these characters.

You’ve also got to think ahead. You might be on episode one, but the production team are still working on episode four, so you've got to be heavily involved with the scripts to understand where the development is and how to manage the music so it doesn't become repetitive for the audience. Binge-watching is such a trend now that audiences will watch two or three episodes or even a whole series in one go. You need to know the mileage you've got with the music so that it doesn't become irritating and overstay its welcome. You have to be very mind mindful of that and of how the audience feels. It’s important to put yourself in the position of the viewer and write with that in mind.

(Image courtesy of Netflix)

How did you land on your musical interpretation of extinction?

It's a difficult one. I did a TV show once and I had to write the theme for God. Who am I to say what God’s theme sounds like? In this case I had to step back and ask, 'what is the point of extinction?’ Extinction is about hope, and fighting to survive so I had to take those feelings and everything that represents it and write with that. You've got to look at it as an emotional thing. We all go through the emotions of extinction and death, it happens to all of us, and it happens to loved ones. You have to connect yourself to that, to look at the humanity of it and the emotions connected to it.

Similarly, with the creation, we don't know what that sounds like – we can only imagine – but I tried to connect it to the feeling I had when I became a parent. So when writing, I would use the emotion I felt when my children came into the world. As a composer you need inspiration around you to be able to create, and if you haven't got experiences and this journey in life to relate to, it makes it much harder.

We only like a character that we see on the screen if we can understand them. It's the same with villains. When the villain gets killed at the end, you're only relieved if you have gone on a journey with the character and you've seen what made them this way. You’re not necessarily personally connected, but you have an understanding of them. That's the big task of composers for media, to try and translate this into music.

Life On Our Planet Live in Concert is on tour now. You can find more information about dates and venues here.