The music of the 2004 TV series Battlestar Galactica is a body of work largely credited to the composers Bear McCreary and Richard Gibbs. The music of Battlestar Galactica displays a variety of ethnic influences and generally does not conform to the "orchestral" style of many science fiction scores. The music of Battlestar Galactica makes use of the technique called "leitmotif". A leitmotif is a phrase or melodic cell that signifies a character, place, plot element, mood, idea, relationship or other specific part of the story. It is commonly used in modern film scoring as a device to mentally anchor certain parts of a film to the soundtrack. Of chief importance for a leitmotif is that it must be recognizable enough for a listener to latch onto while being flexible enough to undergo variation and development. However, the development of leitmotifs was not part of the composers' (Bear McCreary) original plan: For a show that set out to avoid 'themes,' Battlestar Galactica has certainly ended up with quite a few. — Bear McCreary, Bear's Battlestar Galactica Blog. (en)
For a show that set out to avoid 'themes,' Battlestar Galactica has certainly ended up with quite a few. (en)
They didn't want an orchestral sound. So when I started the series, I had an extremely limited palette – a lot of percussion. I only had a handful of instruments that could play anything melodic. As the show went on I started developing motific ideas that started coming into the texture that represented certain characters. Towards the end of the first season one of the producers turned to me during one of the playbacks and said, "Can we get some of that Boomer theme right there? I want to hear the Boomer theme!" I thought to myself: we’d never had a discussion that said it was okay for me to start writing a Boomer Theme, but I happened to have done it, and they noticed it, and from that point on I started exploring other possibilities once I realized that this show could develop. (en)
This sort of opened up the floodgates for anything non-orchestral that I could find, and LA is a great town to find musicians who play unusual instruments. So it ultimately benefited the show, because I started writing for non-traditional instruments and I still had to find ways for those instruments to speak musically the same way that an orchestral score would – meaning that the drama still had to be there; I just couldn’t use twenty-four horns and sixty strings – I had a couple of frame drums and a duduk! The irony is that by the end of the first season they were asking for some orchestra, and we were putting some orchestral strings back into the mix, but it was in a very different context. The strings, when they come up, suddenly sound special and unique, and when those episodes come up, I think viewers are subconsciously drawn to them because it sounds bigger, whereas if we plastered every episode with strings that effect would be lost. (en)
The music of the 2004 TV series Battlestar Galactica is a body of work largely credited to the composers Bear McCreary and Richard Gibbs. The music of Battlestar Galactica displays a variety of ethnic influences and generally does not conform to the "orchestral" style of many science fiction scores. For a show that set out to avoid 'themes,' Battlestar Galactica has certainly ended up with quite a few. — Bear McCreary, Bear's Battlestar Galactica Blog. (en)