How Composer Gordy Haab Became the John Williams Whisperer
John Williams defined the sounds of ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Indiana Jones.’ Gordy Haab has picked up where Williams left off.
If you’ve played a video game based on a Lucasfilm property in the past 15 years, you’ve probably heard the music of composer Gordy Haab. You may just not have known it, because Haab has a gift for writing themes that sound like lost tracks from the classic scores of John Williams. Haab understands Williams’s work in a way that few others do, and his lifelong love of the legend’s music has given him a knack for evoking Williams without copying him—a delicate act of creation that yields songs that seemingly could or even should have been written by the 54-time Oscar nominee (who himself is well-known for synthesizing the styles of the artists who influenced him).
In addition to his output for TV, film, and other video games (including Halo Wars and MultiVersus), Haab has composed or co-composed the soundtracks to 10 Lucasfilm-licensed games. His Star Wars catalog encompasses The Old Republic, Kinect Star Wars, Battlefront and Battlefront II, Squadrons, Jedi: Fallen Order and Jedi: Survivor, and Hunters, but his video game labors began with 2009’s Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings. He recently returned to the franchise that gave him his start to compose the score for this month’s Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, one of The Ringer’s top 10 games of 2024.
Haab, 48, earned a bachelor’s degree in jazz composition (an early occupation for Williams as well) from Virginia Commonwealth University and his master’s in film and TV scoring from USC. In 2019, Billboard described him as an “heir apparent” to the now-92-year-old Williams (who semiretired after last year’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny), and Electronic Arts president of music Steve Schnur likened him to Michael Giacchino, who also started out in video games before transitioning to scoring blockbuster franchise films—including the first Star Wars movie Williams wasn’t involved in, Rogue One.
Haab spoke to me last week via Zoom from his studio in Los Angeles, where an image of an oncoming Star Destroyer menaced me from a screen behind him as we discussed his highlights, how a fan film became his big break, the upsides and drawbacks of composing for video games, the secrets to sounding like Williams, whether he’s met the maestro, putting his personal spin on the sounds of Star Wars and Indy, his big-screen ambitions, and more.
Does it feel like a full-circle moment for you to come back to Indy?
Yeah, it is a full-circle moment, pun sort of intended, because the very first video game that I ever scored was an Indiana Jones game that I completely fell backward into. I had never even considered the idea of writing music for games. I was very focused on writing for film, and I had written music for this Star Wars fan film that someone at Lucasfilm had seen. They were looking for a composer for an Indiana Jones video game. That’s how I got my first gig in the game business. And now fast-forward almost 20 years, and here we are quite literally coming full circle and getting to rejoin that franchise that I love so much.
What was the fan film?
It was called Ryan Vs. Dorkman [2]. It was two buddies of mine fighting with lightsabers in an old, abandoned factory in their regular street clothes. They choreographed the whole thing, and it was sort of like a demo for their visual effects, and they did an absolutely bang-up job on it. It was fantastic. I went all out, and we sort of crowdsourced before crowdsourcing was even a thing. We crowdsourced money to hire an orchestra to record the score. It kind of blew up on YouTube [in 2007]. Someone saw that and heard the music and liked it, and that’s how I landed in video games.
How did your process evolve between Staff of Kings and Great Circle?
So much has changed. The one thing that’s been a constant, at least in the games I’ve been fortunate enough to write on, has been this notion of a built-in fan base that already exists for the franchise. When you’re dealing with something like Star Wars or Indiana Jones or even Halo, there’s already an expectation from the fans of what the music will be, and pretty high expectation at that. So in the beginning, working on Staff of Kings, that was very nerve-racking to walk into something like that. I knew that there was fan expectation, and I knew that there were plenty of people out there that were hoping it would be great but very willing to voice their opinion if it was not.
So over the years, what I’ve become very used to is that whole concept of how to write to that fan base. My method that I’ve evolved over time is to always remind myself that, first and foremost, I’m also a fan of these franchises. I grew up with Star Wars and Indiana Jones, and so I love them, just like all the fans that have these high expectations.
