Composers for ‘Ripley,’ ‘Lessons in Chemistry’ and ‘Palm Royale’ Detail How Characters and Eras Inspired Emmy Contenders’ Sound

variety.com:

Jon Burlingame Music for drama can take on various styles and colors, as demonstrated by three of this year’s most talked-about miniseries.

Jeff Russo spent two and a half years thinking about, and composing, the score for “Ripley,” Steven Zaillian’s eight-part thriller about a sociopath (Andrew Scott) who finds the high life in 1960s Italy worth killing for. “Every piece of music I wrote was related to Tom Ripley,” Russo (an Emmy winner for “Fargo”) says of the Netflix series. “It all had to do with Tom’s state of mind.

We’re either in Tom’s head — the tension that he feels, the off-kilter feeling that he feels, or the sinister aspect of what he’s feeling.” Zaillian gave Russo the key: Don’t start with episode 1, start with episode 7 (as the Italian police are closing in). “He wanted me to write the almost-end [of the story] and then deconstruct all that material to score episodes 1, 2 and 3, and he was exactly right.” Russo also wrote, and plays (on guitar and variations on the mandolin called the mandola and mandicello) the colorful Sicilian-flavored music in the series.

A 32-piece orchestra performed the score. For the Apple TV+ “Lessons in Chemistry,” Carlos Rafael Rivera experimented with various musical approaches, some of them quite unconventional, but eventually turned back to a straightforward orchestral score, but with themes specific to the characters at the center of the story.