Severance composer Theodore “Teddy” Shapiro said during a sit-down conversation at Deadline’s Sound & Screen Television awards-season event how the music evolved from the first to the second season of the Apple TV+ series.
“I said my first thought was that we could do something that contrasted one world for the innies and one world for the outies,” Shapiro said about the vision he had for the score working alongside producer Ben Stiller. “So I sent Ben a bunch of ideas and he was really enthusiastic about sort of what I was coming up with.”
While getting ready to shoot Season 1, Shapiro noticed Stiller kept “coming back to this section of peace,” which was “based on four chords.” With Stiller’s “incredible instincts,” Shapiro then “sat down at the piano and played those four chords,” which turned into the main title.
Shapiro noted that the music was influenced by 1970s cinema, which Stiller loves. When composing the second season, Shapiro said he wanted to stay true to what was established but evolve with “new variations on the melody of the theme.”
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“Harmonically, there are new chord sequences that sort of start out with the four chords of the main theme and then go to different places,” he said. “I work very closely with the sound designer named Chris Lane, and we really leaned into the piano. Just having seen that the piano was really the core of the sound in Season 1.”
He continued, “This time he developed a whole batch of sounds using only the piano as the source. So there’s a lot of, like, percussion in the show, and it all sort of comes from him beating a piano and, you know, making loops out of it. And, just seeing just how much juice we could squeeze out of that.”
“The Ballad of Ambrose & Gunnel” was born as another episode in the “liturgy of musical themes that are connected to the Eagan mythology.”
As far as the music for Severance Season 3 goes, Shapiro says he has not started on it yet, adding, “I don’t know what I’m going to do yet. It’s terrifying. But I’m just hoping that when I start hearing about where the story is going, that will lead me to, to whatever I’m going to do.”
Check back Monday for the panel video.