House of the Dragon Season 2 | Official Teaser

This week let’s explore a musically reductive but effective teaser for Season 2 of House of the Dragon, a tv series on Max. Drawing on parts of the book Fire & Blood_ _by George R.R. Martin (2018), this series is a prequel to the wildly successful Game of Thrones saga.

As the trailer opens with the sound of waves, a voiceover provides links to the storyline from Season 1. Then at 0:07, cello and contrabass play a descending passage in octaves to outline an E minor chord. Ominous orchestral strings here feel like a good fit for a fantasy based on Medieval Europe, and the bold descending passage in a minor key seems to foreshadow the story of a royal family at war with itself. More importantly, the orchestrational choice here keeps this trailer on brand with what is likely the most musically memorable aspect of George R.R. Martin’s tv franchise to date: the brilliant cello melody that Ramin Djawadi composed for the opening credits of Game of Thrones.

Notice how at 0:11 the soldier’s banner flutters in the wind in a way that is synched to the music, as if the banner is rhythmically setting up the next measure’s rhythm on the drum. Historically, drums have often been used by militaries for communication and coordination purposes, as well as to intimidate enemies. Here the drum’s rhythmic motif is introduced at the same frame as a cut to this trailer’s first shot of a marching army.

At 0:16 the cello’s motif returns, along with the same military drum rhythm. This time a new quasi-rhythmic sound effect is added: the sound of an object that has been spinning and is slowing down. This spinning sound design element is something we have been noticing more often in recent action film trailers–for example in the Rebel Moon trailer we blogged about last month (check out 0:55-1:08 in that trailer).

Speaking of spinning, House of the Dragon’s teaser’s musical motifs here build to a downbeat at 0:19 that is synched to an on-screen execution by decapitation. But rather than showing us a severed head, the impact moment of the sword-striking-neck is replaced by a quick cut to a marble ball spinning, and its movement here too is synched to the beat of the music, a nice touch. The synching of moving image and music is an effective way to get a point across quickly, which is crucial in the economy of a teaser.

Up until this point \the music is sparsely orchestrated, primarily low strings and a single drum. But at 0:24 when we see a close-up of a woman blowing out a candle, the sound of her breath segues seamlessly into the entrance of a wordless choir and full orchestra playing sustained chords.

Even though with this transition the music shows promise of increased intensity and depth, from here to the end the music is surprisingly understated. The full orchestration remains unchanging, on a series of sustained chords. We hear a handful of cliché drum fills on the large reverberant taiko-style drums that cinematic music loves to overuse, but they are mixed in a way that feels at times choppy, for example at 0:40-0:42. There the music seems to momentarily shift to the frequency filtering techniques common in electronic music, before reverting abruptly back to the cinematic orchestral style that had felt more fitting for this period drama.

To close out the action at 0:56, the drums move in the direction of the classic “trailer triplets” we’d expect at a climax, but instead opt for a measure of the slightly more conventional dotted eighth notes, which also serve to keep us rhythmically on our toes.

Overall, this teaser’s musical accompaniment aligns as expected for the action/fantasy/period drama genre, but it does feature some clever and effective moments in the sound editing, especially in the first 30 seconds.

House of the Dragon Season 2 streams next summer on Max.

• Jack Hui Litster