Why the Sirens Song Is a Masterpiece | The Odyssey

There's a small musical figure in the Odyssey that never seems to arrive. It reaches up, gives way, starts again, but it never quite lands anywhere. I keep thinking about it days after watching the film, in the way you keep thinking about a sentence someone said to you once that you never got to answer. How can a film show us a song that's supposed to be irresistible when no single melody could sound equally irresistible to every person watching? And I think that's the trap. If you play the most gorgeous tune ever composed, somebody in the audience will still shrug. So, what do you do if you're director Christopher Nolan and the whole scene depends on convincing us that a sound could undo a man completely? You don't try to win the argument about whether the song is beautiful. You let us watch what it does to him instead. Odysseus is a decade out from Troy, close enough to smell home when a ship nears the island of the Sirens. Circe has already told him what's coming. His crew fills their ears with wax so they hear nothing. Odysseus wants to hear everything, so he has his own men bind him to the mast to take it all in. Which brings me to the music, because this is where the film gets quietly clever. Nolan told composer Ludwig Göransson to leave a traditional orchestra out of the score, since that kind of sound belongs to a much later world than the one on screen. Göransson begins with a sound that feels physically older than the film around it. The score is built from bronze percussion, found metal, and instruments that seem to belong to the world itself. The Siren's song emerges from that material, using an ancient Greek double pipe reed instrument called the aulos. It doesn't sound polished in the way we expect film music to sound. It sounds exposed, almost unstable, like something being dragged out of the past before it has been properly remembered. The instrument is doing something especially strange here, because its two pipes create two different musical functions at once. One holds a low drone beneath the song, a single note that refuses to move. The other plays a central figure, four notes that rise and fall. That's the entire shape around the idea. It reaches upward, then gives itself back. It tries again, then returns to the same place. There's no dramatic change in harmony to carry it somewhere new.