NEVER GIVE UP

In the summer of 2023 I was simultaneously facing the two most high-pressure commissions of my entire career. The first was to complete Giacomo Puccini's final opera 'Turandot' for Washington National Opera--a huge challenge to fill the maestro's shoes, especially for a first-time opera composer like myself. The second commission, however, was equally daunting, but in a different way: I had to compose the theme to Civilization VII, and somehow match the bar I had set for myself with my previous Civilization themes: "Baba Yetu" and "Sogno di Volare".

As the weeks ticked by and I had little to show for my efforts, I was starting to get frustrated. In search of inspiration, I decided to employ a little trick that I had used while composing "Sogno di Volare": I scanned the tech tree quotes from Civilization for famous quotes that might be the basis for my next big choral theme. And that's when I discovered the following quote from 'The Iliad' by Homer:

This quote really resonated with me, and captured an aspect of the Civilization franchise that I had never fully explored in music before: the idea of leaving your mark on history.

CAPTURING THE MOOD

When composing Civ themes, I usually start by scoring the opening cinematic. The reasons are twofold: first, the opening cinematic usually sets up the tone, theme, and drama of the game--and if I can find the right sound for the cinematic, then I can carry that sound over to the main menu piece. Secondly, at the stage where I'm hired, usually the opening cinematic is the only thing that they're able to show me for visual inspiration (the main menu background graphics are often temporary at this stage).

To draw inspiration I'll study that cinematic. What are recurring visual themes? What is the color palette like? What is the story? In the case of Civilization VII, it painted a grittier picture than previous iterations of the game. The character models were much more realistic (as opposed to the wide-eyed look of Civilization VI). The palette was filled with darker colors; grays and blacks predominate. Many of the vignettes take place at night, or in dusky, foggy, or smokey circumstances. The primary "character" was a sword--a symbol of warfare--instead of an actual person. There was far more militaristic imagery than previous games; the flaming remnants of a battleground, Mongol invaders storming a village, terrified soldiers marching through a foggy jungle.

All these clues indicated to me that we were heading down a different musical path than my previous themes, which were more spiritual (Civ IV with its shot of earth from space) or aspirational (Civ VI with the father and daughter relentlessly pushing further and further). This cinematic was directing me to write a piece that had a darker, more dramatic feeling to it. This was reinforced by the two pieces of music that they had "temp tracked" the cinematic with. (A "temp track" is a piece of temporary music that directors add to a rough cut of a film, usually with the instructions to the composer to recreate this particular mood.) Both of these pieces were in minor keys (basic music theory: major keys generally convey happier, more uplifting sentiments, while minor keys usually do the opposite). And so now, for the first time, I would be writing a minor-key Civ theme.

DOMINATION VICTORY

This actually made my creative process even more challenging. For some background, I thrive in major keys (and mixed modes, for those musicians out there). All my most memorable pieces are essentially uplifting, major key anthems: "Baba Yetu", "Waloyo Yamoni", "Sogno di Volare", "Flocks a Mile Wide"... the list goes on. I would argue, in fact, that the vast majority of the most popular, memorable, and hummable music ever written has been in major keys. I don't often attempt to write the minor key 'banger'--much less one with so much expectation ahead of it. But I was happy for a new challenge.

I also had in the back of my mind this idea that I had seen in the comments section of the YouTube videos of my previous Civ themes: the idea that each Civ theme had a different victory condition ascribed to it. "Baba Yetu" is often described as a Religious Victory, and "Sogno di Volare" is often described as a Science Victory. Since I love incorporating feedback from my audience, and have an obsession with inserting easter eggs where I can, I decided to run with this idea. "Live Gloriously" would be my Domination Victory contribution to the canon.

HUNTING FOR EAR WORMS

My basic musical process always starts the same: with a hunt for ear worms. I go to great lengths to find them. I'll sit at a piano and bash around until something sounds good. Maybe I'll go for long walks, humming to myself, until something memorable emerges. Oftentimes things come to me in the shower. Sometimes I'll even grab a snippet of a sound I hear in my day to day life and develop it (e.g. I'm literally writing an aria right now where the opening notes were inspired by the 'power down' sound my induction stovetop makes).

In the case of the opening cinematic, that ear worm unearthed itself one morning as I was folding laundry. I was in the bedroom by myself--the noise of our kindergartener was off in the other corner of the house, and so I had a rare moment of silence to think, when those opening notes popped into my head. By the time I finished folding our clothes, I had the seed of an idea, but it wasn't fully fleshed out yet, so I actually undid the laundry pile and refolded all the clothes again and again until the idea matured. (Later on my wife asked, "Couldn't you have just picked up the vacuum cleaner instead?") Sometimes when you're in a creative flow, you don't want to change what you're doing, in case you lose the magic of the moment.

