Neundorf

HBO's ‘The White Lotus’: Eerie music heightens drama of rich people's bad behaviour and emotional dysfunction

Retrieved on: 
Wednesday, August 30, 2023
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The HBO series The White Lotus faced stiff competition when it was launched in summer 2021.

Key Points: 
  • The HBO series The White Lotus faced stiff competition when it was launched in summer 2021.
  • When the show’s trailer was released in June 2021, its strikingly novel soundtrack stood out.
  • This could be heard in full on YouTube and Spotify before HBO aired the first episode that July.

Canadian composers in film and TV

    • Tapia de Veer joins Emmy-winning Canadian composers Christophe Beck and Mychael Danna, demonstrating the important role Canada has occupied in producing music for film and television.
    • In the early 2000s, he had a Canadian hit with the song “Supersex World,” but then turned to working on music for film and television, creating scores for series like Hunters, Humans and Utopia.

‘Haunting’ sounds

    • In doing so, Tapia de Veer presents the themes and sounds that dominate the six Season 1 episodes.
    • The “Aloha” theme combines vocal and percussive sounds the composer calls “tribal” and “primal,” with bird calls “for an island feel with a spooky tropical depth.”

Menacing undertone

    • It provides a menacing undertone to a surface layer of popular music that tourists to Hawaii may recognize, whether it’s Louis Armstrong singing “On a Coconut Island” or the Rose Ensemble performing “Aloha ‘Oe,” a traditional Hawaiian song composed by Queen Liliʻuokalani.
    • For example, when Tapia de Veer uses the human voice in the underscore, it is never with words but rather in bizarre vocalizations.

‘Renaissance’ set in Italy

    • Season 2’s main theme, “Renaissance,” features flowing piano, harp and (wordless) operatic voice.
    • In later episodes, this setting is localized by the use of the mandolin, an Italian folk instrument.

Disconcerting background tones

    • Stories of treachery and infidelity play out in the disconcerting background tones created by Tapia de Veer and longtime collaborator Kim Neundorf, who in Season 2 has contributed to or composed over 10 tracks.
    • Neundorf also worked with Tapia de Veer on the TV series Humans and The Third Day, as well as the horror film Smile.

Next season: 36 Thai gongs


    It will be interesting to hear what White and Tapia de Veer decide to serve up as the music for the next ‘White Lotus’ season in Thailand. Already, the composer has teased his inclination for including the sounds of Buddhist temples and for using his collection of 36 Thai gongs “to go deep with it [and] make it take a journey.”