When showrunners Aaron Ehasz and Justin Richmond selected Frederik Wiedmann to score The Dragon Prince, the young composer was relatively new to the entertainment industry, yet had already amassed an impressive array of credits. Several came from DC’s direct-to-videos: Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox, Son of Batman, Justice League: Throne of Atlantis, Batman vs. Robin, Justice League: Gods and Monsters, Justice League vs. Teen Titans, Teen Titans: The Judas Contract, and Batman: Gotham by Gaslight, plus the Beware the Batman TV series. He had also scored projects as diverse as Jarhead 2, Hangman, and All Hail King Julien — which earned him a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Original Song. His first TV series work, Green Lantern: The Animated Series, earned him nominations for two Annie Awards and an International Film Music Critics Award. These were projects prior to his assignment with The Dragon Prince, which will eventually encompass seven seasons.

Our interview from June 7, 2023 continues.

Bob Miller: Okay, so how did you get involved with The Dragon Prince? How did Justin and Aaron select you?

Frederik Wiedmann: My good friend, Giancarlo Volpe, was one of the executive producers on Season One through Three. I had worked with him on Green Lantern: The Animated Series back in 2011. He was the showrunner on that one together with Bruce Timm.

Miller: That was your first credit on a series, wasn’t it?

Wiedmann: Correct. First-ever show and also first animation. It was a pivotal project for me on many levels. And Giancarlo then went on to work on Dragon Prince. They didn’t know who to hire for a composer, so Giancarlo just casually threw my name in the ring and said, “Freddie’s been great on Green Lantern. I think you should hear what he can offer to this project.”

When that conversation started, that’s when I started to write music for them, conceptual pieces like, “Hey, we’re trying to create, do some world building here, so how is this for musical world-building? How do you like these instruments for Xadia and the elves?” I had at this point seen storyboards and character designs and had a sort of a rough outline of the story, so I knew what was going on and where we were heading with the themes. So I sent him a bunch of music and they seemed to respond to it. There was a point where it came down to three people: me and two other composers, and I don’t know how they chose me, if it was because of the music I had sent in or other things, but eventually they said, “Let’s go with Freddie.”

Once that was decided, it was still six months before Episode One was ready for scoring, so we were way ahead of the game. But I spent an enormous amount of time recording a ton of different instruments. I came up with all the themes. I wrote massive suites. I think I wrote about an hour of music, just broad strokes, conceptual ideas for them just to get inspired by and listen to and get familiar with, and they started using it. They were cutting the first episode as temp music.

By the time we got to Episode One, we had everything laid out. We knew the themes for every character. Everything was mapped out and ready to go, which was really great. Pilots can be a pain in the ass because they’re new and you don’t know what you’re doing, and you are like, “How’s this? How’s this? How’s this?”

And it gets stressful, ’cause you’re shooting in the dark and the producers are equally unaware of what exactly they want. They just want to try stuff, and often you don’t have the time because the pilot is two weeks and then Episode Two comes along, so you don’t really have a whole lot of time to do trial-and-error. We were ready to go because we knew exactly what we wanted. All the themes were there, and I just scored the first episode and it was as seamless and easy to get done as any consecutive episodes were. It was a great experience. Yeah, but it took a lot of work to get on this project right from the beginning. A good six months of prior work led up to Episode One. Worth it.

Miller: How specific was the advice that Justin and Aaron gave you?

Wiedmann: They had their ideas and they don’t speak in musical terms, which is always my favorite when they just speak more story, and what they’re trying to do visually, what they want the audience to feel like, how they want them to feel immersed in this experience. And I think that’s most helpful for me as a composer to come up with something original rather than somebody coming with too many specifics like, “Play a violin, and then here you play a cello.” You know what I mean? If you don’t know music really well, those kind of notes can become difficult to interpret sometimes, ’cause when some people say “cello” they mean “bassoon,” and then it gets weird. They were very good at keeping the conversations about story and characters, which it helps me just focus on what I’m doing and really, really hit the nail on the head with the music.

I get the cut, which is sometimes fully animated, sometimes half animated, sometimes not at all—which is the least inspiring, ’cause just the colors are not there. It’s very bland and you kind of have to visualize, “Oh, this is gonna be an amazing scene with sunset and the lighting.” But all you see is a grey background and a little circle for this. You have to use a lot of imagination often because animation takes time. Often they’re not done and ready for you, but you still have to score it because they have to deliver the episodes at a certain time.

Miller: Is the dialogue included in that?

