Maxance Vincent
Guy Ritchie is no stranger to the world of Sherlock Holmes, having adapted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s work for modern filmgoers twice, on the big screen, with Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law as the titular detective and his sidekick, Dr. John Watson, respectively. Now, Ritchie has set his sights on reinterpreting Holmes yet again, this time by focusing on Andrew Lane’s Young Sherlock Holmes series, showcasing a more playful version of the character (played here by Hero Fiennes Tiffin) as he uncovers his first case with the aid of James Moriarty (Dónal Finn).
Reinterpreting Sherlock in film and television is no easy task, since the character has been brought to the screen by so many great actors and filmmakers. For Young Sherlock composer Christopher Benstead, who spoke to Awards Radar during a Zoom press day on the series, his primary goal was to distinguish the music from what came before and add his own spin to the material:
“You want to give it its own fingerprint and suit the characters, which I think are quite different from some of the other Sherlock and Moriarty we’ve had before. I had to find something that had enough swagger and a momentum in it, just to keep the show driving forward. There’s a lot of information that comes at you quite quickly, but we also wanted it to have a relentless feel, to some extent, to carry it through. There is such a body of material for Sherlock Holmes, so it was tricky to come up with a sound. However, what seemed to work was using the upright bass, drums, guitars, and a bit of folk there. A lot of the music is me playing the cello and the violin to give it a kind of slightly folkier edge than maybe we’ve had before for Sherlock, which is quite good fun.”
One specific instrument that’s used throughout the series is the electric guitar, which adds an anachronistic element to the show’s sonic palette. For Benstead, this instrument was crucial to give the music another color, specifically when composing Moriarty’s themes:
“The electric guitar is an interesting one because I did various themes and ideas for Moriarty, but that seemed to somehow suit the sort of swaggeriness of his character. Obviously, like a few things in the show, it’s quite anachronistic. It’s an instrument from a lot of years before the period the show is set in, but it was interesting that it worked and didn’t rub me up too badly. It gave it another color. It’s another thing in our arsenal to play with to take his character away from this idea of the bass riffs and stuff, which was more of a Sherlock thing.”
Of course, with a show so rich in its musical scope, there was a lot to talk about, which you can hear in our audio conversation below. Some of the topics of discussion include the process of scoring scenes in which the audience enters Sherlock’s headspace, how the show’s musical scope changes once Sherlock travels beyond England, how the action scenes were scored, and the creation of motifs for Sherlock, Moriarty, and Princess Gulun Shou’an (Zine Tseng).
Listen to the full conversation below and stream all episodes of Young Sherlock on Prime Video today:
[Some of the quotes in this article have been edited for length and clarity]
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