Interview: Discussing the Score of ‘Masters of the Air’ with Emmy Nominated Composer Blake Neely

Composer Blake Neely has worked on Band of Brothers, first as an orchestrator for the late Michael Kamen, who was also his mentor, and then co-composing the score of The Pacific with Hans Zimmer and Geoff Zannelli.

He has now received an Emmy nomination for his work in the latest series from the same creators, Masters of the Air, for Outstanding Original Main Title Theme Music. He tells Awards Radar on Zoom that to have been able to finish this ‘trilogy’ of sorts and receive a nomination “felt like an incredible honor”:

“It’s a fantastic feeling you can’t describe. I was probably like, ‘Oh my God, it happened.’ The funny thing is that I’m not a huge believer in giving awards for art, but I’ll take it [laughs].”

Neely also tells us that the main title theme (called ‘Soar‘) was the proudest thing he composed for the series, an almost three-minute-long track that sends the audience on an enveloping, emotional journey before the show truly sets itself in motion. The opportunity to not only have a main title theme, but also one that’s quite long for a TV show is rare in this landscape, and Neely wanted to use this time to tell a story through the music:

“You start quite somber but end in a big way. You want to invite people to what they’re about to watch because it’s a giant production. We always refer to it as “The Movie,” because it’s a ten-hour movie. It’s a giant epic of a show.”

Neely also wanted the main title track to stand on its own two feet, stating “it could be your souvenir from the show. You can listen to the main title and feel all the emotions from the rest of the series. It didn’t really have to drive the series, because sometimes, after the main title, you come back and they’re just at breakfast at camp, or in the middle of the action. So it was very much a theme that would represent the whole.”

We also discussed the process of scoring and accompanying the action, giving the right emotional notes to a show with plenty of harrowing scenes, if there were any motifs that accompanied the characters, and how he approached the show’s strongest moments of heroism.

You can listen to my full interview with Blake below and stream all episodes of Masters of the Air on Apple TV+ today: