What Ludwig Göransson’s The Odyssey Reveals About the Power of Performance

I went to watch The Odyssey without having followed much of the build-up, marketing, or reviews. So imagine my surprise when I sat down to watch this enormous Nolan epic and was met with Göransson’s very particular score.

I was very surprised.

Not necessarily in a good or bad way. It simply wasn’t what I had expected as the obvious musical choice for a film of this nature and scale. But the more I listened, the more I understood why they had chosen it. And, in hindsight, it feels like a fairly natural progression in the Nolan/Göransson collaboration — one that has been developing since Tenet.

Predictably, people have a lot of feelings about the score. Some people love it. Some hate it. Some don’t understand it at all. I can understand all three reactions. When you go to see an epic, there is a fairly strong expectation of what the music will sound like: sweeping melodies, enormous orchestral forces, heroic themes and the romantic compositional language audiences have become accustomed to — and therefore comfortable with.

Composer Ludwig Göransson attends the premiere of Christopher Nolan's 'The Odyssey'.

What struck me most about Göransson’s score, however, wasn’t the unusual instrumentation or the novelty of its sound palette. It was the performance.

Performance

In a world where AI is becoming increasingly prevalent in people’s daily lives, and people struggle to tell the difference between real and AI-generated, The Odyssey contains something that AI cannot manufacture in quite the same way: the unmistakable evidence of a human performance.

You can hear players breath, the physicality of the performance, the tiny fluctuations in timing and tone. In places, the music pushes and pulls rather than sitting rigidly on a grid. It feels almost like the music is moving with the seas on which Odysseus sails. Those details are not incidental to the sound, they are what make the score so compelling.

This is particularly apparent in “Sirens”. One of the reasons I find this cue so compelling is that the performance itself becomes part of the music's structure. The expressiveness of the performance is not just decoration around the composition; it is an integral foundation that conveys so much depth of emotion and meaning to the audience.

We hear little crackles in the recording — from the room? From the player? — as well as the physical noise of the instrument, the breath and the texture of the room. These details create an extraordinary sense of intimacy.

There is also a fascinating shift in the recording itself. The cue begins with a much wider, larger reverb, creating the effect of something far away, muffled and distant. As the aulos material emerges, the reverb pulls back, and suddenly it feels as though we are sitting much closer to the player. The effect draws us onto the boat with Odysseus and mirrors the sensation of hearing the sirens through the wax. It is an incredibly effective use of recording and space as part of the storytelling.

Why Live Recording Matters

Modern composers have access to an extraordinary number of tools. We can quantize every note, tune individual sounds, edit out timing variations, replace individual notes, manipulate performances almost indefinitely, and construct extraordinarily convincing music without ever putting musicians in a room together.

All of those tools are incredibly useful.

But there is a point at which removing every imperfection also begins to remove some of the things that make a performance interesting in the first place: individuality, spontaneity, physicality and the tiny fluctuations that tell our ears that a person is making the music.

This is where the difference between recording a sound and recording a musician becomes important.

A score supervisor monitors the Cinemagic Scoring recording session from the booth, ensuring every detail of the score is perfectly captured.

A performer obviously does not approach every note in isolation.

The way a note is played depends on what came before it and what comes after it.

It depends on the breath preceding it, the physical gesture required to produce it, the player’s intention, the acoustic environment, and their interaction with the musicians around them.

You cannot necessarily isolate all of those things and recreate them individually.

Context creates expression. And that context is precisely what can be lost when individual sounds are separated from the performance that produced them.

When you record a musician, you aren’t just recording notes. You are recording a performance. And that is something fundamentally different from acquiring another sound from a sample library.

This is also why I don’t think the lesson from The Odyssey is that composers need to go out and record an air conditioner, a dishwasher, or the inside of a washing machine because nobody has ever done it before.

Novelty is not the point.

The interesting thing about live recordings is that it gives you access to something that could only have happened through that particular performance, in that particular place, at that particular moment.

A choir recorded with Cinemagic Scoring.

When a composer records with an orchestra, they aren’t simply acquiring an orchestral recording of their composition. They are accessing musicians who have spent years developing their craft. They are accessing expressive decisions, interaction between players, the acoustic characteristics of a real room, and the physicality of a live performance. It gives your music depth, individuality and expression. That is the value.

Recording in a Changing Industry

The challenge, of course, is that recording musicians has become increasingly difficult to justify within shrinking music budgets. Composers are being asked to achieve more with less, and live recording can easily begin to feel like a luxury reserved for the largest productions.

Yet the landscape of recording has changed considerably. Remote recording now allows composers to work with exceptional musicians and recording facilities around the world without necessarily needing to be physically present in the same room. And while recording remains an investment, it can be considerably more accessible than the traditional model of bringing an entire production team together in one location. For composers working within tight budgets, this opens up possibilities that might previously have seemed out of reach.

Cello section during a Cinemagic Scoring recording session.

What matters, then, is not simply that composers can access these resources more easily, but what those resources actually contribute to the music.

The Odyssey provides a particularly striking contemporary example of what happens when the physicality of performance becomes part of the sonic identity of a blockbuster score.

But I think there is a broader lesson here for composers. Being different is not, in itself, a compositional achievement.

Beyond “Being Different”

It is very easy, particularly as a young composer, to become obsessed with finding the next strange sound, the next unusual instrument or the next technique that nobody else is using.

But the real craft is what you do with your material.

How do you develop it? How do you sustain an audience’s attention? How do you transform an idea without exhausting it? How do you serve the film? And ultimately, how do you make the music communicate what the film needs it to?

Göransson’s The Odyssey score is interesting to me not simply because it sounds unusual. It is interesting because it demonstrates how much expressive information can exist in the performance of a musical idea — and how powerful that information can become when it is allowed to remain audible.

Music is, by its nature, fleeting. A musician plays a note, and then it disappears. What we call a recording is really an attempt to hold on to that moment — to preserve something that existed only for the brief period in which it was performed.

Perhaps that is why performance matters so much. A recording doesn’t just preserve the notes. It preserves something of the person who played them: their timing, their breath, their physical gesture, their interaction with the room and with the musicians around them.

In an increasingly digital musical landscape, that physicality becomes even more valuable.

And perhaps what we should be trying to preserve when we record music is not just the sound, but the moment.