The Widow

Dubois Records releases Dominik Scherrer's original music to Amazon's thriller series The Widow, created by Jack & Harry Williams (The Missing, Baptiste). The series, starring Kate Beckinsale (Underworld) & Charles Dance (Game of Thrones), is currently available to watch on ITV in the UK and Amazon Prime Worldwide. Last Wednesday, Dominik Scherrer received an Ivor Novello nomination for his score to last year's Netflix / BBC one supernatural series Requiem.

Dubois Records releases Dominik Scherrer's original music to Amazon's thriller series The Widow,
created by Jack & Harry Williams (The Missing, Baptiste).
The series, starring Kate Beckinsale (Underworld) & Charles Dance (Game of Thrones), is currently available to watch on ITV in the UK and Amazon Prime Worldwide.
Last Wednesday, Dominik Scherrer received an Ivor Novello nomination for his score to last year's Netflix / BBC one supernatural series Requiem.

The Widow is an eight part thriller and follows Georgia Wells (Hollywood A-list actress Kate Beckinsale), the eponymous widow whose husband Will died in a plane crash on a trip to Africa. Three years after Will's death, she saw a man resembling her husband on a news story reporting civil unrest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Suspecting that everything is not what it seems, Wells travels to Kinshasa to uncover the truth. Georgia starts looking for answers particularly concerned with the reason why her husband – she believes – faked his own death.

Composer Dominik Scherrer about the sound of the series:
'The series needed a musical score that would start from the sorrow and melancholy of the title character and develop it into a tense and epic thriller score. I have previously worked with the creators of the show, brothers Jack and Harry Williams, on the Emmy, Golden Globe an BAFTA nominated 'The Missing'. Jack and Harry are keen on ballsy, streetwise, modern sounding scores, and that’s what I set out to do. At the same time, I felt the series was going to be a big international thriller, with amazing cast, locations and cinematography, and the score needed to reflect its scale. That's why an orchestra component was built into it right from the start.'

The show is set in Wales, in Holland, and for the majority, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Whilst fulfilling its duty as a tense and emotional thriller score, Dominik was keen for the music to reflect the series’ Central African setting and draw from the continent’s amazing musical heritage: 'I had long been a fan of different African musical styles. But rather than adding African instruments as a mere embellishment, I wanted to build the score from African structures, and have it played also by orchestra. If you look at Congolese music, the general line-up is simply guitar, bass, drums, vocals. Those brilliant Congo guitar riffs became an inspiration, they incorporate the essential polyrhythm all in one element. I translated some of this into our larger thriller-orchestration.'

If time allows, Dominik starts working on these kind of projects in an early stage, writing and developing themes during the shoot and interacting with the cutting room to feed them the kind of rough themes they need to make the cut work: 'I am generally not keen on the use of temp music, so I started composing the music right from the start of cinematography, so the cutting room would already have some of my themes to lay down a temporary score. We can then really see the show coming together as a whole, rather than the score being an addition in postproduction.'
Lots of the solo instruments as well are recorded early on, particularly where some improvisation is involved, so there is room to explore music avenues. In London, Dominik already wrote a lot of rhythmical material and recorded with the amazing percussionist Paul Clarvis. Then, traveling to South Africa, where the majority of the cinematography took place, he spent a week in Johannesburg recording some of the new themes with percussionist Tlale Makhene, Kora Player Pops Mohamed, solo vocals and a small choir amongst others:
'There is a sizeable Congolese diaspora in South Africa, in particular musicians, for whom the DRC’s political climate can even be life-threatening. Johannesburg in particular has a cosmopolitan feel, it is sometimes described as the “New York of the 70s” because it attracts people from all over Africa. So it was an amazing place for us to record musicians from the Congo and Central Africa.'

Dominik Scherrer explains how the main character's melancholy was captured:
'A lot of African music is very exuberant in nature, with a very positive outlook. The Widow needed a good deal of tension and melancholy. Right during the recordings in Johannesburg, very close to our studio, the funeral ceremonies and processions for Winnie Mandela were taking place. Despite the corruption and crime associated with her, she is also seen as a key anti-apartheid figure, and her death was a big deal. The studio manager encouraged the musicians to channel the sorrow and pain for Winnie, and get them to imagine sitting in the huge Soweto stadium, where the ceremonies were taking place. So we really can hear lots of emotion and melancholy in the performances, and there were certainly lots of tears during the sessions, particularly during playback, when all the performers congregated in the control room, and everyone was overwhelmed by the beauty we created.'

More info at: Official website