Wiedmann: Dialogue is in there. It’s not mixed, so you hear very dry booth ADR dialogue. It sounds very stale, so to speak, ’cause you don’t hear echoes, you don’t hear reverb from when they are in a cave or something, or you don’t really have forest ambience much. Sometimes they cut them in, but it’s all temporary and not very dialed in, so you need a lot of imagination.

It’s different from live action. In live action when you have everything recorded with the field recorder or boom mic. You have a very good idea of what the scene is gonna sound like, because it’s all there, and you have the natural background sounds that are around whatever they had shot, but in animation, everything has to be created. And the editor can only do so much, ‘cause they’re worried about cutting the thing to the proper length and making sure it flows. They’re not that concerned about sound design, because that’s another person’s job that comes later, just like they start when I start the sound designers. So, they put in place-holders and kind of rough broad strokes to show, “Oh yeah, this is gonna be a waterfall sound here.” But often you don’t hear these things and then it’s very dry.

Miller: Do you factor in acoustics in your recording sessions? In other words, you want an outdoor type of sound, do you factor in the ambience of the environment with what is played?

Wiedmann: No, never. Never. Music has to just sound good. It doesn’t matter if you’re inside a house or outside. I don’t pay attention to that because we’re not doing source music. Source music is music that comes from the movie, like somebody is listening to it in the scene, like a song on the radio or in a bar. That’s called source music. Those pieces you need to match whatever environment you’re in because they’re playing in the scene, but we’re doing score. It’s basically the fourth dimension, if you want to call it that. So, it doesn’t have to match anything.

Miller: So, when Corvus is playing “Song of Love and Loss”…

Wiedmann: That’s source music.

Miller: You call that source music, but then it didn’t matter about the acoustics, ’cause it played over several scenes, right?

Wiedmann: That’s right. But if you listen closely in the headphones, you can tell when he starts playing in Season Four, Episode Three, it feels very dry. There’s no reverb. It feels like he’s playing it on that stage, but then the moment we transition to Claudia and then go back and forth, you hear there’s a lot more reverb coming in on his performance. So, now it becomes a little bit dreamier and slightly larger-sounding and more surreal. And then at the very end, we dial it back down and it becomes very dry as if he’s just playing when we see that his last note come in. So, they did a great job at the mix to sort of stretch reality a little bit. When we get to this montage segment of the fight going back and forth and him playing, that it takes on a slightly different nature, even though he’s still playing it, but you can feel it’s more than that. It was difficult to find the right tone because it had to be complex. So, it feels like a performance piece, but at the same time, it needed to have a little bit of an emotional component to it because of what’s happening really on screen that we’re trying to underscore with what he’s playing.

It had to be really sad because it’s the song of loss and love. And on top of that, it had to be slightly unrealistic, like one cello can’t really play that. That’s because he’s not playing a real cello; he’s playing the Xadia version of whatever that is. So, I had to write something that a cellist wouldn’t really be able to do this on its own, because it’s an instrument that we made up.

It’s like, Gattaca (1997) had some guy with 12 fingers and he was paying a piano piece, and apparently you can’t play that unless you really had 12 fingers. Somebody composed that. So, that’s kind of the idea behind that.

Miller: Do you score all the entire season all at once, or do you do an episode at a time?

Wiedmann: It’s an episode at a time and we go chronologically. I think it’s two weeks per episode and we spot and then I have two weeks from start to finish for each episode. Just to do the score, send it in for revisions. We get notes back. I do all the recordings usually before I even submit the first version just so they can hear it in its full glory and beauty. And sometimes I have to re-record things based on the notes, which is fine. And then it’s approved and it goes straight to my mixer who then prepares it for the final mix and we ship it to the guy who does the final mix, who I believe is in Canada. So, it’s all virtual. We don’t actually go to these mix sessions.

Miller: Do you have any concerns about AI in music?

Wiedmann: No, I think there’s a hype right now because it’s new and people are like, “Wow, look at all the stuff you can do.” But honestly, at the end of the day, I think art can just never be AI-created. I mean, the reason why we like art is because every piece of art is mostly created out of some kind of suffering from the artist in one way, shape or form. And if you don’t have this human igniting factor that made you create, I don’t think it will have any effect on you, if it’s just a matter of taking existing things and then with an algorithm jumbling it up into something new.

I honestly feel like art is safe from that, especially music. I mean, I’ve heard some of these AI-generated songs. They’re terrible. I feel nothing. I feel absolutely nothing when I listen to that. It’s correct music, if you want to put it that way. It’s right. The chord progression makes sense and the lyrics possibly make sense too, but you can tell that it was not created by somebody with a deeper understanding of what would really resonate with an audience or people.

