The composer behind The White Lotus theme songs explains why he’s done working with Mike White | Canada Voices

Here’s one person definitely getting killed off of The White Lotus on Sunday’s season finale: Cristóbal Tapia de Veer.

The Emmy-winning Chilean-Canadian composer behind the unsettling and unorthodox music on Mike White’s HBO hit anthology series says he has quit – for good this time.

Over three seasons, Tapia de Veer’s White Lotus theme songs full of high frequencies and distorted sounds have been turned into club hits and become the fuel for clickbait controversy.

But in an interview with The Globe and Mail, Tapia de Veer describes his time on the show set among ugly Americans at high-end international resorts – where his score provides a kind of satirical commentary on the characters in between lines – as one of frequent creative friction with its creator.

Ahead of the finale (streaming on Crave), Tapia de Veer – whose recent work includes the scores for the horror movie Smile and Nicole Kidman’s erotic thriller Babygirl – spoke to J. Kelly Nestruck over Zoom from his studio/home in the Laurentians, north of Montreal.

There is a conversation around the music in The White Lotus in a way that there isn’t about a lot of other TV – to the extent that Enlightenment, your new theme song for the Thailand-set season, led to articles about a backlash with viewers. Have you heard anything about that?

The people that were shocked that I didn’t use the “ulululus” – those vocals from the previous seasons – they have all turned around now. The only people who are still mad at that are getting laughed at. On Instagram, I have tons of people sending me videos of people saying, you know, “I used to hate this theme on the first episode, and now I’m four episodes in and I’m losing my mind.”

So you were following the social media.

The people at the beginning who went into this hate thing, to me, it’s exactly like the tourists who get to a new place and it’s not what they expected. The food is not what they expected. They thought they were going to, you know, Ibiza. And bad tourists, they start vandalizing.

Well, that’s a great way to relate it to the series as well.

The first theme song was a surprise because it was so weird. Some people took it badly, but generally people were at least very interested in the music. The second one was a completely different thing. Major DJs like Tiësto and Sofi Tukker were doing remixes, so it became like a club success. This one managed to change people – and that for me is an even a bigger achievement, to have people coming back to you and they’re so into the music now.

When we’re talking about the “ulululus” that were absent from this year’s theme – is that a technical term or are you imitating the sound?

A technical term could be a war cry.

In the previous themes, they were sung by Colombian-Canadian singer Stephanie Osorio, right?

Her voice is in the new theme too, it’s just even more unrecognizable. People are talking about a flute sound: I play these notes on a keyboard using her voice as the source. [Note Osorio’s “ulululus” also appear in a longer version that Tapia de Veer posted on YouTube.]

What else are we hearing in Enlightenment?

At the beginning, there’s wood blocks that have this Asian vibe to them – very popular in many countries. Then you hear the accordion – my mom sent me this accordion that she found in Victoria. Then there is the voice. And then there is the Thai violin – which they call the saw u. The rest is lots of synthesizers.

Can you tell me how the composition of the theme song each season works? People really listen to it in part because they are watching the opening each week, trying to figure out if there’s any clues to who dies in art, the visuals and the accompanying music.

We never worked that together. The theme is very much inspired by the story. Even in the first season, I didn’t have any images, any video, any footage for a while, so most of the music was done mainly just by the idea of the characters and what I read in the script. Maybe that’s why it did something special in the first season because the approach was so different and quite risky.

It paid off.

The music is so popular now – it’s like a big deal. But before that, it was a problem actually. I had an ally, a person who was a long-time collaborator of Mike White and she was into the music in a way Mike didn’t understand. Mike didn’t want to use the theme but she convinced him. I was on the phone with her all the time and she was like, “Okay, we need to talk again with Mike,” and at some point she called me back and she said, “Okay, we made the decision, this is gonna be the theme.” But she told me that herself even; Mike wouldn’t talk to me about that.

What’s your relationship with him now? He must now just really trust you, I imagine.

You would imagine that. It seems logical to me. After all, out of 15 Emmys this show has, I have three of those. But no, Mike never came out of that position where he doesn’t seem to understand what I give him.

I don’t want to sound arrogant. I’m repeating what people in the industry are telling me about the first White Lotus – the music was a really important thing – and it’s because of the eccentricities of the music. But Mike always likes just the nice bits, that’s what he prefers. So, this has been a constant fight. Until now. Now I quit for real. Now it’s true. Now I’m for sure not coming back.

Oh no, I’m sorry to hear that.

Well, not me. I’m really, really, really relieved because I don’t wanna deal with that any more. In this business, as you might know, particularly in Hollywood, it’s a really hard task to go against what you’re asked.

Is there anything else that stands out, for you, in the scoring that you’ve done this particular season?

I did more action – more violent action music on this one for certain scenes. There are a few places where the music gets really super intense, so that was fun to do. The last episode is gonna be that kind of music. It’s still kind of experimental. There’s big loud drums, but there are lots of animals used in the action music – birds of prey, wolves – and screams and breathing. I put some analog synthesizers, like a Terminator kind of thing. So it’s a really strange blend.

This interview has been condensed and edited.