So I’ve always approached it from the angle of, “I need to write what I would expect another composer to write.” Like, “As a fan of these franchises, what would I hope to hear from a composer?” And that’s always come down to, I would want to hear something that was unique and original, that told a new story, gave a new perspective on the franchise, but also had just enough to hang on to to remind you that you’re part of this existing franchise that we all know and love. That was my approach for this as well, to just dig into my fan nerdiness and try to deliver a score that I would be excited to hear as a fan.
Was the feedback to Staff of Kings the kind you had hoped for? Was there constructive criticism?
It was a bit of both. I think a lot of people heard it and liked it, but then some of the constructive feedback, if you want to call it that—even though probably it wasn’t super constructive, the way it was worded—it was, “Oh wow, I can hear exactly which piece of music you ripped off there from John Williams.” And they weren’t wrong. The fact of the matter is, I didn’t know what I was doing back then. It was my first real gig, and I got launched into this thing. I’d never imagined I’d write music in that style, so what do you do? I started listening to references. I think those references do come across, but I’ve evolved my own sound within these franchises over the years.
So I learned from that, and I definitely have learned to stamp my own personal aesthetic on everything I do. I’ve always approached it as having one of two options when I’m working on a franchise that has existing legacy music, like Star Wars or Indiana Jones, beloved music from John Williams that’s undeniably fantastic. I could do a pastiche, paint-by-numbers version of that, which I feel would always fall short of the original. A paint-by-numbers always looks like a knockoff, and it’s never going to be as great. Or I could just paint my own brand-new painting of whatever I want it to be, my own piece of art, but use the same color palette as John Williams would use.
That’s the approach I’ve taken here and the approach I’ve developed over the years of working in these franchises—to paint my own original ideas but every once in a while put a little flavor in there to remind you of where you are, of what the franchise is, and hearken back to the legacy themes that we all know and love.
Walk me through your composing process. How much information do you have about the project you’re writing for, and when and where do you write?
For me it always comes back to one most important thing, which is story. So I always start from script if I can. In the case of this game, I was able to do that. I came onto the project relatively early in the production schedule, when it was still just in a script stage. So I was able to read the story and really wrap my head around it and understand it. If I can approach it from that narrative perspective, it’s going to be a much more effective film score. And I did approach this much like scoring a film. Because if you look at even just the cutscenes alone and you string them all together, it’s quite literally like two feature film lengths of cutscenes.
From a technical standpoint, I always then would start to write musical themes. Once I have all my themes in place, I start writing actual pieces of music for the game. I write by hand. I’m very old-fashioned in that sense. I sit at the piano and I write on manuscript paper, and then I’ll go into my studio here to orchestrate it and produce mock-ups for the production studio to hear, to put into the game, to test out. And then things get kicked back, and there’s lots of iteration and back-and-forth. And then once everything’s approved and signed off on, I come back into here and I orchestrate everything in notation.
I have a team of people that will put all the parts together for every instrument in the orchestra, and then we go to a studio and put it in front of the orchestra and they record it, which is the process that I’ve done for pretty much every one of the games, this one included. And I have this fantastic luxury of getting to work with some of the greatest musicians on the planet to bring this music to life. In this case, we worked with probably over 300 musicians around the world that put this music together, [from] London, recording at Abbey Road Studios, to a full orchestra in Vienna that we recorded at the Synchron Stage in Vienna. And then even had the opportunity to write some old-time, big-band, 1930s-era jazz music that we recorded with a jazz big band in Nashville. And we recorded it in the old-fashioned way, with just two microphones in the room and the whole band in the room together playing at the same time and just improvising and having fun with it, as it would have been done back in the day.
All of that gets sent to my fantastic mixer, Steve Kaplan, who puts it all together and makes it sound like magic. And then it’s shipped into the game. And there’s an amazing team for the game as well. There’s a music department at MachineGames, Pete Ward and Christopher Larson, who would implement all the music into the game. And sometimes that would dictate, “OK, we put everything in, but we need this little transition to make it happen interactively.” And so I’d write a new transition. So we had multiple sessions over the course of the project to fill gaps along the way.
How does working on an Indy score differ from working on a Star Wars score?
Star Wars is larger than life. You’re dealing with the entire universe at your disposal. With Indiana Jones, it’s a terrestrial project. You’re on Earth, you’re traveling to these places that we all know, we can actually research. It’s set in a time period [around] World War II, which is a real thing that actually happened. It is a little more grounded in that sense. So harmonically and melodically, I feel like it’s a bit more grounded as well, and you can use instruments that are of this world. With Star Wars, you never want anything to feel like it’s of Earth, because that’s not what we’re doing; this is a completely different universe.
With Indiana Jones, you can lean into those things a touch more and get away with it. So I think it’s cool to create environments that are very researchable and real and things that we can all experience. And I think what’s cool about Indiana Jones is this concept of travel and adventure. I’m a self-proclaimed adventurist, and I seek out new experiences. So in my own right, I’m kind of a low-rate Indiana Jones—music instead of archaeology, but very similar. I love traveling and learning new things, and so being able to travel the world and learn about new musical cultures, I was able to fold a lot of that into this score.
In Great Circle, where does the legacy score end and the original score begin? If you do your job well, it’s sometimes tough to tell.
Right from the beginning, I wanted it to be something completely new and original. So I approached that from the concept of writing brand-new themes. I think what makes the John Williams scores work so well is his ability to write character themes and environment themes and then weave them in with each other so seamlessly. So I figure if I start from that concept, then I’m already ahead of the game. So writing brand-new themes right away for new characters, following the story, which is always my North Star. The guiding light is the story and the narrative—what does it call for? So right away, I’m divorcing myself from that legacy sound, and then only in key moments will I fold back in one of the legacy themes like “The Raiders March.” Even then, I’m always folding it in in a way where it’s a countermelody to some newer theme.
And it’s just there enough to remind you, “Hey, this is Indiana Jones.” Or take the score that I wrote with Stephen Barton for Star Wars: Jedi Survivor: eight hours of music, but only two minutes of that score uses “The Force Theme.” Eight hours, and then just that tiny little bit, but those two minutes are so potent. We purposely saved that theme just for that most important moment, where anything else would’ve been a mistake. So I tried to take the same approach here: I only really used “The Raiders March” in very key moments when nothing else would’ve served the purpose. Or “Marion’s Theme” is folded in maybe two times in the whole score, but it’s just in those exact moments where you need to hear it. Otherwise, I didn’t want to use it and lean on it like a crutch. I didn’t want it reminding you all the time, “Hey, we’re Indiana Jones, so here’s the theme, here’s the theme.”
I was impressed by the restraint. Every now and then, you’d tease us with just a little snippet, and then finally the credits roll, the theme kicks in, and it floors you.
Exactly. Yes.
What’s your favorite theme from The Great Circle?
There are a couple themes in this game that I’m quite proud of and had a really great time working on, the main one being the opening of the soundtrack. It’s called “The Great Circle,” and the second half of that track is my theme for the Great Circle itself. From the very beginning, I understood this concept of what the Great Circle was, which is all these points along the globe that, if you connect them all, create this great circle around the globe that would then open up these magical powers.
I followed that exact concept by creating these pointillistic melodies, where it’s like individual pitches that move. The first pitch would go up a sixth and then down a third, then up a sixth, down a third, up a sixth, down a third. And it creates this stepping-stone pattern that, by its nature, would repeat every note available in the 12-tone chromatic scale before looping itself back around and starting over again. So you could actually start the theme on any one of the pitches within that row, and it would always cycle itself around. The end point would be the beginning point and repeat itself again. So it actually creates this musical great circle. It actually creates this great device because you can continue this motion over and over and over again, and it never seems to get tiring because it’s actually cycling through all the various pitches and never feels like it’s leaning into one tonality for too long.
The second favorite of my themes that I wrote for this game was the theme for the flood. In Indiana Jones, there’s always some larger-than-life element that is mystical and awe-inspiring. In Raiders, the ark theme has this power to it. You listen to that, and you just feel awe. And so with the flood, it’s a similar approach, where I wrote this theme that could continuously stretch upward and develop into this awe-inspiring thing. And I really leaned into using choir quite a bit for that, which I felt added to that religioso vibe that it needed.
You’ve previously written themes for Chewbacca and Greedo. What’s your favorite of your Star Wars themes?
One of my proudest is a theme that I wrote for Jedi: Survivor, which is the Imperial theme for the game. It opens up the soundtrack for that game as well. It’s called “Dark Times.” Again, it’s very conceptual. I actually initially was [told], “We need to create a new Imperial theme,” which by its nature is the most intimidating request ever because there’s already a pretty good one out there.
