Kristin Baver writing over at StarWars.com brings us an absorbing chat with Solo: A Star Wars Story composer John Powell, looking at his collaboration with John Williams, his influences and the musical choices he made to bring this masterpiece of a score together, including a Bulgarian women’s choir.
The haunting sound of the Savareen stand-off is at once new and exciting yet somehow familiar. Powell heralds the arrival of Enfys Nest with the forceful sound of a Bulgarian women’s choir.
“You first hear them when Enfys arrives on the train,” Powell says. “I was trying to find something that was both exotic and unusual, that sounded like something else: another world had arrived, another style had arrived. I’d always loved John’s choral writing in The Phantom Menace. This was my way of thinking, this could be the solution to this particular scene where I can establish this very different sounding choral sound, but it harkens back to John’s style….I was trying to basically get a ferocity of femininity. I was trying to find a very powerful female sound. It was a little dangerous because, obviously, we didn’t want to give away Enfys’s true nature.”
Powell knew early on that no standard women’s choir would quite do to embody the fierce warrior’s theme. “Everything else in the orchestration was incredibly aggressive. I think if I just used a normal women’s choir, it wouldn’t have worked. It’s this particular sound that they have in Bulgaria where they don’t sing vibrato and it’s a real aggression.”
