Composing Songs of Ilium: Exploring The Iliad Through Hollywood Scoring Techniques
- Charlie Parkin
- Jul 11
- 6 min read
When I first set out to compose Songs of Ilium in 2021, I was fascinated by the idea of translating the epic narrative of The Iliad by Homer into a musical language shaped by Hollywood blockbuster film scoring techniques. Years later, with the release of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey on the horizon, I find it a fitting moment to revisit this project. This retrospective offers a chance to explore how classical texts like The Iliad can be reimagined through the lens of a traditional Western cinematic score, and how such an approach resonates with modern audiences familiar with the blockbuster film score style.
The Challenge of Translating The Iliad into Music
The Iliad is a sprawling epic filled with complex characters, intense emotions, and monumental events. Its narrative - which you can read in full in the archived text at MIT Classics - unfolds through vivid scenes of war, interpersonal human drama, and twists of divine intervention from the gods. Capturing this in music demands a score that can embody both the epic scale and grandeur, but also the tragedy and fragility within the story.
When composing Songs of Illium, I approached the album as a "what if" scenario: what if The Iliad were depicted as a Hollywood blockbuster? This meant embracing the tools of film music: full orchestra, thematic motifs, and sweeping dynamic shifts - all to create a soundscape that feels like it's been ripped from a massive Hollywood studio film.
Using Hollywood Blockbuster Film Scoring Techniques
Hollywood blockbuster film scores often rely on a full symphonic orchestra to deliver emotional depth and narrative clarity. They use leitmotifs - musical themes associated with characters or ideas, which I discuss in a lot more detail in my Rings of Power score breakdown - to guide the audience through the story. I adopted these techniques to give Songs of Ilium a cinematic quality that could stand alongside scores for major films.
For example, the track "Achilles" serves as a fanfare celebrating the rise of the hero. It uses bold brass and racing ostinato strings to evoke the power and pride of Achilles, much like a blockbuster score would highlight a protagonist’s entrance. This approach helps listeners connect instantly with the character’s significance without words.
Tracklist Breakdown and Story Beats
Each track on Songs of Ilium corresponds to key moments in The Iliad, reflecting the narrative arc through music:
Sing, O Goddess
This opening track mirrors the invocation at the start of The Iliad, calling upon the muse to inspire the tale. Its brief, solemn tone sets the stage for the epic journey. From a filmmaker's perspective, I envisioned this as the low, tonesetter - but ending with a big and bold lift as its finale, as we 'arrive' with our characters ready for the story to truly begin.
Plague
Representing the devastating plague sent by Apollo, this piece uses dissonant strings and a haunting motif to convey suffering and despair. We begin with a classical, almost operatic and melodramatic smiting of the plague - then sit with the consequences, with a brass top-line melody providing a sense that 'all is lost'.
Dance of Immortal Horses
Inspired by the divine steeds that pull the chariots of gods and heroes, this track combines rhythmic strings as percussion with ethereal melodies to suggest otherworldly movement. This was a fun one to get right - playing into the 'dance' and clippity-cloppity bounce of a horse's gallop. The weight of this track comes from its big, brassy feel - like a clear and epic arrival, and it stands out as one of the big, Blockbuster sounds of the album.
Intervention
This longer piece captures the gods' meddling in human affairs, blending majestic orchestration with sudden shifts to reflect the arrival of divine power and unpredictability into the narrative. I wanted the music to place you, the listener, in the throes of battle, desperately calling out for a miracle amid the chaos. Then, with a crack of Zeus' lightning and the clap of thunder, the gods answer and intervene, transforming the course of the conflict. This track felt incomplete without some level of sound design to heighten this moment; this friction between sound design and more traditional 'musicality' is something I'm extremely passionate about in my own projects (as in the case of my score for Night Shift), and something I love to see in others' work too (like in The Northman)
Achilles
The album’s centerpiece, this fanfare celebrates Achilles’ wrath and glory. It channels the energy of a blockbuster hero theme, with triumphant brass and driving rhythmic ostinati - starting low, and building to a very deliberate and overstated finale. It was also fun to create the visualiser for this track, which you can watch at the top of this blog post. If you'd like to learn more about my filmmaking work, including my cinematography and visual effects experience, I have a dedicated 'filmmaking' site here at film.charlieparkin.co.uk.