“The Imperial March,” the sequel.
[Laughs] Yeah, exactly. And we needed something more ominous. The description was “We need something that just feels like they’re always present. This omnipresence, this pounding in your chest, like the heartbeat just pulsing in the distance.” So I took that heart-pounding, pulsing concept and turned it into melody in a way that I thought was unique. If you were to trace the contour of the melody itself, you’d see that it’s actually the contour of a sinus heartbeat rhythm. I have this concept of “Themes do not necessarily need to be singable to be memorable,” and so I leaned into that a bit on that theme. It was sort of a proof of concept in that regard. I wanted to create something that was not necessarily singable, but you automatically recognize it the second you hear it because of a contour that is familiar.
The pitches within that contour don’t really matter. It actually ends up going through all 12 notes in the chromatic scale at some point. So it’s a very angular row of pitches, which was by design, to prove the point that I don’t think it needs to be within a key and singable; it just needs to have a shape that we can hear. And then once we establish that, then the pitches themselves didn’t even matter. We used random pitches to create that melody. Conceptually, I think that was really cool. And the fact that it actually worked really well and was well received is something I’m very proud of.
How many hours of combined Indiana Jones and Star Wars score would you estimate that you’ve written?
Oh my God, probably a hundred hours. Just this game alone is close to six hours of music. The Jedi games combined are close to 20 hours of music, probably. Over the course of my career, I think I have accumulated somewhere around 80 to 90 hours of music written for Star Wars projects. So yeah, a massive amount, surprisingly more than John Williams has written for either franchise, which is kind of crazy to say. But true.
I haven’t prepared a quiz, but if I pulled out some random snippet of music from one of your many works, do you think I could stump you to the point where you would wonder, “Is that mine or his?”
I think I would know. [Laughs] I think I’d have perfect recall. If I wrote it, I’d know it.
How would you describe your creative relationship to Williams? Would you say that you’re an admirer, an interpreter, an emulator?
First and foremost, I’m a fan. That’s how I would describe my relationship with John Williams’s music: I’m a fan. I was inspired by it as a kid. The Empire Strikes Back in the theater was one of the first films I can recall seeing, and I was just so completely blown away by what I was seeing and hearing. But what really was making it work for me was the music. And so John Williams’s music has really been a huge mainstay in my musical development.
So it’s one of those things that’s unavoidably part of my DNA. I never see myself as an imitator. I just write what I hear in my head. Sometimes what I hear in my head just naturally fits into that similar vibe, but it’s only because that’s been such an inspiration to me. Even before I understood what a C major scale was, for example, that music was a part of my life. So it was seeping into my DNA from the very beginning of my development as a musician, to the point where I don’t think about trying to sound like John Williams or trying to make it sound like it fits Indiana Jones. It just naturally does because that is such a part of my aesthetic.
Has that influenced the music that you would make just for fun or when you’re working outside these franchises, or have you retained your own separate musical voice?
I think my natural musical voice does fit this world-building sound that worked for Indiana Jones or Star Wars. Just naturally, this is my sound. On other projects, certainly I branch away from that. I’ve been working on this Chinese film series [Creation of the Gods] for a couple of years now that’s like China’s equivalent of The Lord of the Rings, a larger-than-life fantasy adventure. And that has a very different sound, but you can always hear these anchor points in that score that will tie you back to the sound that I always use in the Star Wars franchise and as well in [The Great Circle], which is just this harmonic language that I’ve grown to understand and make part of my own aesthetic that John Williams uses as well. And of course, he was influenced by the great composers of the 1930s who were using that aesthetic, and those composers were influenced by classical composers of the late 1800s. So we’re all kind of borrowing this harmonic language from classical repertoire from the turn of the last century. That’s just a big part of my musical heritage, so it just comes across.
You referenced the “color palette” that Williams would use. What is on that palette, exactly?
The palette in its [most generalized] form is just a symphonic palette. The use of orchestra for the sake of orchestra, not using orchestra as a layer among other layers of big percussion or synthesizers or this and that. The orchestra is the feature. And the orchestra is an extremely capable beast. Every single instrument in that orchestra has these vast capabilities of virtuosity, and I think a well-written symphonic score can feature all of those things very well.
