Civilized - Eli Hamada McIlveen - Civilized Main Theme

How I Make Music

The piece of music we're listening to in the background is the theme to the podcast Civilized. It's a regal intro theme with a vintage sci-fi feel and today we're going to break it down and get into why and how it was made. You're listening to How I Make Music, where behind-the-scenes musicians get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song or a soundtrack or composition and get into how it was made. My name is Eli Hamada Mcllveen. I'm a composer, sound designer and writer from Canada, and this is How I Make Music.

01:12
Civilized is a dark comedy sci fi series that's also completely improvised. There's a small terraforming team who have crashed landed on a far-off planet, and they're doing their best to survive. And they're pretty terrible at it. So this is the opening theme to the show and introduces us to the world via this opening narration read by our actor Risa King. And kind of kind of builds the mood until Mike comes in with "Civilized".

02:11 Analog synths

Early on, some of the influences we had for the feel of the show itself drew on science fiction. Both my partner Sean and I watched a lot of Doctor Who as kids. A big part of the sound of the music was the analog synthesizer of the day. Your Arps, your Moogs, your Polysixes. Here's the synthesizer lead to the Civilized theme.

02:53 Larry Fast

I got really into electronic music in high school and used to raid used record shops looking for old records and one of them was Synergy. It's the project of a guy named Larry Fast, who was the synth player on a lot of Peter Gabriel's early stuff. Pure synthesizers. One of the best known tracks is one called Legacy. Here it is.

03:26
Peter Howell

Peter Howell was the guy that did the The Leisure Hive in 1980. It sounds like this. It's got the same kind of military drums with its synthesized horns, but it's got the kind of feel I was aiming for. It's got that marching band kind of feel. So I wanted to capture a little of that. So that's that's why I chose this ensemble. It's two horns, tuba, timpani snare drum and synthesizers. Oh and piano.

04:49 Quartal and quintal harmonies

So I did what I usually do. I noodled around on the piano to create some interesting melodies and harmony under them, and I started playing with quartal and quintal harmony. Quartal and quintal harmony use the fourth and fifth. A stack of those. So right at the beginning of this piece, you'll hear the synthesizer. It's a I think it's a model of a Solina string synthesizer that's playing this big stack of fourths. And over top of that there's an arpeggiated synth that's playing those same notes. And that adds some motion and a little bit of glitter. They're like the stars twinkling in the distance or something like that.

06:06 Great leaps

The melody itself the main melody uses a lot of fifths and it has these great leaps that make it sound kind of heroic, I guess. You get those sounds typically in brass parts. I guess they evoke things like fanfares or bugle calls, because a bugle doesn't have any vowels. So it's pretty much limited to the harmonic series. So the bump, bump, bump bump up, up, up, up, up, up up. Those are the notes that you have at your disposal. So those big wide striding leaps, give it this big open kind of optimistic feel, I think. So as a composer, I lean on my very limited playing ability. I I know a bit of bass and enough piano to kind of be dangerous, but reality is I'm kind of like an author that types with like one finger on each hand. Yeah, I'm not sure where to go with that! So these big leaps in the melody give it this very forward looking feel. I I use the word heroic. Yeah, the opening phrase actually reminds me this one phrase in the opening titles to Deep Space Nine. Similar, I hadn't heard that theme a whole lot. Before I created the theme to Ci

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