Background
When he began work on the series, McCreary was asked to produce something completely different from the "gleaming, brassy sound" of the original series. To save on expenses McCreary typically works with 9-10 musicians. For some of the series' more important episodes, he requested a full orchestra: "I don't need to put up a fight for it. The episodes that require an orchestral presence are self-evident, and everybody at Sci Fi and the producers know it's money well-spent."
Orchestral music began to be introduced near the end of the first season. In the beginning, producers preferred other sounds:
"They didn't want an orchestral sound. So when I started the series, I had an extremely limited palette – a lot of percussion. I only had a handful of instruments that could play anything melodic. As the show went on I started developing motific ideas that started coming into the texture that represented certain characters. Towards the end of the first season one of the producers turned to me during one of the playbacks and said, 'Can we get some of that Boomer theme right there? I want to hear the Boomer theme!' I thought to myself: we’d never had a discussion that said it was okay for me to start writing a Boomer Theme, but I happened to have done it, and they noticed it, and from that point on I started exploring other possibilities once I realized that this show could develop."
McCreary was interested in producing an organic sound using real instruments.
“This sort of opened up the floodgates for anything non-orchestral that I could find, and LA is a great town to find musicians who play unusual instruments. So it ultimately benefited the show, because I started writing for non-traditional instruments and I still had to find ways for those instruments to speak musically the same way that an orchestral score would – meaning that the drama still had to be there; I just couldn’t use twenty-four horns and sixty strings – I had a couple of frame drums and a duduk! The irony is that by the end of the first season they were asking for some orchestra, and we were putting some orchestral strings back into the mix, but it was in a very different context. The strings, when they come up, suddenly sound special and unique, and when those episodes come up, I think viewers are subconsciously drawn to them because it sounds bigger, whereas if we plastered every episode with strings that effect would be lost.”
Read more about this topic: Music Of Battlestar Galactica (reimagining)
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