Music as a Source of Narrative Information in HBO’s Westworld

Abstract

The player piano serves as a part of the HBO series Westworld’s (2016–) title design and has been described by the show’s creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy as a “touchstone image” (Vineyard 2016, 2) in that it reflects the core themes of the narrative. The piano serves as metaphor for the shadow of human control over the park’s robotic ‘Hosts’, and the desire of the park’s creator for these robotic inhabitants to break free of their programming in order to reach self-actualisation and sentience. In Westworld however, composer Ramin Djawadi involvement in the early stages and supervising music editor Christopher Kaller’s attendance in the edit, allows for a much richer embedding of music within the series as a whole—part of a complex hypertext whose function is to serve as a robust underscore the many other uses of citation in a narrative which draws its references from a deep cultural well of cinema, literature, mythology, theology and fine art (Hoffman in Time, 2016; Winckler in Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance 10: 169–188, 2017).