Black Sails (A Starz Original Series Soundtrack)

The producers of Starz Network’s episodic pirate saga Black Sails aimed for a gritty and authentic edge, and composer Bear McCreary more than rose to the occasion with a salty, organic score that pays an unusual level of attention to musical history. As he did for his Emmy-winning work on Da Vinci’s Demons, McCreary again collaborates with music historian Adam Knight Gilbert to help inform the score’s sense of time and place. "My goal was to create music that sounds improvised by an exhausted crew aboard a ship navigating choppy waters," the composer explains. "I wanted the audience to sense dirt beneath fingernails plucking jangly mandolin strings, to feel urgent strains of a hurdy gurdy crank, and to smell stale air wheezing out of old accordion bellows." Anchored by his trademark massed percussion, the series’ rousing main title has been acclaimed as one of McCreary’s best. But the score’s rich breadth of textures and colors belies its small-ensemble nature, as richly demonstrated by the folksy “Captain Kidd” and the melancholy solo fiddle of “Wondrous Love,” remarkably different takes on the same basic shanty. Notes McCreary: “The only difference is attitude.”