BG4: “Daybreak, Parts I & II”
Sorry for the delay. This blog entry took more energy to write than I anticipated, but it’s finally finished! I hoped to have it ready for the premiere airing last Friday, but I only finished the score a couple weeks ago and my trip to Germany combined with other work obligations made it impossible to set aside enough time to do it right. But, I’ve loved reading all the comments already posted and seeing the passionate response to this super-sized episode. Thanks for being patient with me and checking back.
I’ve already seen heated discussion all over the internet about this episode, including wildly mixed feedback even here on my own blog. Personally, I am not interested in or qualified to make the inevitable argument over whether Daybreak is the best episode of the series (it’s certainly close), or even my best score to date (it probably is). However, I can safely say it is the most ambitious and epic episode that required the grandest, most thematically developed score I have yet written. In this blog, I will show you the path I followed in order to write it.
Perhaps the nearly 100-minute score to Daybreak should be re-titled: The Battlestar Galactica Symphony. With all my thematic material firmly established in previous episodes, I took this opportunity to develop them further than ever before. Themes were combined, fractured, distorted, elongated, inverted and augmented in rewarding ways. This process became so overwhelming, I actually made myself a checklist of every major theme I wanted to appear in the finale and marked them off as I wrote. With very few exceptions, each was woven into the score somewhere along the way.