A church organ in space: how Hans Zimmer scored Interstellar

Score by Hans Zimmer · Interstellar (2014, dir. Christopher Nolan) · album out 17 November 2014

Zimmer's score for Interstellar started with a sheet of paper. Christopher Nolan did not hand him a script or tell him the film was about space. He gave him one page: a short story about a father who has to leave his child to do an important job, with two lines of dialogue, "I'll come back" and "When?" Nolan asked him to work for a day and then play him what he had. In one night Zimmer wrote a four-minute piece for piano and organ about fatherhood. He called it tiny and fragile. Nolan said it gave the film its heart.

The organ is the voice

Most space films reach for synthesizers. This one reaches for a church. The signature sound is the 1926 four-manual Harrison & Harrison organ at Temple Church in London, played by the church's music director, Roger Sayer, and recorded there in the spring of 2014. Zimmer has said the instrument's look reminded him of spaceship afterburners, and that its airy sound suggested every breath is precious to an astronaut.

It can only make a sound with air, and it needs breath.

Hans Zimmer, quoted by Empire

That is the whole idea in a sentence. An organ is a machine, but a human one: it only speaks while someone feeds it air. Empire's writer, after hearing the score played live, called it "a deeply human instrument. An organ. Not a synth." The same piece reports Nolan's view that organ and cathedral imagery "represent mankind's attempt to portray the mystical or the metaphysical". So the instrument carries two jobs at once: the physical (breath, limits, a body in a suit) and the spiritual (the far-away and the unknowable).

Take the score apart

The finished score is far bigger than the one-night sketch. The recorded ensemble is credited as 34 strings, 24 woodwinds, four pianos and a mixed choir of 60 voices (London Voices), with Zimmer on synth programming and Mario Reinsch on ambient music design. Switch the layers below on and off. The readout tells you what each one is doing in the score, and what is left when you strip the rest away.

A ticking clock you can hear

Writers on the film have noted that one track, "Mountains", uses a steady ticking that stands for time passing back on Earth, and that the rhythm stretches and collides with silence in a way that echoes the film's time dilation. Treat that as a listener's reading rather than a studio fact: it is how one writer at No Film School hears it, and the idea is not attributed to Zimmer or Nolan there. It is a good way into the track all the same. Listen for what stays regular, and what bends around it.

Where the music comes in

Zimmer delayed the album until two weeks after the film opened so audiences would meet the score in the cinema first. The "Cornfield Chase" single later went Gold in both the UK and the US. The score was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Score and for a Grammy, and in 2022 Zimmer named it the best work of his career. Mark Richards, writing about it, reads the central theme as a love theme between father and daughter, with the action theme doing double duty as the family theme.

How to listen

• Start with a quiet track and listen for the organ's air: the swell before a chord, the gap after it.
• Then play a loud one and try to pick out the choir behind the strings.
• Listen to the "Mountains" ticking at a low volume, then again with the lights off. The silence around it is part of the piece.
• If you have a set of closed headphones, use them. A church organ carries low notes you feel as much as hear, and small speakers simply drop them.

Where to hear it

The score is on the album, which came out in 2014 on WaterTower, and an expanded edition followed in 2020. Streaming availability of both the album and the film varies by country, so check your own service.

Sources: Wikipedia, Interstellar (soundtrack); Empire, on hearing the score live; Classic FM, Anna Lapwood plays Interstellar; No Film School, on the music and the physics.