I can't recall ever being so lost for words, so moved, so viscerally gripped and totally engaged by a TV series before.
Recently I watched HBO & Sky's whole "Chernobyl" (2019) miniseries all through non-stop, not having had any previous exposure to any of it (I've happily been without a TV for many years and only infrequently watch TV productions on the Web). In that first run through I didn't pay any particular attention at all to the musical score - which I guess goes to show I'm in no way professionally involved with any kind of scoring for media. So I had the luxury of letting the entire production speak to me as a whole, not interrupted, challenged or dissected by any musical questions or issues in my own mind. Like I said at the top, I was 100% into the thing as a whole.
But after that I started to wonder "what just happened to me, and how?". So a few days later I went through it again, this time with deliberate focus on the score. I've now watched some parts of it at least 4 or 5 times.
Engaging Hildur to score this production was an inspired choice. The production benefitted immensely not just from a woman's intuition, but moreover an Icelandic woman's intuition. Hildur no doubt was shaped mentally and emotionally while growing up in the Land of Fire and Ice, where not only can the cruel climate kill humans in short order and not only are there thousands of earthquakes, but also there's always that discomfiting uncertainty about where and when the magma will next erupt through the ground and lay waste to everything in its path. Who better to convey to us a sense of satanic, infernal danger lurking nearby?
As Hildur speaks about in the interview linked below, she clearly was inspired by the high degrees of realism and truthfulness that the whole production strove to achieve throughout, and hence was happy and comfortable in letting loose her Norse Truth in her score. And that's what grabbed me - unconsciously at first, which is entirely apposite. Indeed, "apposite" is the best word I can find for her entire score - no distracting aesthetic intrusions or excursions, no obtrusive fictions, no over-dramatisations, just very skilful evocation of raw, naturally dynamic, deep-rooted emotions and feelings. Nordic cultures include a characteristic Zen-like minimalist way of describing, naming and expressing certain phenomena; "less is more" thrives in the far north. Hildur has masterfully championed that profound skill in her "Chernobyl" score.
She said she intended her music to portray a feeling of the radiation - that being of course an artistically useful biological fiction - but I'd say she went much further. She portrayed, artfully, skilfully and mercilessly, profound feelings of visceral alarm of various intensities; including not only deep alarm at the deadly radiation that had burst out of its inadequate man-made constraints, but also deep alarm at the narcissistic dysfunctional mental 'machinery' of the Soviet Socialist ideologues who diabolically threatened good sense and truth at nearly every turn.
The score's musical style throughout the episodes is essentially very simple and minimalistic; indeed so much so that some critics might be tempted to think this composer is not capable of writing in mainstream melodic and harmonic styles. But any doubts about that are dissolved at the very end of the final episode, when Hildur introduces an exquisite chorale that brings us at long last into profound emotional closure.
I haven't ventured to analyse her score and probably never could. But I did notice she wasn't afraid of inserting some ugly intervals here and there to very good effect (perhaps including the JI lesser tone, ratio 10:9, which tends to be disturbing and ugly in any musical context). Also, the whole score was built from recordings captured especially for this production at a nuclear power plant in Lithuania. Hildur said this power plant was the instrument for her score! Talk about a fabulous milestone in musique concrète! I don't doubt that if Karlheinz Stockhausen was alive today he'd have doffed his hat and paid some sincere compliments to Hildur and the music production team!
And BTW, no need for any of us to lose heart by thinking about the impossibilities of fielding a pro sound recording team to some fascinating location, for the purposes of moulding the recordings into a low- or even no-budget score. There's plenty of inspiring SFX sound sources in various VSL libraries!
