The two had worked together earlier on Big Wednesday. Milius brought Poledouris on before filming had even begun, giving them time to discuss the emotional overtones that were right for the score. He asked Poledouris to begin work based on the storyboards and to anticipate recording the music once production was winding down.
The composer wrote “two hours of music for Conan,” he told Starlog in 1982. “It was always in John’s mind that Conan would be solid music — much like an opera…. From the first frame of reel one to the end of the Wheel of Pain sequence, somewhere in the middle of reel three, is one long cue without any break. I was terrified when I first realized that.”
Once filming was completed, Milius gave Poledouris two tapes of the finished film, one without music and the other with excerpts from the work of Wagner, Stravinsky and Prokofiev. Poledouris was intimidated by the prospect of having to compare favorably to these legendary composers, but soon found his groove once he realized that their work was just intended by Milius as an aesthetic starting point.
Conan’s personal theme — “The Riddle of Steel” — began as a basic melodic line set to a poem, written as if the composer was Conan’s bard. The underlying melody was later filled out with an epic dose of brass, strings and percussion. The main musical theme, the “Anvil of Crom,” is just as muscular, described by film music historian Laurence MacDonald as “the brassy sound of twenty-four French horns in a dramatic intonation of the melody, while pounding drums add an incessantly driven rhythmic propulsion.”
For the music that was to accompany Thulsa Doom’s opening attack on Conan’s village, Milius wanted a chorus based on Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. However, after discovering that Excalibur (1981) had already used Orff’s work, he asked Poledouris for original material. The result consists of choral passages chanted by Doom’s cohort as a tribute to his name. Poledouris wrote the lyrics in English and had them crudely translated into Latin, as he was “more concerned about the way the Latin words sounded than with the sense they actually made.” The lyrics were subsequently set to a melody adapted from the 13th-century Gregorian hymn, Dies Irae, chosen to “communicate the tragic aspects of the cruelty wrought by Thulsa Doom.”