Scoring Dune: Part Two.
How Hans Zimmer used a teenage spirit and trips to Home Depot to build the world of this epic science fiction sequel.
DISCLAIMER: This article contains plot spoilers for Dune: Part Two.
Dune: Part Two isn’t just a visual experience; it’s an audio-visual experience. Just as director Dennis Villeneuve masterfully built the visual world of Arrakis, composer Hans Zimmer similarly constructed a musical model of the desert world. While Villeneuve was in the studio or the desert using cameras and actors to tell a story visually, Zimmer was in his studio using instruments and musicians to tell a story sonically. Ebbing and flowing along with the film’s narrative, Zimmer’s score for Dune: Part Two marks a new approach to science fiction film scoring based on narrative development, thematic tracking, personal passion, and scientific innovation.
It can be challenging to digest an instrumental (and often abstract) film score that runs nearly an hour and a half long. Luckily, Zimmer’s artistry and the core tenets of this entire musical project are embodied in one specific melody of the score: the primary love theme of the film that appears most notably in “A Time of Quiet Between the Storms” and “Kiss the Ring.” This melody is an apt starting point for my analysis, offering profound insight into the brilliance of Zimmer’s score.
Zimmer wrote the melody before Dune: Part Two was even approved. After writing the score for the 2021 film Dune, Zimmer just kept on composing, confident that a sequel would be approved. “I never left the world of Dune,” Zimmer says. The composer’s dedication to the project—so strong that he was writing music for a film which didn’t yet exist—demonstrates that the Dune films weren’t just any other job for Zimmer; rather, the science fiction epic was a story which the composer was deeply committed to vitalizing through music.
Zimmer, like Villeneuve, first read the Dune novel as a teenager, and his childhood love of the source material fueled his enthusiasm for the project. Zimmer recalls diving into the fictional world of Arrakis with a young, ambitious spirit that only a teenager can possess—and it was precisely that teenage spirit that drove him to work on this score with unbridled passion, fearless commitment, and reckless spontaneity.
For Zimmer, this unique attitude meant revolutionizing how music is written for science fiction films. “I never understood why a film set on some strange planet in the future should use a normal romantic middle-European orchestra. Why am I suddenly hearing violins? This all seems to be wrong. So we started building instruments, we started designing instruments,” Zimmer says. No film composer had ever approached the science-fiction genre with the same rebellious attitude as Zimmer; no composer had dared to abandon classical European orchestral scores in this way. But crossing this line was precisely what enabled Zimmer to do justice to the science-fiction epic that had captivated him since his adolescence.
So Zimmer started innovating. He used the Osmose, a new synthesizer developed over a decade by French musician-scientists striving to expand the emotional range possible through its keys beyond that of a traditional piano. He recorded instruments built by sculptor Chas Smith, who repurposes scrap metal from Boeing to create sonic sculptures that function both as works of art and as musical instruments. Zimmer even built a baliset, a fictional string instrument referenced repeatedly in the Dune novels, and wrote songs on it alongside actor Josh Brolin.
In the case of the central love theme of Dune: Part Two, Zimmer’s sonic innovation took shape through his trips to Home Depot. Zimmer initially wrote the melody for the bagpipes, but when musician Pedro Eustache approached Zimmer about playing it on an ancient double-reed woodwind called the duduk, Zimmer figured it was worth a try. There was just one issue: an ancient duduk can’t play all of the notes in the melody. So Zimmer and Eustache took to Home Depot, their “secret instrument building site,” where they got PVC pipe to modify the instrument. Once the DIY duduk was finished, Eustache performed the melody which would lay the foundation for the musical telling of this epic story.
Zimmer praises Eustache’s performance of the melody for being packed with one particular emotion—longing. This yearning quality of the melody and performance allows Zimmer to mold the tune to the progression of the film’s romantic arc.
The melody first appears in “A Time of Quiet Between the Storms,” which serves as Paul and Chani’s love theme. Eustache’s tender performance combined with atmospheric desert sounds and a soft electric cello in the background provides a perfectly vulnerable score for an intimate moment in the desert. The sense of longing in this piece takes on a profoundly romantic quality as Eustache and Zimmer tap into the emotion of two young people deeply in love, longing for each other’s companionship.
But “love is complicated,” according to Zimmer. When the melody reappears in “Kiss the Ring,” the final piece of the film, it carries an entirely different weight. Now played by a richer layer of instruments, bolstered by heavier percussion and swelling with greater intensity, the theme feels somber. The once-romantic tune takes on a much more horrific tone than before. As Paul betrays his relationship with Chani and dooms the galaxy to Holy War by entering a political marriage with Princess Irulan, the film’s initial sweet notes are replaced by a deep solitude that accompanies Paul’s quest for political power. The melody still conveys a profound longing, but Zimmer and Villeneuve have now shifted this feeling to reflect the loss of an intimate relationship.
The manner in which this melody evolves throughout the film demonstrates Zimmer’s broader commitment to aligning his music with the film’s core themes. He does so not only through the melodies of his pieces, but also in the very way that those pieces are composed, performed, and recorded.
Take the relationship between humans and technology in the Dune universe. In this world, set many thousands of years in the future, computers have advanced enough to be considered a threat to humanity and are therefore banned; but, at the same time, highly advanced technologies such as body shields, spaceships, and ornithopters shape how humans interact with their environment. In other words, in this science fiction setting, a special emphasis is placed on human value, with technology enhancing human abilities rather than replacing them.
This is precisely the spirit that this score embraces. While Zimmer was constantly pushing the technological limits of music—whether it was with the Osmose or new feats of digital mixing—he was doing so to enhance human playing, not replace it. According to Zimmer, the most important part of the score for Dune: Part Two was the “virtuoso musicians,” the extremely talented individuals such as Eustache who Zimmer considers to be the final actors in the film. He did not pursue new instruments, sound-editing techniques, and other innovations to replace these musicians, but rather to make them even more important and powerful. Technological innovations like Zimmer’s DIY duduk were crafted to make impactful human performances such as Eustache’s possible.
Zimmer similarly follows another theme of the Dune universe in his creative process—the power of women. According to Zimmer, practically all of the power in the Dune universe is derived from the female characters such as the Bene Gesserit, who pull the political strings across the universe. Reflecting this sentiment, Zimmer called upon the hard-hitting sounds of his female percussionists in certain pieces such as “Harvester Attack.” It’s incredibly fitting that a score written for a world of powerful women should also derive its energy from women; Zimmer’s foresight to follow the themes of the film’s diegesis so closely in his creative process demonstrates his commitment to crafting an apt auditory experience to accompany the film. Notably, Zimmer also channels his teenage years in “Harvester Attack.” Recalling his time playing in a punk band as a teenager, Zimmer embraces a punk spirit in his composition of this track, creating a powerful combination of percussion, synths, bass, vocals, and more which perfectly fits the high-stakes action of the scene.
It would be immature to say that Dune: Part Two is definitively Hans Zimmer’s greatest score; after all, he composed the soundtracks for Interstellar, Gladiator, Inception, The Lion King, The Dark Knight, Kung Fu Panda, The Last Samurai, and more. But the score for Dune: Part Two is certainly a mark of Zimmer’s raw talent for innovation. The 66-year-old known for his orchestral compositions was able to draw inspiration from his long–past teenage years, think beyond the accepted conventions of the genre, and push the limits of film scoring in order to do justice to the brilliant epic that is Dune: Part Two.
edited by Madison Esrey.
album artwork believed to belong to either the publisher of the work or the artist.