Posted 28 minutes agoSubscribe to Screen Time NewsletterCaret DownBehind The Music Of "Avatar: The Last Airbender": Composer Jeremy Zuckerman On Bringing Aang's World To LifeJeremy Zuckerman shares stories behind Avatar: The Last Airbender's unforgettable music and its journey to a global concert stage.by Andrew FirrioloBuzzFeed StaffFacebookPinterestLink The music of Avatar: The Last Airbender evokes such powerful emotion throughout the series. Robert Mora / Via Tellem Grody PR (Pictured: Jeremy Zuckerman guest-conducts the encore of Avatar: The Last Airbender In Concert tour at the Dolby Theatre.)When the show premiered 20 years ago, its storytelling, animation, and world-building were groundbreaking, but its score elevated Avatar to an entirely new level. Just hearing the opening chords of "Leaves From the Vine" is enough to bring Avatar fans to tears (myself included). To celebrate Avatar's 20th anniversary and the Avatar: The Last Airbender In Concert orchestral tour, I sat down with composer Jeremy Zuckerman to discuss crafting the sound of Aang's world. Jeremy met Avatar co-creator Bryan Konietzko in grad school. Tim Navis / Via Jeremy Zuckerman Jeremy: I was going to CalArts for graduate school, and there I met [Avatar sound designer] Benjamin Wynn, who was doing the undergraduate program. We were both working with computer music, and it was the cutting-edge technology of that time. Computer music was just starting to become more accessible to people, so it was a really exciting time to get into it.
Ben was sharing an apartment with Bryan Konietzko, the co-creator of Avatar, who was a longtime friend of Ben's brother. Bryan would come to events at CalArts, and he was super fascinated by music technology. He was making his own electronic music, and is also a really good guitarist. He really loves music and being around musicians.
We became good friends, and mutual nerds - fast forward a couple of years, and he and Mike DiMartino created Avatar. At first, music and sound were meant to blend into one seamless element. Araya Doheny / Via WireImage (L-R): Jeremy Zuckerman, Benjamin Wynn.
Jeremy: Bryan and Mike got a green light, and they asked Ben and me if we wanted to handle all the sound. We pitched an idea that we would think of the music and sound design as one element, and you wouldn't really be able to tell which is which. That was the original idea.
Avatar wasn't quite the right project for that, but Bryan was impressed with the idea. He wanted someone who thought about sound with a fresh take. Originally, Ben and I handled both sound design and music for the pilot, but we quickly realized it wasn't sustainable for the full series. There just wasn't enough time.
Ben took over the sound design. I had my traditional music background from Berklee, so I took over the music. Another early idea was to avoid using traditional Western instruments. Nickelodeon Animation Studios Jeremy: There was another concept we tried, which was to use no traditional Western instruments. Imagine you're in a room with all these instruments, and a lot of them you've never seen before. You just experiment with them and make sounds with them. What does that sound like?It was a really cool concept, but it wasn't practical - we didn't have the time or access to make it work.
We were still very informed by that original concept of using non-Western instruments, and particularly Chinese instruments. I started studying that and integrated it into the score. There were a couple of other instruments in there, like the duduk, which is Armenian, but mostly it was Chinese influence. It was kind of a fusion of ideas. When working on episodes, there was only time for one round of revisions. Robert Mora / Via Tellem Grody PR Jeremy: Once the scene was fully animated and the dialogue was recorded, it would come to me. We'd have a spotting session, where we'd spend a couple of hours reviewing all the scenes and taking extensive notes. Then I'd have a certain amount of time to do the first pass. I would get feedback and do revisions. We would only have time for one round of revisions, and that was it.
The music is very connected to the action of the scene and the story. For example, can we bring the music down here and make room for this joke? There's an emotional change here; can we support that with the music? Jeremy created the orchestral instruments using MIDI, and performed the non-Western instruments himself. Nickelodeon Animation Studios Jeremy: All the orchestral instruments were MIDI [Musical Instrument Digital Interface], but I performed and recorded much of the percussion and non-Western instruments, including the duduk, pipa, and guzheng, and various flutes.
There were a lot of limitations to MIDI; for example, you couldn't play the same note twice in a row. It would be from the same sample, and it would sound like a machine gun. They called it the "machine gun effect."It was just me until the last four episodes, and sometimes Ben help