Awesome Music pages are Spoilers Off. You Have Been Warned.
- Hans Zimmer's incredible, sweeping and highly emotional score. For example, the music that plays during the climactic scene where Cooper docks with the Endurance after Dr. Mann blows part of it up is nothing short of jaw-dropping, using a powerful mix of electronic, traditional sci-fi music and an epic church organnote , the latter of which goes a long way towards establishing the cosmos as a reverent, awe-inspiring place.
This baby wasn't Oscar-nominated for nothing! The use of a church organ was fully intended, as Zimmer wanted to evoke the feelings of the classical tracks used in 2001: A Space Odyssey, such as Richard Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra. Compare the ending of that piece to the organ chord played at key moments throughout the Interstellar soundtrack. Similarly, compare the opening music of Koyaanisqatsi, a film with similar themes of technology and the environment, to the recurring organ line from "No Time for Caution." - The part of the score that plays over the final scenes of the film, during its hopeful Bittersweet Ending. The story up until then was often engulfed in a fairly dark and pensive atmosphere, bordering on hopelessness at times. The increasingly majestic musical crescendo at the end turns things around. Much had to be sacrificed, but ultimately... Earth life and humanity survived, receiving a second chance. Made even better by the score going hand in hand with Murph's contemplation on what Amelia Brand must be going through right now, as the first colonist and founder of what might become a new human civilisation. All of that interspersed with a montage of scenes showing Brand doing her best on the new homeworld and Cooper and TARS preparing for another voyage, confident and happy this time that humanity has a future.Murph: She's... out there. Setting up camp... alone, in a strange galaxy. Maybe right now, she's settling in for the long nap. By the light of our new sun. In our new home...
- There's a small piece of music that plays while Dr. Mann is showing the Endurance crew his world that epitomizes the wonder of exploring an alien planet.
- The score for the scene on Miller's planet, titled "Mountains", and its extended version, "Tick-Tock". It starts very low key and quiet, with a constant ticking clock motif subtly reminding the viewer of the time dilation effect present on the planet; per Word of God, every tick is a single Earth day, and there are around 60 ticks—or about two months—per minute. It slowly builds in intensity as the crew discovers the truth, to the point where it swells when the wave looms above them before crashing down, bringing home how small and insignificant they seem and how easily bested they are by the inhospitable elements. It has a tragic sense of majesty and helps make real the challenges the human race will face when exploring the galaxy.
- Four letters; S.T.A.Y. This piece is heartrending and unfathomably alien all at once, using only a repeating two-note tone, some ambience, and little bit of droning to get across the sheer loneliness and sadness of Cooper's situation while trapped in the Tesseract. He's trying so hard to talk to Murph through time, banging on the temporal strings and inadvertently becoming her "ghost" when she was a kid only to break down when he sees himself leaving to go on the mission. He so desperately wants to stop himself, to convince his past self to stay with Murph, but he know he can't. His breaking down into a sobbing wreck is really the only justifiable reaction to all of this, and the song only accentuates his despair.
