The Voice of Arrakis

To score Dune, Hans Zimmer turned down a film by the director he’d worked with for over a decade — then built instruments that did not exist and a language no one had ever sung, all to make a planet that was never real sound older than any planet that is.

A desert that exists only on the page is a hard thing to score. There is no folk music of Arrakis to borrow, no field recording of a sandworm, no living tradition to lean on. A composer reaching for the obvious answer would dress the fiction in something familiar — vaguely “Middle Eastern” ornament, the off-the-shelf sound of cinematic elsewhere. Hans Zimmer reached the other way. He decided that if the place was invented, the sound of it would have to be invented too — and then tested against the real world to keep it honest.

He wanted it badly enough to pay for it. Offered the chance to score Christopher Nolan’s Tenet — after collaborating with Nolan across six films over some fifteen years — Zimmer turned it down to take Dune instead. By his own account, Nolan’s reaction was, in a word, not warm.

Not great. — Hans Zimmer, on Nolan’s response to his choosing Dune over Tenet · ReelBlend / CinemaBlend (opens in new tab)

Instruments that did not exist

The first problem was timbre. Familiar instruments carry the weight of where they come from; a known sound places you on a known map. So Zimmer and his team built unfamiliar ones. They went to a hardware store, bought lengths of PVC plumbing pipe, and made flute-like instruments out of them — the cheap plastic giving a breathier, less resonant tone than a real flute, an airy hollowness with no homeland. The flautist Pedro Eustache combined those PVC pipes with duduks, blurring the line between the invented and the ancient.

The strings got the same treatment. Zimmer had the cello played not as a cello but as something far older and harsher — in his own words, putting “the characteristics of a Tibetan long horn on a cello,” the deep groaning blast of a monastery long horn dragged out of a Western orchestra instrument. Reporting on the score commonly credits cellist Tina Guo with that long horn part. The point, either way, was to take instruments an audience could place and bend them until they could not.

Against all that invention, Zimmer kept one genuinely ancient anchor: the Armenian duduk, a double-reed woodwind cut from apricot wood, one of the oldest reed instruments still played. It is a real thing with a real history, and it threads through the score — performed, like the PVC flutes, by Pedro Eustache. The texture of Dune is partly this: a true ancient instrument standing next to invented ones, so close you cannot always tell which is which.

A language no one had sung

The hardest invention was the human voice. The Fremen needed not just music but a tongue, and on the film’s spoken side that was handled by the linguist David J. Peterson — the man who built Dothraki and High Valyrian for Game of Thrones — who built the Fremen’s spoken language for the films: a constructed version of Chakobsa, a name Herbert had borrowed from a real Circassian hunting tongue. Zimmer wanted the sung side to feel just as constructed and just as lived-in. So he spent more than a year working with the vocalists Loire Cotler and Lisa Gerrard of Dead Can Dance — the recording sessions directed by vocal contractor Edie Lehmann Boddicker — to invent a vocal idiom out of real human practice.

They drew on living traditions: Hasidic Jewish niggun, the wordless devotional melody; South Indian konnakol, the spoken-syllable percussion of Carnatic music; and Tuvan overtone throat singing, in which one voice sounds two notes at once. None of these belongs to a desert that never existed. They are real, and they belong to real peoples — borrowed here, with care, to give an imagined culture the texture of an old one. Gerrard, working remotely during the pandemic, devised vocal lines all her own; Cotler, locked down at home, recorded her parts — as Zimmer has told it — in an apartment closet, because that was the studio lockdown left her.

Then he went to check

All of this is invention, and invention can drift into the merely exotic. What keeps Dune’s score from floating free is that Zimmer treated his own instincts as a hypothesis to be tested. He disappeared into Monument Valley and the desert country of Utah and Arizona to check the veracity of his ideas against real sand — how the wind actually moves through rock, how grit actually sits in your teeth. The fiction was built first; then it was held up against the real and corrected. That sequence — invent, then verify — is the whole discipline of the thing.

The two pages became an Oscar

The method was vindicated where Hollywood counts such things. Dune won the Academy Award for Best Original Score at the 94th Academy Awards, the March 2022 ceremony honoring the films of 2021. It was Zimmer’s second Oscar, his first being The Lion King decades earlier. He was not in the room to collect it — he was on tour in Europe, and accepted in absentia. A score assembled from plumbing pipe, a misused cello, a lockdown closet, and a year of invented singing — checked against the wind in Monument Valley — turned out to be the best of its year.

I actually went into the desert. There was a moment when I disappeared into Monument Valley and the desert in Utah and Arizona to check the veracity of my ideas. — Hans Zimmer · Variety, 2021 (opens in new tab)

This is why the score belongs in the Roots and not only on a soundtrack shelf. It is a model of how to build something that does not exist: invent boldly, borrow with respect from what is real, and then — before you call it finished — go out into the actual world and check whether your invention rings true. The future was made to sound ancient. It was made to sound that way honestly.