Before the finale of “The White Lotus” Season 3 put three main characters into body bags, the HBO show’s composer Cristóbal Tapia de Veer announced he would not be returning for Season 4. What followed was a public blame game between creator Mike White and Tapia de Veer, who cited arguments and creative differences over the music being experimental.
Whatever led to their rift is far less interesting than the three seasons of material Tapia de Veer contributed to the anthology series. Unlike any other original score on TV, Tapia de Veer’s work for “The White Lotus” raised the bar high and took on ideas that, on sheet paper, must have sounded too risky to pull off.
Tapia de Veer, a Chilean-Canadian composer who found success making electro-pop music as part of One Ton on top of compositional work, absorbed sounds from the characters’ surroundings and put them through a meat grinder, complementing how messy the show’s relationships can get. Despite injecting each score with his EDM-inspired style, Tapia de Veer manages to consider each region’s identity, whether it be the high-end Italian life in Season 2 or the tropical trouble-in-paradise atmosphere of Season 1, set in Hawaii.
For the first season, the “Aloha!” main theme for Season 1 takes flutes, percussion and the show’s familiar “loo-loo” vocals, chopping them up in an electronic fashion to produce alien-sounding textures. Although it conjures up Hawaii’s greenery and the clear blue beaches, it also seeks to put the viewer on edge through its unorthodox composition.
But the careful handling and weaving of scenes that Tapia de Veer’s score experienced when he worked on the show is not a universal guarantee for music on TV. Original scores and soundtracks can take up a significant chunk of a show’s budget — especially when licensing comes into play.
According to The New York Times, it costs about $30,000 to $40,000 for indefinite rights to use one song on a show, which could take up half an entire episode’s music budget. When having indefinite rights becomes too costly for networks, they may replace pop songs from the 2000s with generic stock music, stifling the filmmakers’ intentions.
The same article mentions an episode of “The X-Files” called “Beyond the Sea” that features the song of the same name by Bobby Darin. However, it was replaced with a reworking of the original song’s melody on Hulu. That’s like if a melodramatic string-led score fitting for a Hallmark movie replaced Tapia de Veer’s work from Seasons 1 to 3.
“The White Lotus” is not the only ongoing TV show with an impressive score, and it’s far from being the first. The score for “Severance” by Theodore Shapiro captures the workplace mind-bender through its sparing usage of piano keys and electronic production, albeit taking after more ambient music than EDM like Tapia de Veer.
However, while the “Severance” score deserves just as much acclaim as “The White Lotus” score, it more or less falls in line with the show’s overall aesthetic and does not call too much attention to itself. On the other hand, “The White Lotus” scores for every season do stick out in the best way possible, amplifying the tension at every turn and distinguishing the show from other social satires like “Big Little Lies” or the movie “Triangle of Sadness.”
Few could have predicted “The White Lotus” would have taken the zeitgeist by storm for the better part of a decade when it was first announced in 2020 as a limited series from a “Survivor: David vs. Goliath” best known for writing “School of Rock.” While much of its success goes back to White, as well as the three casts in the show’s archetypal roles first seen in Season 1, Tapia de Veer gave “The White Lotus” an edge other TV shows wish they had and set a near-impossible bar for his successor.