What makes the John Williams palette what it is is his understanding of the orchestra itself. I’ve spent the better part of my life studying orchestral music, all the way from the 17th century up to modern orchestral music. And I think my understanding of the orchestra is what is similar to John Williams’s music. I don’t have to reach too far to make it sound like it fits these worlds because a natural part of my creative process is using that symphonic orchestra sound as my palette.
Now, within that symphonic sound, John Williams has what I kind of call “-isms,” like John Williams–isms: the way he uses winds in certain places, the way he doubles the three flutes an octave above the trumpets to give it more shimmer. [They’re] less palette colors than they are little devices that he uses to get an effect across. So I might write something and then look back at it and say, “Are there places within this piece of music that I’ve written that’s wholly original, where I could pull in some of these things and just drop them in as little flavors?” And just enough of those little flavors can give you the impression of it feeling like it fits into the world of Indiana Jones or Star Wars or some of these John Williams legacy franchises. If it was my own music, I wouldn’t sprinkle those in.
Is there a particular strain of a Williams soundtrack that’s special to you? Maybe it’s not the most famous march or theme, but something that’s special to you. My favorite moment in the entire Beatles catalog, for instance, is when “Polythene Pam” transitions into “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window” during the Abbey Road medley. For John Williams, it’s the climax of the Luke-Vader duel in Jedi—
The choir.
Yeah.
It’s so great. I love it.
That wouldn’t be the most immediately recognizable piece of Star Wars music, but to me that’s the peak. So I wonder if you have a moment like that.
Yeah, there’s a few. And I don’t know if they’re obscure, necessarily, but I actually tend not to think that the music from Star Wars is his best work. And so when I think of John Williams, I tend to gravitate more toward the things that really captured my attention early on in my life, the biggest being the score he wrote for E.T. The closing segment of that film, in my opinion, is some of the most brilliant film scoring throughout history. It captures every single bit of the emotion of losing your best friend, but also being happy that your friend is going to be home now. And there’s so much nuance in that, and he manages to capture that in a way that is just breathtaking. So if I had to pinpoint any one thing about John Williams that I think makes him great, it is quite literally the last 10 minutes of E.T.
And if I was going to name another one, it would be the last 10 minutes of Close Encounters of the Third Kind because [of] the way he folds in “When You Wish Upon a Star.” He does it in a way where you don’t even notice it’s there, and then suddenly it’s just there. It’s very subtle and it’s very delicate, and he only brings it in when no other theme would be good enough for the moment. I always look at that as an example of how to use his themes when I’m asked to bring some of his melodies into my own music. I need to [use] them in a way that weaves it into my own aesthetic and my own textures that I’ve created, and a way that just feels like nothing else would have worked except to bring it in in that moment, rather than to constantly just drop it in as an overlay on top of music I’ve already written.
Have you met or interacted with Williams, or heard that he’s heard your work?
I know he has heard my work because when I was working on the Star Wars: Battlefront series, that was the first series of Star Wars games that EA was creating. The deal that EA had with Lucasfilm and Disney was that they would also get sign-off from John Williams on anything new that was written that would be based on his themes. The concept behind the game was nostalgia, so there was not a lot of room for, like, “Create brand-new melodies and stretch the sound of Star Wars beyond the John Williams thing.” It needed to feel like you’re opening a shoebox of your old toys from the 1980s, so it needed to feel like it fit John Williams’s sound. So everything was sent to him for approval.
That said, I’ve never actually met him in person other than the first day, quite literally, I moved to Los Angeles, now [almost] 25 years ago. I went to Costco to buy bulk toilet paper and paper towels or whatever, as one does, and I walk in, and there are John Williams and Yo-Yo Ma sitting right in the center of the entryway to Costco signing CDs, because they had just released an album together. I was like, “Oh my God, this is John Williams.” So I had to run to the CD section of Costco and try to find a John Williams album and buy it real quick. And I just happened to find Jaws, and I got in line with all the people and I got him to sign it. But that’s the only time I’ve ever actually met him in person.
Wow.
Considering the body of work I’ve created over the past couple decades, it’s kind of surprising that we’ve never met, but he definitely knows my music, and I think he approves.
That’s incredible. A close encounter of the Costco kind.
