You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Herway.

Winter is coming. This one will be long and dark things will come with it.

That's a clip from Game of Thrones, the HBO series that premiered in April 2011 and became the most watched show in HBO's history. This is the main title theme.

The theme was written by Emmy-nominated composer Remeen Javari, and in this episode he'll break down the different elements in this piece and how the themes within the show inspired his composition and his choice of instruments.

Hi, my name is Remeen Javari and I'm the composer of Game of Thrones. David Benioff and Dan Weiss are the creators of the show.

They took the book and decided to turn it into a TV show. They sent me two episodes, the first two episodes of the first season before meeting with them, so I watched them and of course I was blown away. I thought it was absolutely amazing what I saw.

I already had started on the episodes and we were reviewing some music in this and then they said, oh by the way, there's also a main title of theme you have to do.

I thought, oh okay, and it's almost two minutes long. Nowadays in TV there's many times there's either no main title at all or it's 15 seconds or 7 seconds, it's usually very short.

So I thought it was rather unusual to have an opportunity to have a longer piece of music. They said, the visuals are not completely done, but we would love for you to just go see the visual effects guys and meet with them and check it out.

So I did and it was these moving buildings coming out of the ground, you know what it is now, so it was all there in an early stage and it was absolutely inspiring for me.

The one keyword that they said to me about writing the main title was that they wanted it to be a journey because there's a lot of different locations, again there's lots of different characters, there's just a lot of traveling in the show, and that's something that they wanted to convey with the music as well.

And then when I saw the visuals and saw the different locations, all that inspired me to write this piece. I wrote the riff, that was the first thing that came to me and I built the whole piece around that basically.

The riff is played by the strings, the first two bars are minor and then the switch is to major.

And then it goes back. My intention was just because of what the nature of the show is, there is so much backstabbing and conspiracy and anybody can turn on anybody at any point, so I thought it would be cool to kind of do the same play with the music.

So even though the majority of the pieces are minor, there's that little hint of major in there where it kind of switches and then it changes back again, so that's the opening.

The melody first gets stated by the solo cello.

The thing I liked about the cello was that it's, first of all, it's one of my favorite instruments, but what I love about the cello is that it's dark, which is perfect for the show.

It has a huge range, it can play really low, it can play really high, and even if it plays higher, actually, it still has a darker sound and that's why I thought let's try to make that our main instrument for the show.

And then a solo violin joins an octave above.

It's like two characters meeting or something like that.

What I think is so great about Game of Thrones is that there's so many different characters and you never know which path they might go on and which characters might interact or meet.

So I thought by starting with a single instrument with a single character then having a second instrument join, it's a second character.

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