Martin Phipps on Scoring the Inner Turmoils of ‘The Crown’

When the entire cast of The Crown changed at the beginning of Season 3, so too, did the hit show’s composer. Martin Phipps took over from Rupert Gregson-Williams and Lorne Balfe, after Hans Zimmer had established the show’s theme tune. The switch-up was part practical, part signal-turn, indicating a jump in age and era as The Crown progressed its story-telling, under the eye of showrunner Peter Morgan. With the pomp and pageantry inaugurated by Phipps’ predecessors, the Ivor Novello and BAFTA-winning composer has been tasked with focusing on the more introspective moments in the drama series closely based on the Royal Family. Many of these quieter moments make up the current season’s highlights and have been released as a soundtrack to the show.

“I was a little bit wary of taking the job on because I have never taken on someone else’s show before,” Phipps, who’s worked on a host of notable TV series from Black Mirror to Peaky Blinders and Black Earth Rising, tells American Songwriter. “I think Peter Morgan’s a genius and does such good work, so I wanted to do it for that, but also because he said to me early on that he wanted something different from the music.”

Indeed, over the first two seasons, which cover Queen Elizabeth’s first two decades of reign, the music is grand and lively, and drives the action forward. “What we really wanted to do after that was create more silence and make the music really count when it did come in, and make it be a personality in its own right,” says Phipps.

Creating a quieter, somewhat minimalist score reflecting the inner struggles of the main characters was something Phipps began working on in the previous season, for which he earned an Emmy nomination in the outstanding music composition for a series category. One of the instruments he relied on during Season 3, which features in the current season too, is the French horn. “It’s a theme that came out of the episode about the 1966 Aberfan mining disaster, in which 116 children and 28 adults died. That was a really tricky episode to score,” he says.

“Basically, whenever The Crown goes outside the world of “The Crown,” outside of the palace and the environs of Westminster or the Royal houses or palaces, then it’s always very difficult to get the tone right. This was all set in a mining village, and there was this real challenge. We had to pay respect and somehow musically capture the tragedy of the situation that happened, while also trying to score the Queen being unable to feel the emotion that she should feel, while not being sentimental. It was a really multi-layered, kind of very interesting, challenging episode that one, but I think it worked in the end,” he says.

Conveying emotion, or lack thereof sometimes, has been a cornerstone of Season 3 and 4. Season 3, while perhaps not as exciting as the first two, allowed Phipps to gain his footing, ahead of the current season, which sees at the center of it, the marriage of Prince Charles and Princes Diana and the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher as British Prime Minister. “I read the other day, someone said, basically, nothing happened in Season 3, which was kind of what it was like in the ‘60s and ’70s. In terms of politics, it was a pretty depressed time and really quite a stagnant period. Culturally it wasn’t, but politically it was.”

Season 4 upped the ante with the arrival of Diana Spencer, who audiences — and Prince Charles — are first introduced to as a sprightly young “mad tree” from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “Margaret Thatcher — whatever you think of her — and Diana are both a force to dramatize, so Season 4 definitely sparked into life, I think,” says Phipps. “And everything that was set up in Season 3 kind of came to fruition in this season, which was really great.”

To illuminate Princess Diana onscreen, Phipps would use soft voice in his score, another element he began playing with in Season 3. “I love using voices, and it felt like they sat nicely in Season 3. Then with Diana’s arrival, she’s a little quiet in her own right but with a ferocious energy and an innocence, tied with a kind of knowingness, as well. There’s all this juxtaposition there. Some of those very pure female voices seem to sit really nicely with her.” They shine through most in the soundtrack’s standout track, “Fairytale.”

There are scenes in The Crown with Diana listening (or dancing or roller-skating) to 80s pop songs, which Phipps says were often in place already or written into the script, and he would work around them. He credits the show’s editors with making them work seamlessly together — enveloping the pop song with a classical choral piece.

Phipps also got to play with synthesizers for this season. “To introduce more modern sounds, I I bought in a little touch of the ‘80s electronic sound,” he says. “I couldn’t resist that. I grew up with that and love it. It’s the brightness and fresh air of Diana that she sort of blasts into this quite staid, middle-aged set up. We wanted to capture that. There’s one scene in episode six when they’re in a parade in Brisbane. It’s kind of a ticker-tape parade for Diana, and everyone is just going nuts. It’s kind of sort of ‘Beatlemania’ for Diana. For that, I made the music incredibly bright and sharp.”

Diana’s story-line is what Phipps is most looking forward to working on, as the show continues into its final two seasons. “The playing out of that older Diana, particularly when she starts to take control of her situation a bit more,” he says. “Because I know whatever Peter does, he’ll tell the story from a different point of view, and that’ll be really interesting, to see those very familiar events that we know told from a different point of view. Likewise, hopefully we’ll do the music from a slightly different point of view, too.”

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash