Zimmer’s inspiration for the score was The Threepenny Opera, Kurt Weill’s macabre tale of Victorian London’s criminal underbelly (although he cheerfully admits there is a dash of Steptoe and Son thrown into the mix). Like Weill’s new invented folk tunes, Zimmer’s music has a hidden sophistication. The pianos may be out of tune but they are all played impeccably. “It’s a typical example of Zimmer madness, where I hear a sound in my head and how are we gonna get it? I was looking for a pub piano sound, something that had that lived-in quality, but there are no pubs in Los Angeles. At first I got someone to detune my piano but it just sounded out of tune so I asked my assistant to go onto Craigslist and find me a broken piano. Actually the broken piano became a bigger thing because then I thought, rather than use big drums what would a piano sound like if you dropped it down a flight of stairs?”
And did you do it?
“Yeah. We rented 20th Century Fox’s underground car park one Sunday and did hideous things to a piano. Actually, that was the second broken piano we bought. The first one I had every intention of destroying but when it arrived you could tell that someone had loved and cared for it all their life — it was so sweet. My reaction was, ‘We can’t break this. Find me an abused piano.’”
- From "Hans Zimmer: 'The sound of Sherlock Holmes? It’s a broken piano'"
And yes, school starts tomorrow and I do not know what to expect.
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