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The soundtrack for Apple TV’s “Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age” has been released, featuring music by Hans Zimmer and fellow composers Kara Talve and Anže Rozman.
The score was written by Zimmer, Talve and Rozman of Bleeding
Fingers Music and performed by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. The trio are nominated in the Outstanding Music Composition For A Documentary/Nonfiction Or Reality Program (Original Dramatic Score) Emmy category.
For the series’ first two seasons, Zimmer, Talve and Rozman built an arsenal of custom instruments (Raptor Violin, HadroCello, Triceratone, FatRex) out of bones, fossils and dinosaur skull replicas, fusing them with a traditional ensemble to reflect the Mesozoic Era.
To capture the Ice Age era, the trio used instruments including the Divje Babe flute, which was discovered in 1995 at the Divje Babe archeological site in Slovenia. It’s a bear femur with holes, thought be a Paleolithic instrument. “Our friend has a replica. We went into the caverns of the Postojna Cave [in Slovenia] and recorded it,” said Rozman. “It’s a very eerie sound that immediately transports the listener back in time.”
For the score’s heavier and darker sound, the team removed high flutes, violins and brass. The composers also try to bring something unique to their scoring process. “We had a wall of cellos in a semicircle and double basses. We recorded an octobass, which is a huge double bass,” Rozman said.
The instrument was so big that the player needed to stand on a stool to play it. Rozman said, “That gave us the rumbly, low feeling for the mammoths. The sounds of the terror bird (phorusrhacids) was based on a prototype, which was modeled on the larynx of an extinct terror bird species. But they took it to the next level, and the Triceratone was born, a wind instrument that created the guttural sound needed for the bird.
For the rumbling weight of woolly mammoths, they utilized an Octobass; a massive 12-foot double bass generating subsonic 16 Hz frequencies. Paired with a low-register orchestra, it created an ancient, earth-shaking sonic mass.
“We have always approached ‘Prehistoric Planet’ by asking how we can create sounds that feel like they’re transporting the listener back in time” said Zimmer, Talve and Rozman. “For ‘Ice Age,’ we built the score around a darker, more orchestral palette and continued experimenting with custom and ancient instruments to give the creatures and landscapes their own musical identity.”
The album continues a long-running collaboration between the three composers. Talve and Rozman; both composers at the Zimmer-founded collective Bleeding Fingers Music, have scored all three installments of ” Prehistoric Planet” alongside Zimmer.
Currently, Zimmer, Talve and Rozman are writing the original score for HBO’s upcoming “Harry Potter” series.