So, I trust music fans that they know the difference and that they will still cherish what we do. Because ultimately, you want to have part in somebody’s personal journey with the music. I mean, all these songs mean something to us, right? And they often mean similar things to the artists that created them. I don’t think you can take that out of the equation successfully. I think the curiosity right now is what makes this stuff so popular is how close to Kanye West does it sound? And then you go and check it out. And that’s why it gets a million views on Spotify. It’s not because it’s good or people love it. It’s because they’re curious. And I feel like that’ll die out pretty soon. I’m very optimistic about it, unlike other people. But I have to do that for my own sanity, I think. (laughs)

Miller: Great. I want to talk about one of your specific pieces. For Claudia, it’s a sleeping spell that she puts on the Earth Dragon.

Wiedmann: Which she’s playing that thing on camera?

Miller: Yeah. And there’s multiple versions of Claudia that pop out playing the tune. Was that a flute?

Wiedmann: It’s an ocarina. An ocarina is like a little clay box, usually oval-shaped. And it has holes in different places in the mouthpiece. I think it’s Peruvian or Venezuelan or something. It’s from South America or Central America. And it sounds almost like an owl. Because what she’s pulling out kind of looks like that. That’s why I thought we should have an acoustic resonant body that kind of resembles what she’s using. And I recorded it myself. I’m not a very good player, but it was enough for me to come up with the tune. When she’s doubling herself up and quadrupling herself in many places, I can layer the audio and sort of tune it slightly differently from different perspectives and create this weird ocarina choir, which is what we did. Yeah.

And we heard it before.

Miller: I remember it in Season One. Rayla was about to fall asleep because she’s playing, I think, the same tune. And Rayla had to prick herself with the thorn on a rose bush to keep herself awake.

Wiedmann: Right. Yes.

Miller: That’s the same tune, right?

Wiedmann: The same tune. That’s right. That’s the hypnotic fall-asleep tune.

Miller: Have you completed Season Seven by now?

Wiedmann: No, not yet. We’re still working on it.

Miller: Okay. Well, then are you on Season Six now?

Wiedmann: Yeah, we’re basically working our way through Four, Five, Six, and Seven kind of consecutively without a break. They’re all being done in one big string.

Miller: Oh, well that’s great that Netflix committed to four seasons just like that. And so tell us the advantage.

Wiedmann: The advantage is that, you know the amount of work you have ahead of you without having to stop and then start again possibly at a more awkward moment. When they were ready to go with Season Four, I knew I was gonna work on Four, Five, Six, and Seven in one sitting. That really helps me plan ahead with my other work schedule. Like, “Okay, I’m gonna be working on this for the next year-and-a-half, every two weeks.” ’Cause you need to make room for that. Working on TV, it’s a lot of work and it’s relentless because it never stops. So, unless you have the stamina and the tools and the craft to really just knock those out every two weeks again and again on top of whatever else you’re doing, it’s a challenging thing and not many people really know how to do that well without losing their minds. ’Cause it’s a lot of work. People underestimate it.

It’s easy to score one episode, but then to go right into the next one and then into the next one, and then 52 episodes later you’re still doing it. (laughs) It’s not an easy thing. And knowing ahead of time how long you’re committed to something is, I think is really important. Because if you’re only doing 10 and then nothing, and then you’re taking on another project and then they come back, “By the way, we’re doing Season Five now.”

And you’re like, “Oh, I just signed on to this. Okay, I guess I have to figure that out.” You know what I mean? It can become tricky schedule-wise, because you can’t just be sitting around waiting for them to greenlight something, ‘cause it takes, as you’ve seen with The Dragon Prince, it can take a long time for people to pull the trigger —and you gotta work in the meantime.

Photo by Nils Decker, courtesy Frederik Wiedmann.

It’s very helpful also for the animation team, too, ’cause much more so than for me, but for the showrunners having to let go of everybody—character design, storyboard artists, people that are familiar with the show, the style, they know it inside out, ’cause they’ve done a whole season—then having to let them go and then wait a year and then bring them all back when they all have other jobs. And then you have to start over with new people and they have to get into the show. They have to watch it; they have to understand the aesthetics of how the animation is done. That’s a really hard thing to do. And I’ve heard that from many showrunners as a big challenge is having to let go of the writers, the storyboard artists, everybody who’s so part of the show and then having to recruit them back a year later because now you have a greenlight and then most of them are unavailable. That’s the really, really difficult thing.

