Scoring Complex Delights and Their Open Ends: Ramin Djawadi’s Original Compositions for HBO’s Westworld (2016–2022)

Populated by compelling characters and replete with intertextual allusions, the HBO series Westworld’s intricate plot encourages the high viewer engagement characteristic of “complex TV” (Mittell, Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: New York University Press, 2015). Regarding the soundtrack, much attention has been focused on how the player piano covers of contemporary songs enrich the story with an additional interpretive layer via the songs’ unverbalized lyrics. Complementing these observations, this chapter aims to highlight the contributions of Ramin Djawadi’s original score—which actually constitutes the majority of the soundtrack’s music—to the complex narration across Westworld’s four seasons. In this chapter, I explore the score’s overarching role as a “drillable” (Mittell, Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: New York University Press, 2015) repository of narrative information, serving as an important site for highly committed viewers to engage with the series’ dense intra- and extratextual connections. Djawadi’s versatile musical themes not only cross-fertilize several disparate story arcs across multiple timelines, but also strengthen the narrative’s structural unity in both episodic and serial dimensions. Djawadi’s score collaborates with other dramatic components in setting up puzzle plots, subtly dropping clues but also masking trails and misdirecting viewers in order to maximize the effect of the show’s spectacular reveals. Going beyond the traditional roles of character identification and development, the score expands the interpretive possibilities of pivotal scenes, thus participating in the narrative’s complex negotiation of free will, agency, and control. Ultimately, I argue that the original score contributes to the intriguing ambiguity and open-endedness that keep fans searching for clarifications and answers, prompting them to return for “the subtleties, the details” in the words of the in-story character, Dr Robert Ford. Grounded in (film-)musicological analysis, this chapter aspires more broadly to contribute to a better understanding of the musical strategies employed in complex TV by using HBO’s Westworld (2016–2022) as a case study.