Whatever the Instruments, the ‘House of the Dragon’ Season 2 Score Means War

It’s easy to forget with this season’s high kill count — including several dozen Targaryen bastards just as of Episode 7 — but “ House of the Dragon ” Season 2 opened with a moment of ancient power. Not just Jace (Harry Collett) and Lord Cregan Stark (Tom Taylor) visiting the Wall, already centuries old at the time of our story. The “House Stark” theme, which composer Ramin Djawadi wrote all the way back in 2011, makes its return to the world of Westeros. The strings are as aching (and heroic) as they’ve ever been, but the music feels heavier, more poignant, for all the years that we as viewers have lived with Djawadi’s variations of it.

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It’s quite something to see — well, to hear — that return of one of “Game of Thrones” core musical identities and know that that’s the amount of oomph Djawadi will have imbued into his variations on the key “House of the Dragon” Targaryen themes by the time he’s done. Already in Season 2, he’s moved the music in an interesting direction.

While major houses still have their defining anthems, Djawadi’s compositions for Season 2 shows there’s more that unites the warring factions of House Targaryen than divides them — although not in a hopeful way. The music that plays at the top of Episode 2 in the aftermath of a royal murder is the same theme that develops to its blood-soaked potential in the clash of dragons and armies in Episode 4. Djawadi simply calls it the “War” theme.

“[In Episode 2] it’s played on piano and viola and cello; it’s very small,” Djawadi told IndieWire. “I call it the ‘war’ theme but there, it’s actually a very beautiful, almost romantic version of it. After the end of Episode 1, you know, what do you say musically after that? It’s a case where less is more. You see all the characters just trying to cope with what just happened.”

Coping is done by the time that King Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney) and Prince Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) ambush Princess Rhaenys (Eve Best) in the skies above Rook’s Rest. Djawadi morphs the more “introspective” version of the war theme and makes it an entire orchestra’s problem, the same way the Dance of Dragons is now starting to blight the whole landscape of Westeros.

Djawadi broke down how something that initially sounds so mournful and feeling can, musically, get armored up and ready for battle. “In an action scene and in this particular setting, big drums will be a big part of [expanding a theme], and then also simply change of instrumentation. Instead of having [the theme] on a single solo instrument, this might be played on the full orchestra or on the brass. They’re fattening it up and making it more epic, or taking it to a lower register instead of a higher register. Obviously changing the tempo, too, playing it faster or breaking it up. There’s lots of tools that can be used,” Djawadi said.

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But by working with variations on the same theme, instead writing separate ones for the dragon battles and for — spoilers — the botched child assassinations, Djawadi creates an even more powerful idea, one that contributes to the crushing sense of events spinning out of the control of the warring queens Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) and Alicent (Olivia Cooke). “I think what’s important to remember is why they’re fighting and how much further it’s going (than either side wants). We’re trying to fix things but somehow things get further and further apart every single time,” Djawadi said.

That’s not a bad summation of “House of the Dragon” or George R.R. Martin’s perspective on his fantasy universe in every era that he writes about it. It’s not a bad summation of war in our own world, either. Djawadi is expanding and deepening the music of “House of the Dragon” in a way that goes beyond supporting the particular emotions or needs of a given scene, although the music does that. But it’s also this parallel avenue for storytelling, giving us this intuitive, wordless perspective on the characters and their choices.

Perhaps Djawadi’s Season 2 “House of the Dragon” work feels so holistic because he was able to go through cuts of the entire season all at once. “I don’t know if I ever had pretty much all the episodes available to me at once before. Episode 4 came in a little bit later… but even then they showed me an early cut and it was just great to see the overall arc,” Djawadi said. “I was able — like with Rhaena’s (Phoebe Campbell) theme for example, I was able to jump through all of the episodes and write those pieces. I could see where this is going and how I can develop this theme and everything.”

That the main new theme is simply called the “War Theme” does betray just how much bloodshed “House of the Dragon” still has ahead of it. But Djawadi finds new iterations of existing themes throughout Season 2 and also pushes them closer to the brink, too. The rift between Alicent and Rhaenyra, who had their own friendship theme in Season 1, is so vast that now Djawadi sinks it to the lowest depths in the final moments of the scene between the pair in Episode 3; then he develops entirely different melodic ideas from the ashes to better define the Greens and the Blacks.

“We said the same thing about ‘Game of Thrones’ but it’s been really great to reuse old themes, expand on them in different arrangements and moods, and see where it takes us and what new things we can add,” Djawadi said. “That’s how the score grows nicely with the story.”