Travis ScottArtist profile →
Christopher Nolan took the orchestra off the table for The Odyssey, and what replaced it is a 2,500-year-old pipe. Composer Ludwig Göransson, scoring his third Nolan film after Tenet and Oppenheimer, built the music around a reconstructed aulos, a lyre and instruments made of bronze, a nod to the Bronze Age setting. The soundtrack arrived Friday (July 17), the day the film opened.
Nolan explained the call to Classic FM. He and Göransson decided early they didn’t want the lush, Romantic orchestrations of 1950s Hollywood epics, and he wanted the film to feel “earthy and immediate and accessible.” Göransson jumped at the constraint:
Basically saying, ‘okay, take the orchestra off the table, let’s look to the ancient instruments and see what we can do with an aulos, do with a lyre’.
Christopher Nolan, on Ludwig Göransson’s reaction, Classic FM
The instruments were not easy to find. In a featurette premiered by Rolling Stone, musician Callum Armstrong explains that his aulos is a replica of an original from the sixth or fifth century B.C., and that no reeds survive. He and two others had to read ancient source material to work out how the top of the instrument worked. A second musician, Rosa Fragorapti, plays a lyre reconstructed from old urns and other artifacts. Göransson’s own pitch for the aulos: it was “the most popular rock star instrument for a thousand years.”
Read more‘The Odyssey’ Takes Its IMAX Screens Back From ‘Digger’ and Jumps Back Into the Top 10
Then there is the rapper. Travis Scott makes his feature film debut as a bard who recites epics and stories from ancient Greece, and, per Billboard, his is the first character’s voice heard in the movie. Nolan told Time why he cast him:
I cast him because I wanted to nod towards the idea that this story has been handed down as oral poetry, which is analogous to rap.
Christopher Nolan, Billboard, citing Time
Scott also anchors the album’s closer. “When I’m Home,” with James Blake and Göransson, plays over the end credits, and NME describes it as a roughly five-minute track where Scott references Homer, Blake supplies a ghostly chorus, and sparse production gradually builds. Nolan is credited as a writer alongside the other three. It’s the second time Scott and Nolan have worked on a soundtrack: he recorded “The Plan” for Tenet in 2020. Listen below.
Critics have noticed the score. NME’s five-star review says it “lands harder than even 3,000 years of cultural heft have a right to” once Göransson’s score is added. The film itself has opened huge: we have the opening weekend numbers from the same weekend, and the soundtrack is streaming now.
- Composer
- Ludwig Göransson (third Nolan film)
- Soundtrack
- Released July 17, 2026, alongside the film
- End-credits song
- “When I’m Home,” Travis Scott, James Blake and Ludwig Göransson
- Instruments
- Reconstructed aulos and lyre, bronze instruments
Sources
Added to the High Grailed archive on October 12, 2026.