Yeah, exactly right. [Laughs]
I’m always ambivalent about whether I would want to meet someone I admire that much, less because I’m worried I wouldn’t like them than because … what would you even say? How can you convey what their work means to you in a non-fanboy-ish way that would stand out from what they’ve heard hundreds of times before? Of course, you have a different kind of connection with Williams than most people who admire his music—
But what you’re saying still stands true. It’s like that concept of “Never meet your heroes because they might disappoint you.” I don’t think he would disappoint me at all. But I think at this point, having worked with franchises he’s put such a strong aesthetic stamp on for so long, and him knowing my music, I wonder how that meeting would go. But I’ve never tried to push that happening. I don’t know what he would think, but my gut tells me that he would be an extremely charming, sweet guy to meet.
The Star Wars movies Williams hasn’t scored, and especially some of the shows released since he retired from Star Wars, have pushed the sonic boundaries of the franchise—Ludwig Göransson’s work on The Mandalorian, Nicholas Britell’s work on Andor. But it seems like in video games, there’s sometimes still more of a traditionalist impulse: Let’s make it sound like Star Wars has always sounded, as opposed to What could Star Wars sound like? Do you think that’s true?
I think it’s true in some cases, but not always true. It depends on the game. As I was describing before, the point of the Battlefront games was nostalgia, so [they] needed to feel like those films felt in the day. But fast-forward to the Jedi series, Fallen Order and Survivor and beyond, those were definitely designed to stretch the sound outward from the sound of the films, and it helped [that] the TV series already paved the way.
We took that as a sign and stretched really far. The only real similarity that I could point to in those scores is that they’re symphonic, that we use the same medium as [Williams] would use, but we also then fold in so many synthesizers and different layers and a modern approach to production that would not have been done on those original scores. So I think the Jedi series is the furthest diversion in the game world from the Star Wars sound, and I’m very proud to be a part of that because I’ve been personally developing my own Star Wars aesthetic from the very beginning, and I’m always trying to push the boundary further. And oftentimes I’ll push a little, and they’ll push back.
But on the Jedi series, I didn’t get the pushback. They just said, “Take it where you want to go.” With The Great Circle, we also wanted to stretch out in terms of narrative, and the music needed to follow that. So I was able to push the boundaries pretty far as far as creating new themes and creating new musical language. But it needed to have just enough to anchor it back to Indiana Jones because Indiana Jones doesn’t have the same extensive legacy Star Wars does. So we couldn’t divert too far because I think it would feel wrong.
Do you chafe at all against the creative constraints of the classic sound, as much as you enjoy it? Is it more exciting and fulfilling to do things differently?
That’s certainly the case, because as an artist, I have my own individual voice that I’m always trying to move forward and develop. So yeah, I’m always keen on the idea of being able to stretch away from that original sound. But every once in a while, I’d just have to come back to the center and then stretch far away and then come back to center, because I would never want to have something not sound like it fit the franchise it was written for.
There would have to be a new Star Wars movie for you to have a chance to score one, but is it your ambition to work more in film and TV, whether it’s within these franchises or outside them?
Yeah, certainly. I’m always keen on the idea of doing more with film, and certainly within the Star Wars franchise. I’ve always been very keen on the idea of working on the TV series or the film, particularly considering I’ve spent the better part of two decades really evolving the sound of Star Wars. I will meet fans of the games, and their concept of what music in Star Wars is is actually music from the games because that was their first introduction to the world of Star Wars.
I know the feeling, growing up with, say, the Shadows of the Empire soundtrack.
Right, exactly. So it is fascinating to me that I have developed my own sound within this franchise over the course of a couple of decades, to the point where there’s a whole generation of people that when they think Star Wars, they’re actually thinking of my music. Kind of crazy to me, because obviously the legacy of John Williams lives on as far as I’m concerned. But yes, I feel like I’ve spent quite a bit of time developing that, and I’d love to see that branch into the film and television side as well. I feel like I have a lot to offer in that regard.
What are the pros and cons of scoring for video games as opposed to film and TV?
They both have things I love and dislike, of course, but in the end, they’re more similar than they are different. If it’s a shooter game that doesn’t have a story line per se, that’s a different scenario. But the games I find myself on tend to be story driven. So at the end of the day, it’s really just about how music enhances story, and that is the same, as far as I’m concerned, in film, television, games, concert, stage, whatever it may be. Enhancing story with music is something that’s been a tradition for hundreds of years, starting with opera. The medium doesn’t matter as much as the music itself.
