War And Peace In Just 7 Years is a comedy podcast, reading one chapter every week of Tolstoy's seminal (and very very long) novel set on the battlefields and in the royal courts of 19th century Europe
We wanted to music to represent the high-society and grandeur in the book, and the sheer scale of undertaking to read and summarise it in a podcast. I use a huge Russian-influenced orchestral ensemble, with a packed percussion section and harpsichord. In order to illustrate the length of the book, while keeping the title theme short, I decided to elongate the introductory few chords, making them into a comedically convoluted and ridiculous extended key change, so that piece seems to take forever to settle on a key and get going.
As part of the incidental music, there is an underscore for the reading section. This tends to be a rambling section of the show, with lots of tangents, and I reflect this in the way the piece never quite settles on a key or a continuous stretch of consistent rhythm.