Duelling Hector
This track dramatizes the climactic duel between Achilles and Hector, using tense harmonies and escalating dynamics to build suspense. Big, bold brass stabs, and rips create a sense of grappling, duelling and a meeting of the minds. I tried to create an element of unpredictability, with jumps in dynamics, and steep changes in harmony: bouncing around and mixing modes in the main melodies - a bit like Bear McCreary's approach in The Rings of Power, but more stripped back.
The King Pleas
Reflecting Priam’s heartfelt plea to Achilles for Hector’s body, this piece is more subdued, featuring plaintive strings and a somber mood. This is a tricky beat to cover, because the plea needed to be moving enough that even 'my version' of Achilles - in his epic, and heroic form - gives in to this request. I felt spoilt for inspiration as this turning point has a vast amount of interpretations from classical and neoclassical artists and painters. My favourites - which I think mirror my piece in tone and feel are these:
Priam asks Achilles to return Hector's body by Alexander Ivanov - which almost resembles a Hollywood Blockbuster frame in it's composition and mise-en-scene, where you can envision a cut into over-the-shoulder, shot-reverse shots of the two characters. 
Priam demandant à Achille le corps d'Hector by Théobald Chartran - which has a wonderful quality of light, and a deliberate low-key look, shifting the focus to the turn of Achilles' face, as opposed to Priam's grovelling.
Requies
A brief requiem that honors the fallen, it uses soft, mournful tones to evoke reflection. In hindsight, I think the lead piano of this piece - while beautiful and interesting to hear - slightly departs us from the Hollywood Blockbuster aesthetic, more resembling a library or commercial track that might accompany the end credits of a modern, post-Lord of the Rings fantasy epic. I write more about the affect these detached/needle-drop style pieces have on a film and an audience in my Schindler's List vs Inglourious Basterds post - but I definitely feel this piece accidentally evokes the disconnected feeling I associate with other songs like I See Fire by Ed Sheeran at the end of The Hobbit, for example.
Denouement
The closing track offers an epic resolution, signaling the end of the conflict and the fading of the immediate drama. Fanfare-ish and operatic, this one wraps it all up in an epic bow.
This structure tries to mirror the flow of The Iliad, translating its emotional highs and lows into a musical journey that listeners can follow intuitively.
Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey
Although Songs of Ilium predates Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey film, the upcoming release provides a useful frame to consider how classical epics are adapted today. Nolan’s work is known for blending traditional storytelling with innovative cinematic techniques, and the film score by the insanely talented Ludwig Göransson is expected to reflect that balance. I'm excited to see the approach he takes - and how he explores this world in an inventive new way.
The use of a traditional Western cinematic score with a full orchestra remains a powerful way to connect audiences to ancient stories. It bridges the gap between the classical and the contemporary, making these timeless narratives accessible and emotionally resonant.
In my experience, this approach works because it respects the source material’s grandeur while using familiar musical language to engage modern listeners. The blockbuster film score style, with its clear themes and dramatic pacing, helps to highlight the universal human experiences at the heart of The Iliad and The Odyssey.
Final Thoughts
Revisiting Songs of Ilium alongside the anticipation of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey highlights the enduring power of film music to reinterpret classical epics. The blend of full orchestra and blockbuster film score techniques offers a compelling way to translate Homer's The Iliad into sound, making its themes resonate with today’s audiences.
If you are a filmmaker or game developer interested in music that bridges classical storytelling and modern cinematic language, exploring this approach could enrich your projects. Music has the unique ability to convey the depth and drama of stories like The Iliad, and Songs of Ilium stands as an example of how that can be achieved.
I encourage you to listen to the album and consider how these techniques might inspire your own creative work. The journey from ancient text to modern art - of all media, all genres, styles and tones - is a rich one, full of possibilities for storytelling through sound.
As a final note, at the time, this concept album acted as a research tool and experimental space in preparation for my work on Elysian Fields - a vast, expansive fantasy series. As you explore the newer Echoes of Eibrall soundtrack, you might detect 'echoes' of this album's dip into the broad universe through its themes and soundscapes (pun intended).
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