– Tudor Composition and Soundtrack –
by Gavia Baker-Whitelaw | BachTrack | November 7, 2024
The Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light soundtrack album is scheduled for release on December 13, 2024, available from Amazon.
“These characters are experiencing these things in the present,” composer Debbie Wiseman tells me. “It feels like you’re with Thomas Cromwell the whole time. Everything’s through his eyes.” After a decade-long wait, the BBC’s acclaimed historical drama Wolf Hall is back for another series, adapting Hilary Mantel’s final novel The Mirror and the Light. Debbie Wiseman’s deceptively modern score provides a tense, evocative backdrop for Thomas Cromwell’s 16th-century machinations.
Picking up where the first series left off, The Mirror and the Light opens in the aftermath of Anne Boleyn’s execution, with the cunning Tudor politician Thomas Cromwell (Mark Rylance) rising to greater heights in the court of King Henry VIII (Damian Lewis).
Fans of the first Wolf Hall will be glad to hear that, alongside the cast, the core creative team have returned as well, including director Peter Kosminsky and screenwriter Peter Straughan. Focusing on subtle power-struggles between royal advisors, Wolf Hall feels like an antidote to the current crop of ironic, self-aware period dramedies, offering a more cerebral style of historical storytelling.
As for the music, Kosminsky “absolutely didn’t want Tudor pastiche,” Wiseman says. “This wasn’t going to be a Greensleeves kind of score.” While she does use a few period instruments – harp, recorder, mandolin, vielle – the music is meant to reflect the immediacy of Hilary Mantel’s prose.
Both Wolf Hall scores emerged from a rather atypical creative process. Film and TV composers usually start work after a project has finished filming, but Kosminsky likes to hear some of the music in advance. Wiseman composed Cromwell and Anne Boleyn’s themes before production began on series one, and Kosminsky would sometimes play demo recordings on set. The same thing happened with 2024’s Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, whose score is “very much a continuation” of what we heard before, adding new themes for viola and soprano.
“It was important to Peter that we started the whole of the series with Cromwell’s theme,” says Wiseman. Performed by the Locrian Ensemble – a London-based chamber group comprising a string quintet and cor anglais – this minimalist, understated theme “came really out of the blue” during an early meeting before the first series, where Wiseman sat at the piano and played Kosminsky a handful of semi-improvised ideas. “Immediately Peter said, ‘That’s Cromwell’s theme,’ the minute he heard it.”
“It’s an instinctive thing with a director,” she adds, admitting that it was “very hard to know what it was about it that he liked compared to the other themes that I was playing.” But once she heard a demo version playing over an early cut of Wolf Hall’s first episode, she understood. Cromwell’s theme perfectly embodies Kosminsky’s vision for his controlled, introspective protagonist, adding a quiet urgency to the show’s naturalistic tone. “So you know, that instinct was absolutely right.”
It helps that Wiseman and Kosminsky are longtime collaborators. The Mirror and the Light marks their ninth project together; a recurring partnership through Wiseman’s prolific career. After studying piano and composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in the 1980s, she went on to write music for numerous films (Wilde; Tom’s Midnight Garden) and TV dramas (Jekyll; Father Brown; Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators), balancing screen work with original projects, an ongoing role as Classic FM’s Composer in Residence, and one-off commissions like writing a new piece for the coronation of King Charles III last year.
Of course, TV and film music require a specific skillset, and “the more you work with a director, the more you understand how their mind works.”
“As a director it’s hard to communicate sometimes with a composer, because composers talk in musical language, we talk about phrasing and dynamics and technique. Directors don’t have that language, so when I speak with Peter, we talk purely about emotion and the drive of the story. My job as a composer is to realise that and put that into musical terms.”
Apparently Kosminsky doesn’t like to “over-sentimentalise,” avoiding the lush, orchestral sound of many historical dramas. “He wants it much more authentic and real,” says Wiseman, appropriately enough for Wolf Hall’s grounded atmosphere. Chasing a sense of historical realism, the first series famously shot all of its night scenes by candlelight.
One of the biggest challenges for screen composers is how to evoke emotion without overpowering what’s happening onscreen. “You can’t be complicated and tricky,” says Wiseman. “Simplicity generally works best when you’re working with picture, because there’s a lot going on other than the music.” Viewers need to be able to focus on the dialogue and action, while experiencing the score more subconsciously. “The power of music over image is huge. You just have to turn the sound down on one of your favorite dramas and watch it without the music on, and you completely realise how much music brings to a production.”
Much of The Mirror and the Light is “desperately sad,” an atmosphere that influenced Wiseman’s instrumentation choices. Aiming for a sense of delicate poignancy, she used a lot of mandolin and harp, often paired for duets.
“My composition teacher Buxton Orr always drummed this into me. He’d say when you write a theme, decide who’s going to be playing it at the same time. The two should come almost seamlessly together.” This allows a composer to write for an instrument’s most effective range, which in turn is better for the musicians themselves. “Their job is so vital to the success of the music, and I have to write something that they feel they can properly deliver.”
While film scores can be more straightforward than music composed for the concert hall, Wiseman likes to give her musicians a challenge. The nature of Wolf Hall’s chamber ensemble means that each individual musician is “completely exposed” and most have some kind of solo to play. This season, violist Philip Dukes is particularly prominent. Wiseman gave him his theme well in advance, inviting him to record several different interpretations so Kosminsky could pick his favorite. Elsewhere she highlights the “stunning and ethereal” voice of Grace Davidson, and the “edgy, raw, powerful” work of violinist Charlie Brown on the medieval vielle.
Notably, Wiseman doesn’t really look to other composers for inspiration. She did listen to some Tudor music while working on Wolf Hall – William Byrd, Thomas Tallis – but her main focus was on the story at hand. “The inspiration was simply Mark Rylance’s performance, Damian Lewis’s performance, bringing that to life musically. That raw, authentic direction of Peter Kosminsky. That’s the inspiration.”
This quest to locate the right musical voice is “the key to every job,” whether it’s composing for a royal event or a TV drama. And when you’re returning to a project after a ten-year interval, this kind of strong musical personality is crucial. Wiseman’s Wolf Hall score doesn’t just have to evoke a unique vision of Tudor England. It has to reignite our feelings toward a drama we watched all the way back in 2015, welcoming us back to Thomas Cromwell’s very specific point of view.
Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light will premiere on BBC One on 10th November.
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