And you can tell they struggle to get it back to that same level that they left off on, because it’s all-new people and maybe their passion for this is not as strong as the previous crew, ’cause they’ve been working so hard on it. And that’s a real challenge.

For me, really, I can kind of jump into this at any point creatively, ‘cause I’m still just one person. They don’t have to train somebody new. I’ve done this for so many seasons now. I can just get going immediately and I’m where I left off even if a year had passed.

But with the entire crew of hundreds of people that worked on the show, it’s a much, much bigger challenge. So, I think from that perspective having a greenlight as a package made things a whole lot easier for everyone.

Miller: For everything you’ve composed so far, which do you say, “This is my best piece. This is me”?

Wiedmann: In Dragon Prince or in general?

Miller: In general.

Wiedmann: Oh goodness. That’s a very challenging question. I would say there’s some pieces coming up in Season Six that I’m really proud of and I can’t really say more about it, definitely my proudest Dragon Prince moment, if not one of the proudest moments of my career. And another huge highlight for me last year was definitely Star Trek: Picard. Working with these Jerry Goldsmith themes, it was an amazing thing. So, I had to score that one scene where the old crew goes back on the Enterprise for the first time after 35 years, 40 years. And it was a huge moment for the fans and I had to score that six-minute piece where that happens and then they end up flying off
with it.

That cue was one of those where like, I can’t believe I get to score this. Just everything about it was so magical and I had to constantly pinch myself. I’m sitting here scoring the scene and they’re here. I look down on the Enterprise and I’m using Jerry Goldsmith. Wow. (chuckles) It was definitely a massive highlight for me, too.

Miller: What do you know now that you wish you had known when you first started composing?

Wiedmann: Oh, wow. That’s an interesting question. I have really always followed my intuition and it’s always been right. Like, there was never a moment where I thought, “Damn, I wish I had known this.” I think I can’t really answer that. That’s funny. I’ve never really thought about it this way.

[After thinking it over] Okay, well, I would’ve bought a house earlier. (laughs) Like everyone else, or invested in Amazon. But from a music perspective, I really don’t have anything.

Everything is how I always thought it is. And I think the mistake other people make, I can maybe approach it from that angle. When you’re starting out I think a lot of people expect quick success. They expect to get out of school, and then they have this sort of weird, okay, “Now I’m gonna get hired on my first feature and then my next feature, and then I’m up in the A-list and that’s gonna do my first Disney+ show, and here we go.” And while that applies to very few people, there’s a handful of people that were able to do that, because they were college roommates with somebody who then became a massive showrunner or something. But in most cases, it takes time. It’s a long game being a movie composer, and you have to be really patient with it. You have to take one step at a time, one foot in front of the other, and really just give it the time it needs to become that.

Actors is a different story. They can get cast as kids and they become famous overnight, and you’re there, you can be off to the races, but as composers it doesn’t seem to be that way. It seems to take time. You gotta be an assistant. You gotta work your way to a level where that composer then throws you a bone and lets you score a scene or two, and then you get additional music credit, maybe small orchestration credit, then you build your small resume. Then maybe a person you meet in the process does this first little indie feature. You do that one, maybe it goes to Sundance. You become a little bit more known in some circles. Then you get the next movie, and then maybe you get a little TV show, additional music credit. And then after five seasons of writing additional music, you get your own show. And years go by. I’ve been doing this for 20 years and I honestly still feel like I’m starting out. It’s weird. I’ve done this for so long, but I still feel like I’m just getting started. I have this sort of, I’m nowhere near where I want to be. So for me, all this is just still the beginning of where I really want to go.

So yeah, people need to just take their time. I never expected anything to go quick. I was like, “Yeah, in 20 years maybe I’ll look back and have a body of work to look back on and it’s gonna be great.” But I never expected anything to happen overnight or never expected any of this to be easy, too. I think a lot of people have a misconception that, “Oh, this is an easy thing. You write music, you make royalties, you become rich, you buy a house, you’re good to go.” But yeah, it’s not like that.

Miller: Any final words?

Wiedmann: Go watch Season Five in July. Binge it multiple times!

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In 2020, Frederik Wiedmann was nominated a Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Music Direction and Composition for Season Three of The Dragon Prince. Seasons Four, Five, Six and Seven will likely receive industry award consideration.

Season Five of The Dragon Prince premieres July 27, 2023 on Netflix.

BELOW: “My Love, My Hope” – Music Video from The Dragon Prince Season 3