Now, they have technical differences, and I think that’s where the big differences really come in. For a film, you’re writing a lot less music. I spent three years on Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. And then when I finished, I had a two-week break. And then I started a film, and then six weeks later I was done with the film. I had a six-week schedule to write almost as much music as I wrote over three years. So video games offer this luxury of time that film and television don’t necessarily offer. And that’s something I actually really love about games, because you have lots of time to develop ideas and modify and grow thematic ideas over the course of a longer time frame. Even within the game itself, the timelines are long. This is a 20-plus-hour experience. The Jedi series, they are like 30-plus-hour experiences. A film is a two-hour experience, so you have a lot less time to develop thematic ideas. But then in games, you always have to deal with the technical side of making music interactive. So you have to write things in a very modular way.
And that’s a difficult challenge, particularly with this type of music, which needs to feel organic and like it’s breathing, like it has a life. Symphonic music does that by its nature. So to do that and then also break it out into puzzle pieces can be a very difficult challenge to make [it] feel musical, and can start to feel very much like little blocks that you’re putting together where you see the seams. The goal is to always hide the seams as best as possible, which is the technical challenge that film doesn’t necessarily have. But it’s a challenge that I enjoy and embrace. It’s like solving puzzles. I enjoy solving puzzles.
Do you play video games? At least the ones you work on?
I do. And certainly, I always play the games I work on, particularly because I like to see how the music was ultimately implemented. Even though I’m designing how the music will work within the game, I’m also working with a team of implementers on the production side who have concepts of how that will work as well. And they’re ultimately the ones [with] boots on the ground, putting the music into the game, building the system, creating the triggers that will launch a new layer, making the interactive audio engine work. So I’m always very curious to see how the end result comes out, because I’m flinging things over the fence and just writing like the wind and trying to get it all done.
Do you commiserate or compare notes with other composers who have worked on gaming franchises?
Another major difference between the film and game world is [that] this community of game composers is very, very tight, and we share very freely with each other concepts and ideas. My best friends are all composers that work in games. And we’ll bounce ideas off of each other and say, “Oh, man, this is this challenge I’ve bumped up against, how would you solve this? What did you do in Assassin’s Creed when this thing came up, because I’ve never been able to figure it out?” And for me, one of the greatest joys is the ability to collaborate with other composers on the same project. Because games have so much music, it’s not that uncommon to see multiple composers on a project. So if you take the Jedi series, myself and Stephen Barton, we worked together very closely, and he had many concepts about music interactivity that I had never thought of, and vice versa.
Lastly, since you’re someone who works with pen and paper, I imagine you might have some misgivings about the use of AI for creative endeavors.
[Laughs] Yeah, of course.
AI has been a big concern for video game voice actors. Should it be a concern for composers, too? Do you worry that instead of hiring someone like you, a company will tell a tool to “write some music in the style of John Williams,” and it will spit out something vaguely reminiscent of his music but also uninspired and soulless?
It’s kind of like what I was describing earlier, the paint by numbers versus the creating a piece of art that’s using the same color palette. The paint by numbers, that’s AI. So I feel like, yes, it’s going to affect the industry in some negative ways. I think it’s going to replace some music placements in certain areas of the industry. Probably first to be affected would be reality TV, where you’re using licensed music from libraries to create an atmosphere but not necessarily build up emotion in a narrative. But on something like The Great Circle, where story is king, I think it takes a human spirit to understand that kind of narrative. And I think the only way for that to be created is by human hands.
As long as I’m trying to always be creative and come up with new ways of approaching music and new ways of approaching how music enhances story and narrative, then I think we’re safe. Because AI can’t do that. AI can generate something based on something that exists, but what it can’t do is create something brand-new. It can’t come up with new concepts; it can’t come up with new ways of approaching how a story is told. It can only do what’s already been done.
Speaking of what’s already been done, I hope you don’t mind when people who hear your music say, “That sounds like John Williams,” instead of “That sounds like Gordy Haab.”
[He’s] my musical hero, [so] it's a compliment. It's always a compliment.
This interview has been edited and, believe it or not, condensed.
