By Freya Parr

Published: Monday, 08 January 2024 at 12:21 PM

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The 2024 Golden Globe for Best Original Score has been awarded to Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson for his work on Christopher Nolan’s dramatic 2023 big-screen hit, Oppenheimer.

Oppenheimer was the night’s biggest success story, collecting the most awards of the night. It beat off competition to win in the Best Picture category, with awards also given to Cillian Murphy for Best Actor, Robert Downey Jr for Best Supporting Actor, Christopher Nolan for Best Director and, of course, Ludwig Göransson for Best Original Score.

This is the second collaboration between Nolan and Göransson, who first worked together on Tenet following Nolan’s long working relationship with Hans Zimmer, who scored six of the director’s previous films.

Oppenheimer tells the story of the race to create a nuclear bomb during World War 2, starring Cillian Murphy as J Robert Oppenheimer, the fafther of the atomic bomb.

How Göransson wrote the score for Oppenheimer

Variety reported that Göransson recorded the music for Oppenheimer in just five days. At Nolan’s request, Göransson’s score is particularly violin-heavy. ‘[Nolan’s] thought process was that the violin is a fretless instrument,’ Göransson told Variety. ‘You can go from the most romantic melodic tone and within a split second turn the tremolo into something neurotic and manic.’ He worked with his violinist wife, Serena, to develop some of the techniques used within the score and match the highly strung intellect of the film’s protagonist in the music.

‘There’s so much in the performance of the violin: in a second you can go from something beautiful to something horrifying,’ he explains in this interview with Universal Pictures. ‘I used a lot of synthesizers, but the heartbeat of the music is all organic,’ he adds.

The score builds right through the film, until the point at which the atomic bomb explodes. The moments before this are particularly dramatic in the score, with a powerful thumping bass and a rhythmic ticking sound. When the bomb is finally tested, the orchestra cuts out and the action is accompanied by a shocking silence. ‘Once he presses the button, there’s no turning back,’ Göransson says. ‘And that’s how it all builds up towards that piece of silence.’

The LA Times referred to his score as ‘intensely emotional and neurotic, fragile and contradictory’.

Ludwig Göransson has been nominated twice previously in this category in 2021 and 2019 for his scores to Tenet and Black Panther respectively.