Who tells them what to sing part I

When a new trailer for the Marvel film Black Widow dropped in April of

this year — after the movie had been repeatedly moved back due to the
pandemic — the producers seemed intent on reminding people about
why they’d been excited about the movie before the lockdowns started.
They did so by closing the promo with a new version of the theme
from The Avengers, probably to call back viewers to a different, less
socially distanced time. How could you know this was a new version of
the motif? It was choral, but that was a well Marvel had gone to before.
This time it had lyrics. As best I can tell, for the first time.
As fans welcomed the callback in online comments, I was brought back
to a question that I’d had when Game of Thrones did something similar at
the end of its fourth season and again at the very end of the show. It’s
something of a trend these days to take a highly recognizable
instrumental theme and make it choral. And I get why: The gesture is big
and bold and epic. But my question concerned something comparatively
pedestrian: Who decides what the lyrics are? What language are they
even in? And who writes them? I decided to find out.
Those of us who listen to soundtracks obsessively do so knowing that
that’s not how soundtracks are intended to work on us. Whoever mixed
in a chorus for a few seconds of the Black Widow trailer was going for an
emotional reaction, not some new layer of meaning to be disentangled.
“When I do a film score,” the late James Horner said in a TED talk in
2005, “I am nothing more than a fancy pencil” executing the vision of a
filmmaker. You’re not meant to listen to a soundtrack in isolation from
the image. It is music in service of the moment.
You’re not meant to listen to a soundtrack in isolation from the image. It is music in service of the
moment.

But one place where this fancy pencil has more autonomy is when it
comes to the text that a chorus sings. Perhaps it’s better to say that the
pencil is condemned to freedom. When the composer John Ottman was
hired to score the 2008 Tom Cruise film Valkyrie, he realized that he
needed a break in the texture of the soundtrack at the very end of the
film. That’s because in the final scenes of the movie basically all of the
even remotely redeemable characters get executed. After they had all
died and the credits rolled, Ottman decided he wanted a “sense of release,
because there had to be a different feeling as the audience walks out of
the theater.” So he hit upon the idea of a self-contained choral piece.
“The problem was though, what on earth would they be saying?”