The second major theme you hear--and the one that eventually became the basis for "Live Gloriously"--came about through a bashing-around-on-the-piano session. This one had a particularly difficult birthing process because I knew that it also had to accommodate the Homer text that was providing me my inspiration for this project. Homeric poetry, as any literature scholar will tell you, has a very strict rhythmic pattern to it: dactylic hexameter, where every line has six metrical feet, each made up of a long syllable followed by two syllables.

That's 18 syllables per lyrical couplet, all based around a rhythmic pattern so repetitive that it practically dictates to you what the rhythm of your melody has to be. And when you're writing any sort of vocal piece, if you want it to be parsable by a listener, you need to adhere to the built-in rhythms of the text. Long syllables need to land on strong beats, short syllables land on weaker beats. What's more, the entirety of your musical idea needs to span the entirety of the lyrical thought. So I can't just stop the music in the middle of the sentence--I have to complete the entire lyric in my musical phrase.

After a couple weeks tweaking I finally settled on the shape of the main theme. It would be a giant inverted arch; starting high, descending to a low point, and then climbing back up and ending high again. I was pleased as this essentially mirrored the narrative of the text itself, as well as my headspace at the time: we fall, but we get back up again. The whole thing would span 8 bars (longer melodies present challenges in maintaining the attention of the listener; they require elements to be repeated, but not in overtly similar ways).

By the end of this process, I decided that I hated composing to dactylic hexameter--which is a shame because 'The Iliad' is awesome, and I would love to turn it into an opera. Maybe I still will. After all, if I've learned anything from this process, it's to never give up.

FOUR TEXTS IN FOUR LANGUAGES

My initial idea was to just set the text of 'The Iliad' for the main theme, but after some discussion with the development team, we came to the conclusion that we needed to incorporate other texts--preferably from non-Western source--in order to mirror the more expansive global emphasis of this latest iteration of the game. Additionally, we had many discussions around the concept of the monomyth: the literary theory that there are certain commonalities in epic storytelling that are universal across all cultures. So I suggested to them that if we need to find additional sources to pull into the piece, that perhaps we find similar passages from other ancient epics that were expressing the same sentiment as that passage from 'The Iliad', which is essentially this:

Do something magnificent before you die, and your name will live forever.

This led to a group effort to hunt down other passages from well-known ancient epics that expressed that same notion. The quote below from Beowulf was discovered first, and miraculously the rhythms of the text fit nicely against my opening cinematic theme:

For the Ramayana quote, I leaned on my trusty Sanskrit scholar friend, Shiv Subramaniam. Shiv is a professor at Emory University, and every time I need Sanskrit help, I give him a call. He helped me find the Ramayana quote, which is the third major theme in 'Live Gloriously':

The final quote, in K'iche', was from the Popol Vuh--an epic I had read in my college years. Finding this passage was a great relief, as I've always struggled to find passages from South American literature to work into my music. I used it as a bridge (a one-off musical section that provides fresh material for contrast) to break up the more motivic settings of the other three texts.

With these four texts I was finally able to cover enough cultural ground to make the piece feel reflective of the multi-cultural feel of Civilization VII. Combining four musical themes in one is challenging, however; most self-contained songs tend to have two themes and a contrasting bridge, whereas I now had three themes and a bridge. I had to aim for a different sort of musical structure to squeeze that fourth theme in, which is why we have a big moment in the middle where we strip away everything and unveil the Ramayana theme after a moment of dramatic pause. I felt excited by this musical structure, though, because I'm currently in a more exploratory phase compositionally. It felt good to try to craft a hit using a non-standard structure.

Incidentally, along the way there were other texts I briefly toyed with incorporating, but they all fell by the wayside for one reason or another. One text that I was particularly sad about losing, however, was the following quote that the internet has ascribed to Tecumseh of the Shawnee: "Sing your death song and die like a hero going home." I LOVED that quote, but alas, we couldn't find any proof that Tecumseh actually said it.

NEW COLLABORATIVE PROCESSES

All in all, the composition process of 'Live Gloriously' was different from my previous Civ themes. There was a much closer working relationship with the broader Civ team, to make sure that my music aligned closely with the narrative concepts of the game. But while the composing process of "Live Gloriously" was marked by new creative challenges, it ultimately pushed me to explore new musical forms and discover texts and languages from parts of the world that were previously under-represented in my music.